Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor.
Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skills. Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)
Their name is well known today because we never stopped replacing people with machines. Every industry as been "optimized" over and over again since the Luddite times.
AI is the first threat to the Artisans of today (ie programmers). We are just the most recent in a long history of Luddites.
In every change of this nature, some move on embracing the change, others do not. Some will find other jobs, possibly new jobs, others won't. Carriage drivers became Chauffeurs, some grooms became mechanics.
So sure, I'm a Luddite - I don't want to see my skills become cheap - but I'm also pragmatic. The change is here. I'd rather adapt than die.
This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors).
> A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.
This is by choice. Ikea chooses to produce the cheapest furniture possible, using cheap, crappy materials. Other manufacturers still produce high quality furniture, which is much more expensive.
This may simply be due to a lack of demand, but regardless, I assure you that machine-produced furniture can’t touch human-produced at the apex of fine craftsmanship.
Have a look at this if you're interested:
And yet my working class grandparents didn't eat off the floor, they had great quality tables.
Mine is made of disguised cardboard.
This is a big part of the problem, there is zero trust that any potential improvement in cost or access will reach consumers. Companies don't even bother telling us it will.
We will just be slowly moved into accepting a degradation as the new normal.
You see them in the fact that every single home you'll visit to buy or rent has a fully equipped kitchen including a fridge, oven, likely a microwave, dishwasher and even a washing machine (which alone has a huge economic impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gvsz_vc7B0)
You see it in the fact that your home is safer from fires than it ever has been. That hot water is a cheap passive thing you don't even think about, rather than something you have to plan for. That a TV is a nice add-on to it all, rather than a huge deal to get.
Your grandparents' table was more expensive because they had less things, and the massive wood table that they saved months for was what was kept and stood the test of time for you to see today. Because let's not forget, this is also what furnishing 100 years ago can look like:
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/furnishing-for-h...
Because that requires manufacturers ready to give up stealth corner cutting as the cornerstone of their earnings in favour of the hard and long task of developing an image of reliability.
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Three cases I know enough about: cars, loudspeakers and computer monitors.
You can still buy some Mazda/Toyota models to really get more thoughtful engineering and QC for your money, but the Germans with a similar image of quality (Mercedes, BMW) have partially or fully shed the underlying quality.
Genelec remains the only (non-PA) loudspeaker manufacturer you can sincerely trust to take reliability, performance and transparency seriously. There was also Klein + Hummel (K+H) but since being bought by Sennheiser and integrated with Neumann, things have been going downhill... to the point where some curious people found CapXon caps (bottom of the barrel) in their KH80s.
Computer monitors? Since Panasonic (Eizo's supplier of yore) exited the panel market and left it as LG vs Samsung, it's been a complete disaster. Oh, you wanna pay 1~2k $currency for a fancy OLED monitor? Get used to appalling panel QC (banding, uniformity), VRR flicker and DSC crap.
The available choice for "pay more to get better" continues to dwindle...
Affordable quality is perhaps harder to find in the US than in some other countries. Because professional salaries are so high, the top 10% is responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That makes middle spenders a less lucrative market than in countries with more equal incomes.
Sure, the LACK coffee table is recycled honeycombed cardboard. That's on purpose, and totally fine. I hope people don't eat their dinner of those outside of student life though.
The truth is people mostly want not an improved version but cheaper one.
I can get a ultra cheap mdf Walmart table, a slightly less cheap Ikea table, maybe a midrange crate and barrel table, or a very expensive hard wood table from the local furniture store. Here in the Midwest we even have hand made Amish furniture available. So buy what you want!
False. Ikea is not representative of machine-made products, just their own brand of cheap and poorly-designed machine-made products which outsource assembly to the customer for novelty value. Machines are much more precise than humans and do tedious and complex work without cutting corners or getting tired. Buying handcrafted wooden furniture is a class and wealth flex, just like buying any other customized product. The superiority, if any, is entirely in the materials and bespoke design rather than the work - machines can do almost any of the work involved much better than humans.
In that there are a dozen shades of grey between "fully-automated, no humans assembly line" and "person using only hand tools maintained by hand". Tools _are_ machines, are technology, they've just been around so long we forgot that industrially forged steel needs an industrial steel forge.
Probably the best quality product you'll get is from a person who cares, sourcing materials they care about, working with it using their expertise and discernment, and using the most effective tools to get the job done - most, but not all of which will be power or machine tools.
But the point is that the human needs to direct the machines - sometimes that's just a thinking task, and sometimes it's a bunch more physically hands-on.
The reason is that knotted wood is dangerously unwieldy to machine without a lot of additional preparation. End grain work is just hard to automate. Lots of gluing into a shape that can’t be planed easily and prone to exploding if one is careless.
If you want to peek in to the weird long tail, the guys over at Sawmill Creek love to one-up each other in a never ending contest to be the king of traditional wood working.
I would argue that this is quite the opposite. We may have this perception due to how mass-manufactured product are pushed to insane cost-saving measure due to harsh competition. But machine are far, far more accurate than human, and have been for years. A commercial CNC has insane tolerance, a pick and place machine can accurately place parts that human can barely see, a miter saw can make straight and angle cut that would be very hard using hand tools, ...
And I would argue that your example is even wrong. Almost all Ikea furniture use MDF, which is very dimensionally stable, and once protected with a veneer, is decently resistant to moisture. A solid wood table will contract, warp, etc, depending on the grain of the wood, the humidity, ... And will require much more care and regular use of surface treatment. Of course, "real" wood has its own advantage, but it is a matter of requirement. And even that "hand-craft" table is not hand-crafted. Any woodworking shop today use machines. Circular saw of many types, power drill, planing machines, ... Which are faster and more accurate than hand tool (although hand tool still have their place).
> Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skills. Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)
And that's the thing. As you mentioned, very few go to a woodworker to buy a several k$ furniture. Most go to mass-produces-cheap-but-decent furniture companies like Ikea because they don't have a whole month of salary to put in furniture. Machine can absolutely help create far better quality product. But the way of the world has always been to favor cheap but good enough goods.
The big difference with LLMs and "IA" is that they are not a circular saw, they are not a CNC, etc. They are not a tool made for a specific purpose and optimize for it that can reach insane tolerances that no human could match (and especially not as fast). They are, as the post mentioned, "a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming". There is not really any equivalent in human history. This is a bullshit machine that is scarily good at producing valid output.
It's why I think it is so controversial and why the dust still hasn't settled and why the usefulness of LLM are still subject of such heated debate. A miter saw will cut your plank at a 45-degree angle very fast and very accurately. If you do a lot of that, the benefit is obvious. But if you had a “magical” woodworking tool that could cut at an angle, drill counter-sink, glue veneer, etc, all-in-one but the tolerances are completely random, how useful would that be ? How much time would it save you ? It would be really tough to say.
Customers don't really have a choice either way. Good luck finding quality clothing, services with decent customer support, etc.
Supply chains supporting quality work are destroyed when an industry gets commoditized, and whenever a company doing quality stuff emerges, it eventually gets bought out and the product gets watered down in order to milk its reputation with inferior product.
