We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. In the age of AI, it is really important whether AI feels like it is my tool — meaning I control it, and it makes me better — or the company's tool, the government's tool, or the system's tool
Pedregal reflects that tools shape their users, argues the key question for AI is who it serves (the individual or the institution), and warns that well-intentioned design decisions can produce large unintended consequences, using Google's SEO problem as a cautionary example. ✦ AI generated
Chris Pedregal · Platformer · 2026-07-30 · original ↗
“For folks who only like their job sometimes, but mostly want to not think about it too much and get home to their families: I worry that AI mostly just feels oppressive to them. It's a new system to learn. It's a new system of monitoring and control. And I think this shows up in the survey data about how people are feeling about AI. So my hope is that AI tool makers keep that person in mind and think: what can I do for you, a person who has a normal relationship with your job, that is maybe going to make you feel less overwhelmed?”
I think that's a great point. Tools are the reason humans can do what they've achieved. There's an amazing quote, which is: we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. And I think in the age of AI, it's really important: does AI feel like it is my tool — meaning I control it, and it makes me better — or is it the company's tool, or the government's tool, or the system's tool? In which case, it feels completely different. And the irony's not lost on me, because we are a tool that individuals use, but that, for the most part, companies pay for. So we make sure the notes are yours and private, and we want Granola to feel like the most personal AI, but in the workplace. I really do think thoughtful design of the tools we create matters. It's the same way people stopped going to libraries and started Googling everything. In some ways, that was great, because information was accessible really quickly. The downside is that humanity is now learning a lot of stuff from SEO-optimized, crappy content, as opposed to well-researched work. That's not what Larry and Sergey wanted to happen — their motivation was: let's make information accessible and useful. But that's a weird consequence of the tool they built. And I think the unintended consequences of the design decisions we make around AI tools might be really, really big. So — good luck to all of us, I guess.
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