what's this blog about?

I'm writing this blog for one main reason: I want to explore the boundaries of what's automatable. What can only human hands still do, and why?

Surprisingly many tasks rely on human hand-labor. Every piece of clothing you own, and have ever owned, was made by a pair of human hands. Given the size and turnaround time of the average American wardrobe, this accounts for a disturbing amount of hand labor. Brace yourself for more fashion-talk than any other AI-and-automation blog out there.

Farming certain produce items is also primarily hands-on. Apples, raspberries, asparagus, grapes - all rely on a good amount of human hand-labor.

The human hand is a marvelous, complex thing. It's difficult to engineer a synthetic/robotic replacement - the texture, the dexterity, the nuance.  But it can do so much more than just sewing t-shirts.

I believe that the lack of progress towards full automation in hand-labor-intensive tasks is an unnecessary burden on humanity.

I also want to explore the attempts and barriers towards automating tasks like sewing, harvesting, crocheting, recycling, and more. While language models have made leaps and bounds over the past few years, hand-labor automation has largely not. The development of physical-labor-replacing automation has had many stops and starts, and is still mainly a long way away from being profitable.

I hope this blog will inspire you to think about automation and artificial intelligence differently.