We can be human again

The most valuable work of the next decade will be the work that visibly carries human fingerprints.

That is not nostalgia. It follows directly from what the machines are getting good at.

A friend put it better than I have managed in months of trying. On a Zoom call last week, Tagmac, speaking from the Cyprus sunshine, said something like this: “We can be human now. Before, we were trying to be robots.”

For most of my working life, the highest compliment a process could earn was that it ran like a machine. We trained people toward consistency and repeatability, and asked humans to excel at the things humans are worst at.

That contest is over. Losing it is the best thing that could have happened to us.

When machines take the machine-work, the human-made stops being the inefficient option and becomes the premium one. The handwritten note tucked inside the parcel. The signed edition with the slightly wonky inscription. The bookseller who presses a novel into your hands because it kept her up until two in the morning.

None of it scales. That is the point.

Perfection is now cheap. It pours out of a data centre by the token. What cannot be manufactured is evidence that another person spent their finite time and attention on you. It is the same bifurcation reshaping my own industry, where mass-produced content and artisanal craft are pulling apart into two different businesses.

This has happened before. When photography made the accurate likeness cheap, painting moved to what the camera could not do, and the impressionists turned the visible brushstroke into the whole point. The brushstroke was the fingerprint of the human writer.

So the craft ahead is not outworking the machines, and it is not resisting them either. It is choosing, deliberately, which parts of the work should carry fingerprints, and then protecting the time to leave them. Some of those choices will be commercial, and some will simply be the parts of the work we loved before everything else crowded them out.

The robots can have perfection.

Being human, is ours again.

Related reading: Nobody watches robot archery on which repetition to hand to the machines, and which to keep.