master plan drawing
Handcraft or AI?
We belong to a generation whose childhood was not digital, we already had television, the landline or public telephone that worked with coins, radio and cassette; Things were changing quickly, we were incorporating technology into our lives, learning along the way, taking advantage and enjoying many, suffering others.
Now, we enter the era of accessible artificial intelligence: it is impressive, exciting and terrifying. The topic can be discussed from many angles; propose scenarios, see opportunities, undertake changes. But what is worrying about all this?: possible unemployment, being replaced by technological responses, the creative industry has been put uder threat… (and it is not the only one), one fears that mental fatigue will quickly become massive, people will stop thinking, analyzing, imagining, creating, needing that aspect of personal life and its social projection…it is terrifying.
The answer in this case: “The Resistance”; and I don’t mean to be voluntarily marginal and not use the available technology; but, valuing more the artisanal execution of things.
Many cultures preserve crafts, which have great cultural value, creations with the hands, it is considered a social good to preserve as identity and competence, ensuring that these traditions resist.
You can be very radical, using ancestral techniques with materials close to those used in history, no motor, only tools, manual machines, usually with several different processes to obtain the final result; and from there, depending on the technique, different machinery is incorporated, with degrees of digitalization and automation, everything depends on the speed necessary according to the required production demand.
The question is, if that humanity in the execution process is valuable enough to be sustained over time, despite being possible to replace it with an automatic system?
We have two angles that we can really value: one, the pleasure of making, and two: there is something intangible about handmade objects that make them special and valuable. It all depends on the cultural response, this is surely not going to disappear, there will always be an elite that likes that, but if we let the new generations relate to their lives only digitally, they will not have the concern to do anything personally, nor will they notice any difference between something made by hand or with a machine, and that elite will become increasingly scarce.
I think it is essential to do the exercise of making, from food, cabinetmaking, crafts, textile production, construction, etc. Technology opens up many new options for us that we did not have before, and that is very positive, perhaps we will ask a robot to make us what we imagine in our minds, and have the ability to obtain the materials, and assemble what we ask for, or maybe they give us a fake one, made of plastic or another composite, painted, that looks like it, but it is not, and with that we can take the photo and fell good enough.
