PERSON
David Pye
The furniture maker and theorist who gave craft its sharpest philosophy—the man who distinguished the workmanship of risk from the workmanship of certainty and made that distinction the most precise lens available for understanding what AI does to the people who use it.
David Pye spent his working life making furniture and thinking about what making means. As Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art and as a practitioner of extraordinary skill, he developed a theory of workmanship that has waited six decades for the technological moment that would make it indispensable. That moment has arrived. His central distinction—between the
workmanship of risk, in which the outcome depends on the worker’s continuous judgment, and the
workmanship of certainty, in which the apparatus predetermines the result—is not a historical curiosity but a diagnostic instrument of the highest precision.
The ultimate jig, Pye’s name for any apparatus that absorbs every dimension of productive judgment, describes large language models with an exactness that no contemporary framework matches. His theory of what the hand knows, of how material knowledge is built through bodily encounter with resistant media, explains what is lost when the developer