I love the teamwork and mutual understanding. I'd have a hard time making a circular object like that out of clay, yet these guys collaborate to make this massive thing with very little drama (or explicit communication). As a software person I love me a bit of metal bashing :-)
It's funny, things like this remind me how much we overrate certain kinds of expertise and underrate others.
Those smiths will probably make a fraction of what the average software developer will and hopefully they won't die an early death due to some kind of industrial accident. This video might literally be the only mark that one of them leaves on history.
The intelligence and skill it takes to do it though is astounding. These guys might not be even able to read (this is not an assumption, just a possibility), but they can do this as well as anyone on the planet. It's a real monument to human ingenuity.
Meanwhile, his well-educated counterpart in the West can't stop getting job offers because they've figured out how to twiddle some bits. If they're lucky, they might even be able to make something worth hundreds of thousands, or millions, or even billions, and then people will assume that they know what they are doing and that their opinions matter.
But at the end of the day...there's very little difference between them. We're just really smart creatures.
Yeah. They're doing it because it's cheaper for them to do it that way, not because they're not smart enough to do it another way. There's a remarkable amount of ingenuity and skill going on there.
China reportedly has literacy rate of 96.4%. As a successful software dev of 20+ years, I don't expect to leave any mark on history. What I create is obsolete and hopefully replaced in matter of years.
There's a significant difference in the type of workmanship involved, though. David Pye called the traditional way the "workmanship of risk" and the modern way the "workmanship of certainty"
Although software engineers do have a lot of discretion about how they do their job, it's not a repeated process of judgement and dexterity in the way traditional crafts were.
I was thoroughly impressed by the precise manipulation with the forklifts, particularly the rotation while they were punching the hole in the center. One guy pushes it at an offset angle, which rotates it, then the other repositions it to center. It's almost like a dance.
Having driven a couple of forklifts and excavators some years ago, yes, this takes quite a load of skill - especially that they basically did not communicate at all.
It would be awesome to know how long their apprenticeship period was—or is there even one? That nonverbal communication is impressive, and the picture at the end gives me the impression that they're proud as a team of their work.
> with very little drama (or explicit communication)
There's a guy directing them - he's just off frame to the right, and was only visible once that I could tell. But he's directing their movements, both with hand motions and (presumably) orally.
