ABSTRACT
Richard Sennett describes craftwork as an innate human impulse to achieve perfection in manual labor and equates pursuit of excellence to fulfillment in a job well done. This fascination with craft’s emotional economy of self-improvement seems to suggest an antidote to machine-age anxiety. It posits the ultimate goal of the craftsperson as maximum perfection wrought within the limits of human flaw. It may be inferred that humans are just as valuable as machines because we can achieve organic forms of perfection unattainable for artificial intelligences. Humans are softer machines, our value steeped in seemingly opposed notions of virtuosity: virtue in the Romantic sense of John Ruskin, attached to the acceptance of flaw as beautiful, as well as Denis Diderot’s enlightened reverence for technical virtuosity, as close as possible to (machine) perfection and thus an expression of the sublime in human nature (Sennett 114–118).
