Machines of Loving Grace

There's a poem I keep returning to. Richard Brautigan wrote it in 1967, a small, strange, hopeful thing about a world where humans and machines live together in harmony. It reads like a dream. But that's not quite right. Brautigan was writing from inside genuine anxiety, not from the outside of it. He chose optimism knowing it might be wrong, and that distinction matters enormously. It's the difference between hope and naivety.

It's no coincidence that Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, named his 2024 essay 'Machines of Loving Grace', his argument that AI could be a civilisational force for human flourishing rather than just efficiency carries the same quality. A dare, not a guarantee. Chosen in full view of the risks.

The creative industry conversation has mostly missed this, collapsing a genuinely unsettling question into a binary: threat or tool, doomer or optimist. But the more interesting question sits somewhere else entirely. Because AI doesn't threaten craft. It exposes the absence of it. There has always been work that justified itself as a laborious exercise in production rather than belief. Process over purpose. When that scaffolding falls away, what remains is either intention or nothing. For those of us who believe in the value of what we make, that's clarifying rather than threatening.

You can see this logic playing out in unexpected places. Erthos uses AI not to optimise consumption but to redesign its building blocks entirely, developing bespoke biomaterials as sustainable alternatives to plastics. The machine, in service of values, not instead of them. That's what William Morris meant when he argued that everything made should serve a purpose and stir the senses, that beauty and utility are not competing forces but collaborating ones. We call this Beautility.

When the mechanical disappears, craft stops being a process and becomes a position. You either stand for something, or you don't.

Strange times, but familiar logic.

Brautigan's dare still stands. The question isn't whether to engage. It's whether you're engaging with something worth believing in.

What are you going to make with it?

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ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

by Richard Brautigan, (Originally published by The Communication Company in 1967)

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.