Beyond the Shortcut
Why Your Hands might Hold the Key to Deep Thinking
I started designing a new piece recently. Designing sometimes comes easily, and sometimes it feels a bit like slogging through mud. This piece falls into the latter category. It’s a request for an embroidery store owner, but it comes with a few constraints. In particular, she doesn’t want it to look like most of my work (I was tempted to wonder why she had asked me at all!) “More flowers and not too geometric”, she said. A tricky request given that my base fabric is essentially a piece of graph paper.
Despite feeling a bit stuck, I reminded myself to “trust the process”. This means, at least for me, starting with the outer border. It defines the finished size of the piece, and typically involves easy, repetitive stitching, giving me time to become familiar with the colour palette and make space for the ideas to start bubbling. After several nights of stitching (and a bit more unpicking than usual!), the borders were joined by a central floral motif, subdivision of the space into smaller areas using a large "X" and a central square, and a pretty combination of flowers and leaves repeated down each side.
And it was then that my brain made one of those delightfully interesting leaps of understanding that happen occasionally. I realised that, despite there being billions of people on this beautiful planet of ours, nowhere is there a piece that is identical to the one I was in the midst of creating. Of course there are many previous versions of the stitches I was working and motifs that look very similar, whether in paint or thread or sculpture. But the exact way that I was putting the stitches together, the colours from my hand-dyed threads, the way that the lines of silk floss were overlaying the fabric and each other - all of these factors combined to create a brand new, unique piece.
Work in progress - at least it is making more steps forward than back!
How incredibly cool and amazing is that! I might still feel that it’s not very “good” (whatever that means), and if I was to stitch it again, maybe the design process would be flowing more easily and I would come up with different combinations of colours and motifs. But that is not the point. Whatever my internal critic might be feeling, this piece is still a deeply personal, empowering statement of my commitment to continuously growing my artistic skill and creative confidence. Even when the design process feels hard - maybe even more so because of that - this physical manifestation of my unique creative process is a beautiful reflection of what it means to me to be human.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The whole world seems to be talking about AI: podcasts and blogs I follow, a veritable library full of new books being published, and countless posts on social media. Depending on your viewpoint, it’s exciting, revolutionary, life changing, terrifying, awful, or the beginning of the end of the human race. Regardless of your stance, there is little doubt that it is having a huge impact on the world as we know it.
Before we dive into this a little bit, let's first be very careful about the broad brush use of the term AI - artificial intelligence. Lumping all AI together is like only having one word to describe all machines of transportation - say, "vehicles" (an analogy I borrowed from Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor in their book "AI Snake Oil"). If you were to say that all vehicles are bad for the environment, you'd be treating bicycles and aeroplanes the same way, when clearly they have vastly different environmental footprints. AI is the same. It comes in a wide range of types built in very different ways to achieve myriad outcomes. To give you a taste of that variety, the graphic below is a snapshot of some current AI Productivity Tools, just one slice of the AI market.
A snapshot of AI Productivity Tools via Gencay I on Substack
Much of the hype over the past year or two is because so many of us have gained free and easy access to generative AI, the subset of technologies that are attempting to mimic human intelligence. These include ChatGPT and Claude style language models and a variety of image generators. This has brought the advances in AI very much into the public eye. But there is a whole other subset of technologies categorised as predictive AI, that has probably been impacting your life in a less obvious way for much longer. It might be assisting with decisions about your health care, employment, education, insurance, etc. It's most definitely curating what you see in your social media feeds and/or internet browsing, taking all the data from your engagement history to predict what content and which advertisers you are most likely to click on next.
The ongoing research and development in AI is huge. I don't pretend to be across it in a substantive way. But as a lay person who is fascinated by the work of human hands, it find it interesting to hone in on one tiny philosophical corner of the discussion. Let’s talk about AI and human thinking, and what we might be on the verge of losing - or choosing to give up.
In this short but interesting blog post, Paul Graham noted that one outcome of the Industrial Revolution had been that humans were given the choice as to whether they were physically strong or not. Prior to the widespread advent of machines and fast transport, most humans had a large element of manual labour to undertake, just to stay alive. As everyday lifestyles changed, being physically fit and strong became more of a choice. And because this requires a commitment to effort and hard work, there is a proportion of the population that simply choose to not go there. Many humans will naturally conserve energy and follow the path of least resistance if they can.
Graham argues that we are on the cusp of a similar change with regard to thinking. If ChatGPT-style generative AI can write a letter for us, or answer an essay question, or tell us what our favourite colour feels like (I kid you not - this was a story related to me by a young university student recently), then we are almost certainly entering an era where we will have the choice to think. For someone like me who loves to think, to burrow into the corners of an idea and look for the unexpected connections, that’s an alarming thought. Without any judgement, I totally accept that some humans will be more than happy to relinquish that work to technology. But it does worry me.
We are witnessing enormous implications in education already. If the key outcome from school or university is maximising a grade, which in turn opens the door to the next rung on society’s ladder, then of course our young people are going to use whatever tools are available to help them get there. That doesn’t make them bad humans - it makes them perfectly normal humans who will naturally gravitate to the tools that make the journey as easy as possible. The problem of course, is that they don't realise that taking shortcuts with the work of thinking will directly impact their cognitive capacity in the longer term. It will become a poorly developed muscle due to lack of practice.
So why do I think this is relevant to The Hands Manifesto? And what on earth does it have to do with the knotty design problem I described at the beginning of this piece?
On Steven Bartlett’s podcast recently, Simon Sinek noted, “you aren’t worried about AI if you are a plumber”. As I heard these words, I thought to myself, “nor if you are an embroiderer”. Or a knitter, weaver, woodworker, ceramicist, cook, etc. And yes, I totally take your point that many of these professions were hugely impacted by the Industrial Revolution. But tradespeople and artisans alike are now in the interesting position that AI categorically cannot do what we do. Our work is not tied to producing the thing - it’s about producing the thing. Our value firmly resides in the skills and knowledge associated with our process.
To help solve the bottleneck in the design process on my most recent piece, I needed to think with my hands. The making process itself is a step-by-step transition from things I do know (a library of stitches, colour confidence, the way my fabric interacts with a given thickness of thread, etc.) to things I don't know yet (a design that merges the requirements of the design brief with my expertise and embroidery style). There isn't a short cut for this. I have to do the work of building the design stitch by patient stitch, unpicking things that don't work, trying something different, gradually building up a coherent whole. I could perhaps have turned to an AI image generator for a suite of ideas, but I've yet to have any success in generating something that comes even close to my own aesthetic. And I would still need to translate those ideas into stitch, applying all my knowledge of my materials to decide what will and won't work.
So it strikes me that there is a very interesting idea here. Perhaps helping more people to do some work with their hands, might actually be an excellent antidote to the almost inevitable loss of thinking practice made possible by generative AI. It's by no means a cure-all, but I believe there is real value in helping people experience the deeply engaging thinking that is experienced when undertaking a handmade creative project, especially when technology might be making it less likely that they will experience that in other parts of their lives.
And isn't there something beautifully counter cultural in the idea that the leisure activities that society has been identifying as luxuries or a waste of time for decades, might actually be the very thing that can help humans to reconnect to thinking deeply. It puts a smile on my face, anyway. And keeps me working on my latest design, even if I'm still not sure where I'm going with it.
This Week’s References
AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, Princeton University Press, 2024.
How to comment
I love receiving your comments and hearing your ideas! Making a comment is easy. Just type it into the box below. If you test it with “Preview” first, the name field will show “Not Logged In” (which is a system thing I can’t change). Never fear though! When you click on “Post Comment”, a dialogue box will come up asking for your Name, Email, and Website URL. The only field that must be completed is “Name”. It can be anything you choose - full name, first name, initials, nickname. So go ahead. Let me know what you think :)
