PERSON
David Pye
British furniture maker, wood turner, and Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art (1914–1993), whose Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968) introduced the distinction between the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty that turned out to describe AI half a century before AI existed.
David Pye trained as an architect before the Second World War, served in the Royal Navy, and emerged after the war to a long career as a practicing furniture maker, wood turner, and teacher. He was Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art in London from 1964 to 1974, and through that position he influenced a generation of British designers and craftsmen. His major books — The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (1964) and The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968) — offered the most rigorous theoretical account of skilled making produced in the twentieth century, insisting that the meaningful divide in making was not between hand and machine but between work whose outcome depended on the maker's continuous skill and work whose outcome was predetermined by the apparatus.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Pye was a practitioner first. His turned