CONCEPT

The Revolt of the Builder

Camus’s third position—neither the triumphalist who leaps into productivity as meaning nor the elegist who leaps back into a romanticized past—but the builder who uses the tool, feels the capability and the loss simultaneously, asks not only whether a thing can be built but whether it should be and who bears the cost, and builds anyway without the consolation of cosmic significance.

The revolt of the builder is the AI-age application of Camusian revolt—the refusal to accept the absurd as a reason to stop building, combined with the simultaneous refusal to pretend the building answers the question the absurd poses. It is not the revolutionary optimist’s faith that productivity resolves the human condition, and it is not the revolutionary pessimist’s faith that preserving craft would have secured it. It is the specific position that inhabits the contradiction: the machine is both a gift and a loss, and neither the gift nor the loss is the whole story. The revolt of the builder does not end. The absurd is permanent. The machine will continue to advance. The question will continue to press. And the builder, if she is in revolt, will continue to build—not because

Keep reading with YOU ON AI