When jobs become hobbies

Blacksmithing has always been a loud, hot, strenuous, and dangerous activity.

Today, it’s also an expensive one.

Where bashing metal used to be a profession, people now pay for the privilege of doing it. $325 for an intro to blacksmithing class in Brooklyn, NY, for example. Or $925 for a three-day “adult summer camp.” 

Blacksmithing hasn’t really been a profession since about 1930, by which time, pretty much everything traditionally made by hand — nails, tools, samurai swords — was being made in factories. 

Horseshoes were the last holdout of commercial blacksmithing because they were so bespoke (every horse hoof is different). When horses were replaced by automobiles, blacksmiths lost that work, too.

At that point, a blacksmith’s best chance for continued employment was perhaps Colonial Williamsburg, where they plied their trade in front of an audience — demonstrating how metal products were made in the days before factories made everything.

It’s still a popular attraction, and not just for the blacksmiths. Colonial Williamsburg also has weaving, brickmaking, cordwaining (leather shoes), basketmaking, wheelwrighting (wagon wheels), coopering (barrels), and book binding — all the lost professions of the 19th century, performed for history-buff tourists.   

Being something of a history-buff tourist myself, I can’t help wondering: How long will it be before people want to watch programmers work, too? 

Because writing code — line by line — is quickly becoming as antiquated as binding your own books.

Soon, crafting functions, loops, and if-then statements will be a lost art, practiced only by a small group of artisanal programmers.

These last holdouts will find work demonstrating the ancient art of programming in a half-open space made to look like a dotcom-era startup — the main attraction of a historic district of Silicon Valley.

(What to call it, though? Dotcom San Francisco? Colonial Cupertino?) 

There will be classes, too: learn to make a webpage in HTML like it’s the 2000s. Program “Hello World” in C like it’s the 1980s. Multiply two numbers with punchcards like it’s the 1970s.

I suspect the classes will be a hit, because what else will we do when AI does everything for us?

Today is a good day to think about it. 

In the United States, we’ve long since celebrated Labor Day by not working. 

But if AI becomes everything that OpenAI and Anthropic keep telling us it will be, we might soon do it the other way around. Labor Day will be the day we do old jobs — the way people used to do them — for fun.

Blacksmithing, programming, accounting, and — for the truly adventurous — newsletter writing.

It’ll be great. Just look at the photo above! Jobs and Woz were having a great time in a garage in the 1970s, working to build the kinds of machines futurists had long predicted would make work increasingly unnecessary.

In 1930 — just as the last blacksmiths were being put out of work — Julian Huxley said that technological progress would inevitably usher in the two-day workweek. Thereafter, he predicted, our greatest problem would be what to do with the additional three days of free time. 

He was early with that. What we actually found to do for the rest of the week was more and different ways to work. Most full-time jobs still take up about 40 hours of our time, Monday to Friday.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Huxley was wrong, though. It might just mean that we are really good at inventing new kinds of work to do.

But can we invent new forms of work faster than AI can learn to do them? If not, we’ll soon have to invent new forms of leisure — which will probably include old forms of work.

In the meantime, though, Labor Day remains a day of not working.

Enjoy the time off.

— Byron Gilliam

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