Tools aren’t evil. A chemist can make a poison or they can make sunscreen with the same lab. Letters can be configured into words that bring joy or sorrow. Money can buy food and shelter, or weapons of war.
They’re tools. Our hands and minds are tools, too.
People fear tools because they don’t understand minds. They think that the evil is contained in the sword, not in the hand that weilds it and the heart that drives the hand. They think hatred is housed in the words spoken, not in the mind that willed the mouth to speak.
Humans have great capacity for honor and evil both. They also have tremendous ingenuity, and will use that ingenuity to make tools that further their goals, righteous and evil alike. To attempt to be ever-vigilant against the wrong tools is to fight a fool’s war, and to lose it. The battle for the hearts of mankind must be won there, as well.
The Opportunity Machine 