Just don't tell me that your Japanese knife when hand sharpened cannot be as good as something done by a robotic arm. Otherwise, I have some news - Japanese knife's edge sharpness(not durability) is no match for a surgical scalpel which is made by millions in quantities in fully automated fashion for less than $20. Or even a razor blade that costs $0.10. If scalpels were made from bluesteel (RH 62+), which is a horrible idea for a scalpel but just to make a point, then they would totally match a Japanese knife's durability too.
I could find countless examples where machines can have proper process control (SPC with control charts), high repeatability and can work well given all PMs are done and they're well maintained - totally out perform humans in many handcrafted jobs. Even things that we traditionally associate with artisan such as Guitars can be manufactured better and for cheaper by machines. "Only a master luthier can tell if the wood is good by knocking on it and feeling the resonance" - absolutely not. We can have ultra precision transducers and a whole bunch of DSP to figure that out and actually quantify that bullshit claim of artisanal value.
"But they have no human-like imperfections" - sure, just add random variation in the runtime code and imperfections can be automated.
What bothers me about this artisanal movement is not about craftsmanship, but about the marketing of it - just say it's handmade. Not because it is better but we want to preserve old ways of doing things. Don't say machines are not capable because I will show at your door and automate your job away.
And I seriously doubt that anyone will claim that a knife sharpened by a robot arm reproducing the exact movements of a human will produce an inferior product. The problem is that most automated sharpeners are some variant of a rotary grinding wheel run linearly along the blade and, unless you're sharpening a machete, there are all sorts of aspects of the blade geometry that are ignored by this process but can be accounted for by a skilled worker at a whetstone.
If you started hamming your scapal against a chopping board everyday, it would get blunt very quickly. Comparing two knives with completly different use cases makes no sense.
> "But they have no human-like imperfections"
Easier said than done. You would need some sorts of adversarial model that would quantify which random variations were pleasing and which were not. People. Often prefer inperfections, but that does not mean all or most inperfections are desired.
