Commitment is the Human Activity

Tools Don't Choose. We Do.

We are tempted, all the more as our tools advance, to believe that those tools reduce the burden of choice. I think the opposite is true. The more powerful our tools become, the more explicit our commitments must be.

We talk as if systems will tell us what matters, when in fact they only amplify what we already serve. Treating tools as authorities is not neutrality; it’s avoidance.

Tools can optimize. They can predict. They can recombine. What they cannot do is commit. Commitment belongs to agents who could have chosen otherwise - commitments are personal - a job only a person can do.

Nothing about AI changes this. Nothing about scale changes this. If anything, it makes the old responsibility unavoidable: to decide what we serve, and to refuse the comfort of pretending we didn’t choose.