CHAPTER 01 / 03
A tool changes more than output
When a new means of production appears, the discussion extends beyond its capacity. How work is divided, how makers relate to what they make, and which kinds of labour are valued also come into question. We need not find a perfect historical equivalent of today to understand this.
The V&A’s account of the Arts and Crafts movement shows how the quality of production and working conditions were discussed together in nineteenth-century Britain. William Morris objected to more than the existence of machines: he also criticised the way the division of labour weakened the bond between a maker and the object produced. [1]
CHAPTER 02 / 03
Borrowing a question
We can bring this debate into contemporary discussions of generative AI. But treating factory labour and digital labour as identical would erase the details of both periods. Ownership, the speed of adoption, the means of production and workers’ positions differ. Historical resemblance cannot replace explanation.
What may help us is to borrow the shape of an older question: alongside asking what a new tool produces, ask from whom it takes the process of production and to whom it gives it. We need not carry all of Morris’s proposals into the present. We take an issue we can investigate, rather than a verdict from the past.
CHAPTER 03 / 03
Who crosses the threshold?
If we describe change only through the opportunities available to its winners, we may miss the skills, relationships and say in decisions that are lost. Equally, treating every innovation as loss can make new possibilities invisible. History can teach us to remain more patient between these two easy accounts.
That is why I treat “We have been here before” as a file to open, rather than a conclusion. Who was there, under what conditions, and who bore the cost? A threshold may not be a door everyone crosses at the same time or in the same direction. Understanding today begins with the care we bring to the questions we ask of the past.
25 September 2026 · Opening text completed and revised.