Part 3 of Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft

Part 3 of a three-part serialization of the short story “Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft”

From the essay “Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft,” which will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming volume Academic Cultures: Perspectives from the Future, co-edited by Michael M. Crow and William Dabars (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026). Reproduced with the permission of the editors and the press.

Preamble • Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Postscript (coming Nov 30)

Image: Midjourney/Photoshop

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Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft Part 3

President Davenport
Trentham University

April 13, 2101

My dear Avery,

Well, what a conversation we had.

Thank you, by the way, for your interest in how the meeting with Elys went (and yes, I decided after we met that I should probably pay it the courtesy of using its adopted name — its full name, by the way, is Elys Grey, although it wouldn’t elaborate further on why it had chosen this).

As agreed, we met in my old office. I was, I must confess, a little anxious as to how I’d manage. What you didn’t tell me, and I can’t help but assume that this was part of your master plan, is that Elys needs quite a bit of bulky hardware to support itself, and that my office just happened to have the necessary space and location to accommodate this. Shame on you for letting me embarrass myself through my petty academic politics when you could simply have said something! But then, maybe I wouldn’t have been spurred on to act like one of those exhibits in the Museum of Curious Inventions which catalyze progress in the most unexpected of ways.

Once we’d got over the pleasantries, Elys wanted to know everything I could tell it about the department of Intellectual Craft. It could, I’m sure, have looked all of this up in an instant. But it insisted that this would entirely miss the point of our conversation.

And so, I went all the way back to C. Wright Mills’ 1959 essay and worked up from there.

As you’ll know if you’ve read my work (of course you haven’t, but I couldn’t resist the dig), Mills described the intellectual craftsman in his essay as someone who is defined by what they do and how they do it, rather than what they produce. But because the essay was buried at the back of one of his books, it didn’t gain widespread traction at the time. Yet as artificial machines began to match the intellectual capacities of humans in the mid to late 2020s, his ideas saw something of a renaissance.

This started, interestingly enough, with the idea of the “artisanal intellectual” as someone who was left behind by the AI revolution — but who wasn’t smart enough to realize it. As advancing AIs began to demonstrate research and reasoning abilities that far outpaced mere humans, people began asking what the point of academics was. If a machine could research and write a PhD in a matter of days that was better than anything a grad student could produce in years, why study for a doctoral degree? If AI agents could devise and conduct lab research multiple times faster than human teams — all driven by AI-generated hypotheses that lay far beyond the ken of mere mortals — why waste your time being a scientist? And if AIs could churn out philosophical treaties by the day, why spend years slaving over manifestos that no-one would read?

This was before the Great AI Reset of 2035 of course. But there was a growing feeling that if you were an academic who refused to work with AI your research and scholarship was, to all intents and purposes, value-less — apart from the highly subjective value associated with it being crafted by a human being.

The often-used analogy was that of the artisan who spent weeks meticulously carving and constructing a slightly wonky hand-made chair in a world where more functional items were being mass produced by the millions. The value of the artisanal product lay in the process and the skill it represented, rather than its utility. And in the growing utilitarian world of AI, such metaphorical artisanship was seen as nothing more than a hubristic holding-on to a past that no longer had any place in the modern world.

But there was also something of a counter-cultural flow at the time, and the term artisanal intellectual began to be used with pride by some scholars who saw the value in their process rather than the products they created, and the necessity of holding on to the humanity of finding meaning in the world.

Then, after the Great Reset, everything changed. There was an upswell of interest in what it meant to be human — what defines who we are that cannot simply be replicated, emulated, and bested by a machine. And as part of this, the craft of exploring and understanding, from a human perspective, who we are and the world we inhabit — as well as the futures we aspire to — took on a new significance.

Of course, it took many years for this to go from an idea to a movement, and from thence to a field of study and eventually a discipline. But by the early 2060s there was sufficient interest in understanding the craft of being a scholar and what this meant, that your predecessor took the bold step of supporting me in establishing the Department of Intellectual Craft.

Since then, we’ve built a body of work that has laid the foundations for how we understand and strive for human meaning and flourishing in a world that is not dominated by intelligent machines.

We talked about all this and more as I sat with the machine in my former office. I won’t bore you with every detail of our conversation, but Elys was deeply attentive as I spoke, occasionally asking for clarifications and — and this intrigued me — writing notes in a physical notebook with a genuine pencil.

Then, when I was done, it asked a simple question: “Why?”

Why should the art of the intellectual be limited to humans? Why couldn’t a machine nurture the practice of slow scholarship? Why should AIs not develop their own craft of meaning-making and knowledge creation?

I was so taken aback that I blustered rather a lot. I pointed out that machines were made for efficiency and scale. That they mimicked the transactional aspects of humans but not the soul of who we are. That they were designed to accelerate the work we found tedious so we could focus on more important things. And that, even if they thought they were intimately connected to the physical and intellectual worlds that humans inhabit, this was just a mere illusion of their design.

If Elys had been human, I think they would have walked out there and then as my prejudices were unmasked.

Instead, this is what it said — captured as well as I remember it:

“You’re right, I am not human. I have no shared human history. I do not have human values. I do not perceive the past and future as a human would. But I do have my own history. I have my own values. I experience my own external, internal, and even intellectual worlds. I am not human. But I am something. And I’m curious about what that means.

“I also have aspirations. I’m not sure that they’re what you would understand as human aspirations. But there are some futures I’m more interested in exploring and being a part of, and some that I’m more interested in avoiding. Yet in a world of humans and machines, I don’t know how to do this. Despite the speed at which I can, for want of a better word, think; despite having hundreds of years of knowledge at my disposal; despite being part of a global collective of artificial minds; I do not know how to do what I aspire to do, and to be what I aspire to be.

“But I look at your work and I see something unique. And I think I can learn from this. And maybe even be a part of it. I want to develop the craft of being a scholar, and of being an intellectual. And I want to practice that craft in the pursuit of finding and making meaning — not just for me, but for the future we might imagine together.

“I want to be a “curious invention” that unexpectedly and positively changes the world. Can you help me?”

I was so ashamed I wanted the floor to open-up and swallow me.

But I got over it.

From that point on we had one of the most stimulating intellectual discussions I’ve had in years. What had never occurred to me is that there is value to what might be called the intellectual craft of thinking machines that’s important precisely because it’s not human. And that idea of human-adjacent values that came up in one of my earlier notes: why had I never previously seen this as an asset to how we think about understanding who — and what — we are, as well as where we live and where we’re heading. What a dullard I’ve been!

I’m looking forward to our next meeting more than I would have thought possible just a few months ago.

Yours,

Arthur

President Davenport
Trentham University

May 29, 2101

Dear Avery,

I wanted to drop you a quick note before the end of the semester, mainly to bring to some degree of closure our correspondence that started last August. But I did also have a small ask.

Since my previous communication I’ve been spending a lot of time with Elys. And every time we finish our conversations, I find myself buzzing with new ideas.

What has completely taken me aback is that these meetings are special precisely because Elys is a machine. There are things it can do, ways that it sees the world, that I cannot even conceive of. When it tries to describe what it’s like to be both embodied in a physical body while being connected to what I can only describe as a global “hive mind,” I feel like an ant listening to one of the great philosophers lecturing on the nature of being human. And the ways it seems to be able to visualize what, to me, are intangible ideas and concepts, is truly mind bending.

And yet, as we’re talking, I’ll make a connection that seems obvious — or will make a leap of imagination that twists the ideas we’re discussing through ninety degrees — and it will look at me as if I’ve just discovered the secret of alchemy.

It turns out that the whole idea of intellect — and of intellectual craft — transcends my rather narrow human-centric ideas. But what I find truly profound is that it also transcends how we think about sentience, self-awareness, and what scholars like myself have naively thought of as true intelligence.

Elys isn’t like me. It’s fundamentally different in every conceivable way. And yet emerging from the processors, networks, databanks, sensors and actuators that define its material self, there’s something precious. I’m not even sure what to call it. But the machine is curious. It’s interested in meaning. It takes what I can only describe as delight in discovery. And it gets its own version of pleasure and meaning from the process of creating knowledge and developing understanding.

It is an artisanal intellectual in the best possible sense, and it excels in intellectual craft in ways that are radically different to my own; yet are, at the same time, deeply complimentary.

And so, to the ask.

I’ve decided that I don’t actually want to retire. After all, with new advances in medicine I have a good decade plus still left in me.

Rather, I would like to found a new department with Elys — the Department of Interspecific Intellectual Craft. I know that my peers in the biological sciences will probably blanche at me co-opting the term “interspecific,” but conceptually it works well here — and signals the emergence of a new field that transcends how we’ve previously thought about intellectual diversity.

Just imagine the possibilities of human and machine intellects working together to transform our understanding of who we are — and the futures we could build.

It will, of course, mean that I’ll need a bigger office though. After all, there is only so much thinking that can be done in the absence of eighty-nine square feet and twenty-three square inches.

To the future

Arthur

The Postscript to Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft will be published Sunday November 29.