A circular saw really is an absolutely marvelous tool. Especially a cordless one! You simply place it (6,000 revolutions per minute at no load!) on a wooden beam, pull the trigger and in an instant you have a straight, clean cut. A cordless drill or screwdriver is every bit as amazing!

Just imagine if our ancestors had had tools like these ... No more hammering three-inch square nails into floorboards or cursing, generations later, as you struggle to pull them out. Instead, you'd simply grab a Torx T25 bit and, with a satisfying whir, a hot screw lovingly driven into the board by your great-great-grandfather would come rising out. Alongside the fanciful thought experiment "What if Lembitu had had a machine gun?" we might just as well, or perhaps even more aptly, ask: "What if the builders of St. Olaf's Church tower had used cordless drills?"

A cordless drill, circular saw or any other power tool primarily increases productivity: the job gets done faster than with hand tools, which require care, experience and manual skill on the one hand and constant maintenance on the other.

Picture a perfectly ordinary wooden house built a century ago: fastening all the boards to its walls required thousands of nails and, above all, skill. There was no time to keep tapping away at a single nail indefinitely. It had to be driven home with no more than a couple of precise, powerful blows. Then on to the next one. And the next.

People may have had more time back then than we do today (there were no unanswered emails or online meetings after all), but time was still money and the house had to be finished by the deadline. Master hammerers were probably just as sought-after as plasterers, painters and stove builders.

A carpenter's tools — augers, chisels, planes, saws, axes and the like — had to be impeccably sharp. Only then could cuts be clean, precise and require minimal effort. The same applied to all tools. My late grandfather had several scythes, each suited to a different type of vegetation. As he mowed, every so often you would hear that distinctive "shhk-shhk-shhk" as he honed the blade again and again with astonishing speed and skill. The work took time, but it was efficient and produced good results. Of course, nothing as consistently immaculate as a lawn kept in a perpetual crew cut by a robotic mower on constant patrol.

Machines and standards

Power tools make it possible for even amateurs to manage construction work reasonably well. Of course, compared with a skilled tradesman, they spend considerably more time fumbling around, figuring things out, experimenting and making incorrect cuts. Meanwhile, a true professional starts by switching on a teal Makita jobsite radio (tuned to Star FM) and gets down to work without making a fuss. And let's face it: ultimately, the proof is in the workmanship. A professional builder will generally produce better results than an amateur, even if they use exactly the same tools.

Changes in technology also transform construction methods and standards. In the age of our ancestors' craftsmanship, joinery techniques reigned supreme, with an astonishing variety of joints and applications. Even today, you can come across strangely therapeutic videos on social media showing how several pieces of wood are joined into a single structure through skillful sawing and chiseling, in ways that seem incomprehensible at first glance.

Traditional wood joints can also be made using modern specialized machinery, but nowadays structural elements are predominantly connected using metal brackets and plates, joist hangers and, of course, screws (cordless drill!). It's simply faster and more efficient. Admittedly, a carefully finished traditional wood joint is undoubtedly more aesthetically pleasing, but structures held together with screws are generally covered with standard-sized construction panels anyway.

Machines impose standardization. Even the thickest, most gnarled tree trunk can be effortlessly turned into, say, 50-by-150-millimeter lumber, cut to lengths of 3,600, 4,200 or 4,800 millimeters, at an electrically powered sawmill. The wall framing built from this lumber accommodates precisely the right amount of mineral wool insulation (610 by 1,220 by 50 millimeters).

Once you understand the standards and how they fit together, a building goes up almost effortlessly, like a construction kit. One side effect, of course, is that buildings and rooms constructed this way tend to look alike, with the same proportions — all dictated by the standards.

Progress and the alternatives

In 1903, Matthias Johann Eisen (1857–1934) published his famous short story "Tallinn in the Year 2000." In it, the first-person narrator accidentally travels a century into the future through the Baltic Station. A "kind gentleman" he happens to meet introduces him to this new world. It is a fascinating text that offers a glimpse into what modernity meant at the beginning of the 20th century.

The main themes are speed and reduced effort: nobody travels by horse-drawn carriage anymore, self-propelled vehicles have taken over, an elevator takes people up to Toompea, newspapers are published three times a day and an express train can get you to Pärnu in an hour. Not to mention the airship.

The age of bicycles is over: "Who would want to tire their legs anymore when self-propelled vehicles take all the effort out of traveling? Bicycles are now used only by the very poor, such as servant girls, manual laborers and so on." Speed and efficiency were the goals humanity pursued back then and, broadly speaking, remain so today. In every sphere of life, not just construction.

There have always been those who branch off from the mainstream or even head in the opposite direction. The widespread introduction of machinery during the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the Luddite movement in the early 19th century. Armed with blacksmiths' hammers, desperate former skilled workers who had lost their jobs smashed equipment in factories and workshops because the machines' greater productivity had deprived them of their income, social standing and way of life. The need for skilled craftsmanship declined dramatically and almost anyone could operate a loom. Rapid technological changes came as a shock to traditional weaving communities.

As an alternative to modern machinery, it is possible to preserve and deliberately learn old and disappearing crafts and techniques. Traditional craft technologies offer a wealth of opportunities, from restoring log buildings to practicing craftsmanship with old tools and materials.

There are undoubtedly fields — musical instrument making, for example — where most of the work is still done using good old-fashioned craftsmanship and extremely sharp hand tools. Yet even there, modern equipment, materials and tools have been incorporated as a compromise. The more specialized and exclusive an object and its production methods, the higher its price. The almost magical word "handmade" is added to product descriptions as a mark of quality.

We work with machines!

Beyond construction, machines have also revolutionized intellectual work. Take writing, for example. Not so long ago, producing a properly typed manuscript required considerable technical skill and patience. A mistyped letter had to be erased or typed over, while more extensive corrections meant retyping an entire page.

If an author decided to move a paragraph elsewhere, out came the scissors and glue. The text was literally cut into pieces and the words were pasted onto paper in a new order. The command "cut and paste" originally referred to precisely this kind of manual work. Producing multiple copies simultaneously meant struggling with carbon paper. Editorial offices and publishing houses employed people whose job was to retype, correct and prepare manuscripts for printing. And that's before even getting to typesetting.

Then came word processors — electronic machines. In the 1970s, specialized word-processing systems allowed specially trained operators to make corrections to written text.

With the spread of personal computers in the 1980s, these same capabilities became available to an increasingly broad range of users. The first version of Microsoft Word appeared in 1983 and by the middle of the decade, Macintosh computers, laser printers and desktop publishing software were beginning to bring professional print production capabilities to ordinary users' desks.

During the 1990s, Word became an increasingly common tool and with it capabilities that had previously required dedicated specialists began to be taken for granted. In essence, the circular saw of text production had arrived: skilled professionals still had the advantage, but amateurs could manage too.

Naturally, machines and software established new standards here as well. Today, a document with consistent formatting (12-point Times New Roman, 1.5 line spacing), proper page layout, automatic page numbering and a table of contents hardly seems like a remarkable achievement. Footnotes automatically appear in the right places, the table of contents updates when headings are changed and moving a paragraph from the beginning of a manuscript to the end takes just a moment.

Just a few decades ago, such a change might have meant retyping and renumbering numerous pages. Today, by contrast, it would be rather embarrassing to submit a document with page numbers manually typed in, text formatted using endless strings of spaces or a table of contents hopelessly scrambled after the latest revision.

Rage against the machine

"Drywall house" is probably the most common derogatory term for a modern building. At the same time, it is not universally applicable, referring instead to a particular process and its outcome — namely, hastily executed real estate development.

The negative judgment is not necessarily directed at the tools or materials themselves, but rather at a poor, "cheap" result. Standard-sized lumber, construction panels, metal brackets, screws and expanding foam are, after all, simply materials, not "construction slop," just as a cordless circular saw is merely a cutting tool, not a "stupid machine." The result produced with these materials and tools is still a building, not "garbage" or something that prompts the remark, "You can tell it was made with a cordless drill."

Poor artificial intelligence! It had barely arrived before it was subjected to a torrent of abuse: AI slop, vomit, empty verbiage, trash, drivel, garbage, gremlins, brain rot and brain worms. These are just a few of the expressions used to describe what the technology does and the results it produces.

In academic circles, the term "stochastic parrot" has become well known. On the internet, however, the much more colloquial "clanker," a rattling heap of metal, has gained currency, with roots tracing back to the battle droids of "Star Wars." Science fiction offers other derogatory terms as well. In the television series "Battlestar Galactica," artificial beings are called "toasters," reducing a sophisticated artificial entity to a primitive kitchen appliance. The world of "Blade Runner," meanwhile, gave us "skin-job," a derogatory term for human-looking artificial beings.

Disparaging AI and treating it with condescension is becoming something of a mark of good taste, even in academic and cultural circles. Using chatbots developed by major corporations for research is considered improper, while condemning their environmental footprint and criticizing their energy consumption is seen as the morally correct position.

At the Estonian Annual Conference of the Humanities this spring, a new term, "free-range presentation," was enthusiastically introduced to describe a presentation created without AI as something authentic and genuine (the happy, individualistic free-range chicken versus the miserable, enslaved masses of a factory farm). This despite the fact that even a "homemade" presentation all too often amounts to little more than a digital overhead transparency called PowerPoint.

In September 2025, the British newspaper The Guardian pondered whether "clanker" had already become a discriminatory slur against robots. Such expressions are seen as potentially normalizing the kind of derogatory language used against groups of people. Insulting a machine is itself a peculiar way of attributing human qualities to it. There are no outright calls yet to pick up the Luddites' blacksmiths' hammers again, but that moment may not be far off. One thing is certain: AI is generating plenty of anxiety about the end of the world.

Assigning a bot

Recently, editors were urged to ask authors directly "whether they might have used the help of a digital gremlin (kratt in Estonian — ed.) when writing." What remained unclear, however, was what to do if the answer was yes — automatically reject the text, declare it a non-text, "slop"? More broadly, though, determining what constitutes AI assistance, or the work of a "gremlin," may prove rather complicated.

Indeed, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the encroachment of machines (or gremlins) in academia, too. Take reference management software (such as Zotero, EndNote and Mendeley), which has gradually taken over one of the essential skills of a humanities scholar: compiling bibliographies and formatting citations.

Just a few decades ago, any self-respecting historian, for example, had to meticulously record their sources and literature and format every last citation by hand. Completing a manuscript involved endless fiddling with authors' names, publication years, volume numbers, page numbers and punctuation marks.

Today, however, an increasing number of scholars shamelessly let a digital gremlin do this work for them. A few mouse clicks are all it takes for the software to compile a bibliography, format citations correctly and, if necessary, convert the entire referencing system from one style to another. What kind of humanities scholar cannot even manage their own references? How is a young researcher supposed to acquire the fundamental skills of academic work if a machine puts all the commas, periods and italics in the right places for them?

Most astonishing of all, universities not only turn a blind eye to this practice but even organize training sessions teaching students to entrust the compilation of their bibliographies to computer programs. Who still formats references by hand these days!? And so we are raising a generation of scholars who know how to click a button but may no longer know where a comma belongs in a citation or why an en dash should be used.

Shouldn't academic papers prepared with the help of reference management software also carry a warning: "Machine assistance was used in preparing the references for this article"? Better still, of course, would be to require genuine humanities scholars to continue writing their citations by hand.

At least then we could be certain that we were dealing with authentic human intellectual work rather than the output of some digital gremlin. This illustrates how society takes the automation of certain forms of intellectual work for granted while treating the automation of others as almost a moral transgression.

A machine as a tool

The recent anxiety over the use of AI in writing can easily be alleviated if we remember one fundamental point: we are not, after all, dealing with a supernatural being summoned through a pact with the devil. As Alexander Stubb recently remarked at the opening of the academic year at the College of Europe in Bruges: "Use AI as an instrument, but do not allow it to replace your capacity to think."

A tool does not determine the quality or cultural value of the work it produces. Technology has changed, and will continue to change, the ways we work, without relieving people of the need to make decisions, possess skills or take responsibility for the results.

AI is a machine, an extraordinarily powerful circular saw that helps us work more efficiently and quickly. That includes producing texts. A screw can be driven incorrectly and a saw blade can make a crooked cut. The result is shoddy work that nobody will pay for and that needs to be fixed. In inexperienced hands, AI also produces empty, meaningless text, but responsibility for it still lies with the amateur author — the human being.

As countless presentation slides demonstrate, humanities scholars tend to be, at best, technologically timid, if not downright out of touch with technology. It is unrealistic to expect a humanities scholar whose technical repertoire otherwise extends little beyond a lackluster PowerPoint presentation to suddenly master AI overnight. Every tool takes practice. The arrival of this new machine will undoubtedly bring new standards to creative work, including writing, but these need not necessarily be feared or demonized. A witch hunt targeting AI users and texts produced with its assistance would be equally absurd, even if understandable from a human perspective.

And there will always be the option of returning to the world of well-sharpened hand chisels — sending Sirp neatly handwritten, calligraphic fair copies in an envelope. How to get them to the post office or a parcel locker and, if accepted, into print can be left to the specialists.

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