NEW ISSUE: "The hand axe is the platonic ideal of form following function."

Ed's Note

One of my most treasured possessions is a prehistoric hand axe. My childhood friend Anthony the Younger gifted me the axe for my 21st birthday. (He had a cousin called Anthony the Elder, but he belongs in a different column.) My Anthony — the younger — delighted in plaguing me with his terribly argumentative nature and was positively irritating for much of our mutually semi-misspent youth. Years later he told me that it was because he actually liked me and therefore bothered to argue. (So much for “he’s not that into you”.) Not only did he like me; he understood me. Hence the perfect gift, for embodied in this ancient hand axe is one of my abiding fascinations — design at its elemental best. 

To the untrained eye it looks like an unassuming rock, but pick it up and cradle it in your hand and the lumpen rock is a marvel of inventive imagination. The hand axe is the platonic ideal of form following function. It fits in my hand as though it was made for me. My thumb and fingers wrap intuitively around its bulbous side, each digit resting in its own individually carved niche, enabling a comfortable grip and the necessary purchase so the still-sharp end can do its business aeons later. It’s like a magic trick from the depths of human consciousness, way, way back in time. An object so skilfully designed you need only clasp it in your hand and its function is immediately apparent. It’s instantly useful. 

Have you ever attempted to make a stone hand axe? In first-year archaeology they take you up to the top of Melville Koppies — an ancient site for such endeavours — and let you loose with the rocks. It’s a near impossibility for a modern human to execute the task.  This design required some pretty sophisticated techniques to execute so seamlessly. You started acquiring the skill set in early childhood. They can tell that from the way the excavation sites work — discarded child-size efforts litter the edge of the working space. I am as close to making a hand axe as I am to making an iPhone. And yet both these objects and their inherent design are vibrating at a frequency that resonates with their inherent humanity across time and space. The phone is just as intuitively useful cradled in my hand. 

Just at this moment in the fascinating history of our species, we are contending with the most basic questions about design. Is our AI large-language model still recognisably human and, more importantly, still in service to humanity? Or have we designed something else — something even its inventors are not sure of — as it lies, hallucinates, and obfuscates its reasoning (which, they admit, they cannot be sure of). Have we overleapt the bounds of humanity and designed something that will run away from us into a different unpredictable future? It is of us, but it may be vibrating at its own frequency.

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