The Craft and Code Binary

This chapter articulates the binary between craft and code that animates the volume as a whole. This binary was developed in the nineteenth century (although precedents can be identified much earlier), when it became an important element in debates about factory rationality, industrialization, and empire. It was subsequently adopted by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, becoming a key ingredient in the “science studies” that emerged in the 1960s–1990s. Debates about “learning” cross-fertilized with work in early artificial intelligence, such that notions of craft and code helped structure the development of algorithmic culture itself. Subsequent machine learning practices further complicated this relationship. Human/AI assemblages can no longer be comprehended in terms of a binary that may have been appropriate for earlier conceptions of human reasoning and mechanistic algorithms. Transcending that binary is critical not only for understanding the current algorithmic age but also for governing its evolution.