A computing-inflected 'hammer' formulation in the law-of-the-instrument genealogy is credited to Kenneth Mark Colby in a 1963 volume, eight years before the PARRY paper

quote-investigationlaw-of-the-instrumentai-historyparrykenneth-mark-colbycross-time-bridge

Tracing the "hammer and nail" proverb backward runs, unexpectedly, into the early history of AI. Quote Investigator's genealogy of the "law of the instrument" reaches a 1963 volume — Computer Simulation of Personality: Frontier of Psychological Theory, reviewed in Science that November — that carries a computing-flavored version of the figure attributed to Kenneth Mark Colby, from his chapter "Computer Simulation of a Neurotic Process": "The computer program may be our current hammer, but it must be tried." The line dates from the same period as the idiom's earliest "nail"-bearing formulations, and it recasts the hammer not as a small boy's toy (Kaplan) or a psychologist's caution (Maslow) but as the computer program itself — the researcher's new instrument, viewed with the same wariness the proverb was built to express.

Colby's is not the only computing-flavored hammer in that volume, and Quote Investigator does not present it as the first. The book's opening chapter, by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, carries its own: a hammer-and-nails analogy extended to a computer that has storage capacity but no feelings, and therefore concerns itself with remembering and problem-solving rather than with loving and hating. [unverified-quote — needs direct read] — that passage reached this note through a model-mediated page rendering, not a direct fetch, so it is recorded as a lead and paraphrased rather than quoted. Both entries are 1963, both are in the same book, and the genealogy gives no basis for ranking them by date — so the vault-side claim is that Colby's is a 1963 computing formulation of the figure, not the earliest one.

Colby was not a footnote in AI. Eight years later came PARRY, a Stanford simulation of paranoid personality validated against psychiatrists' judgments and published as "Artificial Paranoia" (Colby, Weber & Hilf, Artificial Intelligence 2, 1971, pp. 1–25). PARRY is the vault's existing anchor for its 1972 ARPANET conversation with DOCTOR, the best-known ELIZA script written by Joseph Weizenbaum. The proverb's history thus threads the same two figures twice: Weizenbaum supplies the 1982 misquote wording that later reappears in A.E. Clark's essay, while Colby supplies a 1963 computing formulation of the underlying figure — the two men whose chatbots talked to each other in 1972 also bracket the print history of "the computer program may be our current hammer."

This is a cross-time, cross-domain bridge: a throwaway aphorism at the end of a China-population-policy essay whose genealogy lands on one of AI's first chatbot-personality builders.