Shop Class as Soulcraft argues that manual, skilled work (like fixing motorcycles) is intellectually rich and essential to human flourishing. Crawford is critical of the shift in modern work toward abstraction, and the separation of thinking from doing. In his view, deep satisfaction and important forms of knowledge come from engaging with the material world, exercising judgment, and seeing the tangible results of one’s labor.
This perspective is increasingly relevant in the context of AI, which accelerates the delegation of both white- and blue-collar tasks to inscrutable software systems. As AI takes over more cognitive work (analysis, writing, creativity, decision-making) as well as physical tasks, human beings are distanced not only from the work itself but from the embodied knowledge that such work develops and sustains. In other words, AI makes us dumber the more we use it.
Crawford’s emphasis on the unity of mind and body in skilled labor challenges the idea that intelligence can be cleanly separated from action. When AI assumes more of our planning, problem-solving, and perception, we risk dislocating ourselves from the very processes that build competence and agency. The more we outsource, the less we engage in feedback loops between thinking and doing. This atrophy of judgment, attention, and intuition may erode our sense of identity, responsibility, and satisfaction in work.
This work has been foundational for thinking about human-technology interactions and continues to be influential in the work of those like Damien P. Williams who write at the crossroads of the humanities and AI.
Ravaged by war and the collapse of previous norms, peacetime Germans struggled to understand a world that was turning West and embracing industry. Many believed consumerism and a bourgeois lifestyle could offer a path to national progress. Philosopher Josef Pieper believed otherwise, insisting that we work so as to have the restful freedom to dream, create, and connect spiritually with the world. Pieper's elegant answer to alienation then has so much to say in an era when technology is again promising liberation - but somehow, will end up again leaving us doing to dishes while it writes ever cheaper poetry.
The importance of human articulation face to face in language in light of the philosophical history of Alan Turing and early sociological study of mobile technology
In this text, Ellul makes a critical point about technology that cuts against one of the enduring myths around it's development and use, namely that technology is "neutral". Ellul argues that all technology has an embedded ideology, specifically the desire for efficiency, and that this desire deeply impacts both how we use technology and how we see the world. He unpacks the implications for our society of the dominance of this ideology.
The article describes the danger posed by Albert Borgmann's device paradigm to the values of the Kingdom of God, which aim towards human flourishing, in Latinx communities. And proposes a view of Christian education to address digital technologies/culture, which grounds AI and which AI is a part of.
A scheme for human progress based on science and planetary management — was the basis for a club founded by Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, who later spoke of “human potentialities”
The text shows what has been lost: The assumption written words are of human origin. Yet it also shows how this might be a chance to return to a reading without regard to origin.
