Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

The artisanal intellectual

Last updated 2026-08-07 · Markdown version

What happens to people whose identity is built on thinking when machines begin to do the thinking? The artisanal intellectual is Andrew Maynard’s answer-in-progress: as AI matches — and may soon exceed — human intellectual labor, human-only scholarship may be relegated to — or deliberately embraced as — an artisanal pursuit, valued for its provenance and process rather than its product. He coined the idea in a footnote in February 2025, days into working with OpenAI’s Deep Research, and then found — through the AI-assisted research the coinage itself provoked — that it had a prehistory running from C. Wright Mills’s intellectual craftsmanship to Dominic Boyer’s 2002 use of the phrase. By November 2025 it had become a short story set in the year 2100, forthcoming as a chapter in a Johns Hopkins University Press volume — a correspondence written, deliberately, without the aid of AI (apart from occasional grammar and style checking).

The argument

The idea arrived as a hedge. In early February 2025, days after getting OpenAI’s Deep Research, Andrew spent four days testing whether it could research and write a complete PhD dissertation (2025-02-09). The ~400-page result “fell short of matching up to a true scholarly dissertation” but was “nevertheless, impressive” (2025-02-16). The conclusion came in a footnote, hedges intact: not that AI would independently research dissertations, but that “we do have to grapple with the very real possibility that AI is becoming a powerful catalyst and accelerant in research that will relegate human-only research to a class of artisanal intellectualism where the primary purpose is the provenance and process, not the product” (2025-02-09). A week later he called it “a bit of a throwaway at the time” that he’d since found himself “increasingly intrigued by” (2025-02-16).

The working definition emerged in conversation with Sean Leahy on Modem Futura episode 18 (2025-02-11): the artisanal intellectual as someone who thinks without using AI — not using AI made a describable stance rather than the unmarked default, “akin to a craftsperson choosing hand tools over power tools” (2025-02-16). That essay supplies the grounding, in citations that are his: C. Wright Mills’s 1959 “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” which casts scholarship as “a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career”; Dominic Boyer’s 2002 essay — “possibly the first time the phrase is formally used” — defining the artisanal intellectual as a knowledge-maker with a relatively immediate and sensuous relationship to the epistemic forms they produce; Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge (“we can know more than we can tell”); Richard Sennett on craftsmanship as the “desire to do a job well for its own sake”; and Martin Heidegger’s 1954 warning against technology enframing the world as “standing-reserve.” The point of the lineage: intellectual labor was personal craft long before AI — what AI adds is the obligation to decide, explicitly, what that craft is worth.

The idea is deliberately not loss-only, opening three questions. Worth: the craft of intellect, he suggests, “helps begin to tease out the “secret sauce” of the academic … as distinct from mere productivity” (2025-11-30) — when machines threaten to replace academic productivity, what remains is what productivity measures never captured. Prestige: “Just as handmade artisan goods gained cultural value in an industrialized world, human-crafted scholarship might acquire a certain prestige or trust in an AI-saturated world” (2025-02-16, a possibility he notes is hinted at in work by Watermeyer and colleagues). Inequality, named as such: “only well-resourced or tenured scholars might be able to afford the slower, manual approach, while others feel pressured to use AI to stay competitive,” and academic authority “might thus bifurcate” (2025-02-16). A deflationary rendering shadows all three: without proactive engagement, “scholars could become ‘intellectual hobbyists,’ individuals indulging in thinking merely as an artisanal pursuit, while AI assumes responsibility for meaningful, impactful intellectual work” (2025-03-16 — a post ChatGPT synthesized from his AI for U podcast conversation, as it discloses). Whether “artisanal” ends up meaning prestige or hobbyism is exactly what he leaves open.

He does not argue this from one side, and the method is part of the argument. The 2025-02-16 essay was itself — “somewhat ironically,” his words — produced with Deep Research: the model drafted; he edited line by line, tracking references back to primary sources where possible. The same year, he co-wrote AI and the Art of Being Human with Jeff Abbott — “a book where we both lean heavily into using AI” (his gloss, 2025-11-23) — and wrote the correspondence at the heart of Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft “very intentionally … without the aid of AI (apart from occasional grammar and style checking),” atop a fictional backstory built with Deep Research (2025-11-30). He frames that process as “an intentional meta-reflection on the ideas the story explores” (2025-11-30). The augmented practice is Massively-augmented research; this page is the craft practice; on his own account, the juxtaposition is the point.

The idea’s extended working-out is fiction. Letters (serialized 2025-11-23 → 11-30) is an epistolary story set in 2100: the soon-to-retire Chair of a Department of Intellectual Craft is ousted from his office by his university’s first tenured AI professor, and the correspondence explores “what it might mean to thrive in an AI future as someone who deeply values their unaugmented human intelligence in what they do and who they are” (2025-11-23). The postscript sets the concept against Michael Crow and William Dabars’s The Fifth Wave (2020) — the “small-scale craft production” of knowledge as a pre-industrial “boutique” strategy that nonetheless “may remain essential to discovery, creativity, and innovation” (2025-11-30, his citation) — and the same pair’s Academic Cultures: Perspectives from the Future (Johns Hopkins University Press, due December 2026) is set to carry the story as a chapter: forthcoming, not yet published.

Lineage

In his own words

From the footnote that coined the idea (Can AI write your PhD dissertation for you? (AI-readable mirror), 2025-02-09):

“To be clear, I don’t think we are heading for a future where AI can independently research and write a PhD dissertation — that would require independent intent and understanding on the AI’s part. But I think we do have to grapple with the very real possibility that AI is becoming a powerful catalyst and accelerant in research that will relegate human-only research to a class of artisanal intellectualism where the primary purpose is the provenance and process, not the product.”

From The Artisanal Intellectual in the Age of AI (AI-readable mirror), 2025-02-16:

“On the other end, we may see the rise of the artisanal intellectual as a conscious identity – scholars who pointedly work without AI aid (or with minimal use) to preserve a traditional mode of scholarship. Just as handmade artisan goods gained cultural value in an industrialized world, human-crafted scholarship might acquire a certain prestige or trust in an AI-saturated world. … However, this could create a new inequality: only well-resourced or tenured scholars might be able to afford the slower, manual approach, while others feel pressured to use AI to stay competitive. Academic authority might thus bifurcate, with a small elite claiming the mantle of authenticity and the majority working in AI-assisted paradigms.”

From Postscript: Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft (AI-readable mirror), 2025-11-30:

“The idea of intellectual endeavors as craft intrigues me, as it helps begin to tease out the “secret sauce” of the academic (if indeed such a thing exists) as distinct from mere productivity. And in the face of machines that threaten to replace academic productivity, it opens up ways of exploring how this craft might influence academic culture in an AI-dominated future.”

Engagement and reception

The idea’s documented engagement to date is editorial. In 2025 Andrew was invited to write a chapter around AI for Academic Cultures: Perspectives from the Future, co-edited by Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars for Johns Hopkins University Press; he answered the invitation with the intellectual-craft story, and the editors and publisher agreed to let him serialize it on the Substack ahead of the volume’s planned publication (prelude, 2025-11-23). One further dated trace documents how thin the phrase’s prior literature was: when Andrew pointed Deep Research at the concept in February 2025, the sources it surfaced included Andrew’s own day-old podcast episode and companion post (2025-02-16, Notes) — “it’s not a term that’s been widely used or written about in the past,” as the post says.

Beyond that, the record is thin: as of 2026-08-06 our reception record documents no independent published engagement with the artisanal-intellectual coinage, and we prefer to say so plainly. This is an absence of record, not a verdict on the idea — conceptual work of this kind typically accrues visible reception slowly, and the initiative does not typically solicit it (Philosophy).

Where to go deeper

The essays and the story

The episode and the chapter

Related ideas and corpus pages