AI sewing machines and different futures

Today on Substack I came across a post by Elle Griffin about this wonderful project, an AI trained on the works of William Morris (the 19th-century writer, Arts and Crafts movement leader, and socialist), operating on a Raspberry Pi… and powered by a hand-crank mechanism.

Max Park’s Prompting Nowhere [here’s a PDF about the project] is one of a couple AIs he’s constructed that reimagine how AI can be designed and deployed in ways that make it more humane, give users more control over it, or create more free time. As Ellie Griffin asks,

What would AI be like if it were optimized for a beautiful life? Maybe it becomes like Socrates, asking questions instead of giving answers, encouraging us to be thinkers rather than passive consumers. Maybe it automates away our desk jobs, so we can spend less time on the computer and more time raising children. Maybe it funds increased leisure time, so we can spend more of our lives working with our hands, rather than sitting on screens. Maybe AI could create a more offline life rather than a more online one.

One of Park’s machines sits on a vintage sewing machine, and is powered by the machine’s treadle. Mounting it on a sewing machine calls attention to the different ways the same technology can either empower workers, giving them more leisure time or greater financial independence, or turn into tools for their exploitation:

At home… [the sewing machine] symbolized freedom: a hand-sewn shirt might take 14 hours, but with the machine it might take one, and create a path to independent income for many women. But at the factory, the treadle sewing machine also powered the sweatshops, extracting more and more output for menial pay. When paired with capitalism, these “labor-saving devices” didn’t shorten the workday; they raised how much women had to produce in a day for their dollar.

I’ve been thinking about this question of how AI could be used to construct different futures, as I just wrapped up a class on artificial intelligence in a summer program at Cambridge. My students were from all over the world, but they all shared real concerns about AI: even the more tech-savvy students, the ones best-positioned to exploit AI, are uneasy about the temptation of AI-generated work and the impact the technology will have on their educations and future.

One of the things we explored was how they could use AI to solve small but meaningful problems in their own lives: help with schoolwork, of course, but also critique public speaking, or even analyze dance routines.

I wanted them to come away with a few ideas:

1. This is not a technology whose course will just be defined by Silicon Valley, but can be determined by all of us.
2. The technical barriers to using AI have fallen very dramatically: a lot of theta projects were Gemini Gems, which they didn’t so much “build” as “co-create by talking to Gemini.”
3. AI isn’t just about massive data centers and world-shifting stuff; some of its most significant applications can be highly personal (like a diary) or temporary (like a patient checklist in an ER).

In intent these were kind of like speculative futures, except they were things the students really were able to build; I thought of them as lo-fi prototypes, not as sophisticated or theoretically subtle as Max Park’s work, but still useful for pointing out how this incredibly important technology could be used to create many different futures, not just the one that CEOs read about in science fiction.