When the Machines Don't Need Us Anymore — And Why That's Good News for Craftsmen
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Opinion · Craftsmanship · Technology
By Robert Lance Robaldo · Gramp's Lazer Shack LLC · May 2026
Let me say something that might surprise you coming from a guy who runs a custom woodworking and laser engraving shop: I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence.
I use it sometimes. It helps me write, it helps me think through problems, and occasionally it helps me run this business a little smarter. But it does not run the laser. It does not pick the wood. It does not feel the difference between a piece of slate that's going to engrave clean and one that's going to give me trouble. It does not look at a memorial order for someone's dog and understand what that means to the family waiting on the other end.
I do those things. My hands do those things.
And the more I think about where AI is headed — and I think about it a lot — the more convinced I am that people who make real things, with real skill, for real reasons, are going to be just fine. Better than fine, actually.
But let me back up and tell you the honest version of the story first.
Something Is Actually Different This Time
Every generation gets told that the machines are coming for the jobs. The loom operators heard it. The factory workers heard it. The typewriter pool heard it. And every single time, history proved the doomsayers wrong — new industries appeared, new work emerged, and people adapted.
So why should now be any different?
Here's the part that keeps serious economists up at night: every prior wave of automation replaced muscles. Steam engines, assembly lines, hydraulic equipment — all of it was designed to spare human bodies from heavy, repetitive labor. What it never touched was the thing we privately believed made us irreplaceable: the ability to think, reason, create, communicate, and judge.
AI is different because it's coming for that — the cognitive work. The spreadsheets, the legal briefs, the code, the customer service scripts, the first drafts. Not all of it. Not perfectly. But the trajectory is real, and the speed is faster than anything we've navigated before.
The honest answer is: nobody knows exactly how this plays out. There are three realistic roads forward.
Three Roads Forward
The Optimistic View says we've been here before. New technologies always destroy old work and create new work we couldn't have imagined. Maybe AI generates so much abundance that entirely new industries and human roles emerge. History supports this. The problem is that previous transitions played out over generations. This one might not give us that kind of time.
The Middle Path — and where most honest economists quietly land — is that the middle skill tier gets hollowed out hard. The accountants, the coders, the paralegals, the analysts. Ironically, low-skill physical labor survives longer than expected, because robotics is still a lot harder than software. The plumber outlasts the paralegal. Productivity gains flow to whoever owns the AI systems, which means wealth concentrates at a rate that makes today's inequality look modest.
The Terminal Scenario is the one nobody wants to say out loud: if genuine artificial general intelligence arrives and robotics catches up to it, nearly all economically productive tasks become executable more cheaply by machines. Human labor approaches zero market value in the traditional sense. GDP could theoretically be enormous — but owned by almost nobody.
"Markets don't guarantee that productivity gains get distributed. They guarantee they get captured — by whoever owns the productive asset."
The Problem Nobody Has Solved
Here's the question at the center of all of this:
When humans aren't needed to produce things, how do humans afford to buy things?
Henry Ford understood a version of this problem when he paid his workers enough to buy his own cars. Wages and consumption exist in a loop — break the loop and the whole thing falls apart. AI breaks the loop if left unmanaged.
The policy toolkit people reach for — Universal Basic Income, robot taxation, massive public employment, wealth redistribution — are all real debates happening right now. Whether democratic institutions survive long enough and stay functional enough to make those calls is the actual question.
Why This Is Good News for People Who Make Things
Here's where I get to the part that matters to me — and probably to you, if you found your way to a laser engraving shop's blog.
As AI scales and algorithmic efficiency becomes the default for everything, something interesting happens to handmade things. They become rare. And rarity creates value. It always has.
Right now, you can walk into any big box store and buy a mass-produced gift with someone's name slapped on it by a machine in a warehouse. That product is cheap because it's abundant. Nobody thinks about it. Nobody remembers where it came from.
But a piece of slate that took skill to engrave — where someone actually thought about the layout, tested the settings, ran their hands over the finished surface before boxing it up — that's a different thing entirely. You can feel it. The person who receives it knows it.
That's not going away. In fact, the more the world gets automated, the more valuable that kind of thing becomes. You can't automate authenticity.
What We Actually Do With AI at Gramp's
I want to be straight with you about this, because I think honesty matters.
We use AI sometimes. It helps with writing — like this article, which I worked through with an AI tool and then shaped into something that actually sounds like me. It helps me think through business problems faster. Occasionally it helps with design ideation.
What AI does not do is run the laser. It does not choose the material. It does not make the call on whether a design is going to look right on a particular piece of wood. It does not pack the order. It does not talk to the customer who just lost their pet and needs a memorial piece that actually honors that animal.
The craft is mine. The judgment is mine. The relationship with you is mine.
AI is a tool in the shop — like a good set of calipers or a reliable alignment jig. It helps me do my job better. It is not my job.
The Bottom Line
The economic end result of AI depends entirely on choices — political, social, and personal — not on what the technology can do. The technology will produce abundance. The question is who it belongs to and whether it gets shared.
But here's what I know from this side of the workbench: in a world where everything gets faster, cheaper, and more automated, the thing that holds its value is the thing that couldn't be made any other way.
A piece made by a craftsman who gives a damn, shipped with care to someone who needed it — that carries something no algorithm can replicate.
That's what we do here. That's not changing.
Robert Lance Robaldo is the founder of Gramp's Lazer Shack LLC, a custom laser engraving and personalized products company based in Land O' Lakes, Florida. Every product that leaves this shop has been touched, tested, and thought about by a real person. That's not a marketing line. That's just how it works. www.LazerShack.com