Robots never smile

Apart from domestic tasks, a walk and a little writing, I didn't do much else today. No sermon to prepare, as Margie one of the Chaplaincy's trainee Readers is preaching. I wasn't inclined to go far as I was expecting a visitor. Following a brief reconnaissance inspection yesterday, David, one of the Mojácar congregation members, a retired engineer, came around to remount the fallen wall radiator. 

The original brackets, being ancient and not really that fit for purpose were unavailable in the local ferreteria, but he'd purchased a couple of heavy duty masonry screws with ends that could be tightened with a spanner, plus a small length of stainless steel tubing and some washers. The screws were a perfect fit for the existing holes, but he needed the tube to fashion a couple of spacers of the right length to position the radiator away from the wall, to ensure air-flow. He measured, and then cut the tube into equal lengths using his hacksaw, without benefit of a tape measure. His experienced eye and metalwork skill made light of the job. 

All I had to do was to hold steady one end of the three inch tube with a pair a pliers while he held the other end and cut with the saw. An engineering apprentice in his teens, he'd worked forty nine years before retirement in the same West Bromwich small business, specialising in making different kinds of springs to order for the motor industry. It was wonderful to watch him wield a hacksaw with such steadiness and accuracy at close quarters. The finished wall mountings fitted perfectly. At the end, David smiled with a craftsman's sense of pleasure at job he was pleased with, which he knew his old apprentice master would approve

Much is being written about industrial systems involving robots and artificial intelligence replacing human labour entirely in coming decades, as has been happening throughout my lifetime. There are many difficult and dangerous taks which new technologies and devides are welcome to, but robots never smile. Only a human being making something with ingenuity, skill and natural effort, has that experience of true joy in creativity. Even if machines can, maybe will continue to be devised to take on the majority of industrial work, there will always be a place for people to learn engineering skills, to use basic tools and make things from scratch, just for pleasure.