For Emergence Magazine, James Bridle writes about artificial intelligence; carpentry and chair-making with ChatGPT; and Enzo Mari, a famed Italian furniture designer from the 1950s and ’60s. Bridle asks: “What if we used AI for something actually useful?” They offer an interesting take on AI, and why the extractive way we’re using it is far from satisfying.
What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way.
More writing from James Bridle
Echoic Memory
“I am a person of ground. This is not to say grounded, but of earth, attached to the earth.”
Seasoning a Kid
“A search for a practice of place.”
A Circling Story
“How can noticing seasonal changes be a radical act in a culture fixated with endless growth?”
Museum of Color
“From ochre to lapis lazuli, Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the entangled histories of our most iconic pigments, revealing how colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness.”
Becoming Earth
“But here the line is blurred. In the afterlife of cedars, nothing is ever dead.”
Telling the Bees
“Finding solace in the company of bees, Emily Polk opens to the widening circles of loss around her and an enduring spirit of survival.”
