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Comment by Wistar | Hacker News Reader

Last night I watched a very good documentary called "Takumi" which was commissioned by Lexus. The version I watched was a 53 minute long cut-down of the original 60,000 hour long piece—claimed to be the longest documentary ever produced—that intimately explores the working lives of four Japanese master craftspeople who spend 60,000 hours to achieve the master artisan status known as "Takumi."

It was made to "emphasize that, in a world where technology and AI can replicate or better anything man can do, human craftsmanship still has a purpose and could become more prized than ever."

The short version I watched streams on Amazon Prime. The full version, "Takumi: a 60,000 hour story of the survival of human craft" is available online hosted with a special video player (with a kind-of weird UI) that allows the user to quickly move about the 60,000 hour (6.8 year) timeline:

https://takumi-craft.com/us/en

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The documentary is not actually 60000 hours long. There is well under an hour of footage for the carpenter so the whole thing is maybe a few hours and it loops those shots repeatedly. It is presented as if it is that long to emphasize the thesis of the documentary. It is kind of ironic that in a film which makes a big deal of the notion that there are no short cuts to mastery they took such a short cut in producing the supposedly very long documentary. I was disappointed to discover this because I was actually looking forward to at least a few hundred hours of nice footage of the carpenter working. They could easily have done that.

Of course with these traditional long apprenticeships you spent your first year filing and making the tea :-)

AT my first place we did have some master carpenters who made some of the hydrodynamic models - the work they did was breathtakingly fabulous works of art in their own right

Yes, it's looped but the presentation is 60k hours (although I haven't watched it all to make sure).

As a young kid, I was plagued by complicated questions, one of which was "Are humans special? (And if not, is all futile?)".

At that time my argument was to point of the ways in which humans are better than machines. But I have to say that it is not even necessary to go down that route. If there is some life form that is smarter than humans, or some machine, then it does not detract from the basic departure point that some values or value propositions are absolute. The ability to discover the Pythagorean theorem is absolute in that way. You either discover it, or you don't (or you discover only the special cases). It doesn't matter how many other entities discover the Pythagorean theorem.

Now I don't mean absolute in the sense of the ubermensch or some dumb crap like that, but I do mean that values are values even in isolation. I think the tinkerer's spirit is very much like that. If you are devoted to your pursuit, then it doesn't mean you have to best some notion of the best. It's like that with an appreciation for life too. If you see a beautiful landscape, then that moment in itself is valuable and irreplaceable, whether there are many such or few such—each is valuable in isolation.

I don't the the point of being human was ever to prove ourselves the smartest.

One of the difficult things to cope with is our need for meaning. It's tempting to think that it's exogenous - if we look hard enough we'll find it "out there" somewhere. But now that we've looked under every rock and around every star we're starting to have to deal with the fact that it exists only inside our heads, and is socially constructed. But that doesn't mean it's not important. In some ways it lets us take ownership of the need to make meaning ourselves - to craft it.

To the universe, we're not special. To ourselves, we can be.

What a beautiful response.

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