The blacksmithing analogy

6 July 2026

Edited: 16 September 2026

Note: this one skirts away from IP and into the now-ubiquitous AI debate. But I'm a fan of useful analogies and this one is, I think, very illustrative of where we're headed.

Consider the village blacksmith. Since the end of the bronze age, most iron objects were made locally by a skilled worker (the blacksmith) who either resided in a village or town, or travelled from place to place performing work. Most blacksmiths were local and fairly unspecialised, although specialist smiths have always existed. The average blacksmith made everything from iron nails, horse shoes and farm implements, to decorative ironwork and cooking utensils. The local and undifferentiated nature of the trade meant that there were a lot of village blacksmiths - part of the reason why 'Smith' and its variations (e.g. Schmidt) are still amongst the most common surnames in the world. For the most part, smiths formed a self-regulating profession driven by master-apprentice training systems and, later, by guilds which regulated the work, advancement and pay of their members.

However, this dynamic began to change as the world (and especially Europe) entered the modern era. Even during the late middle ages, increased economic activity and improvements to trade meant that more work was carried out by specialist smiths operating out of centres of excellence, usually specific cities or regions. Some become famous for the quality of their goods (e.g. armour from Milan or swords from Solingen), which of course ended up attracting even more specialists to those regions to take advantage of the rich networks of technical, social and economic connections there. Small smithies in such places often evolved into fairly large operations, where the master smith managed a number of workers and apprentices who carried out more or less standardised production steps.

The industrial revolution took these trends and supercharged them by introducing fully standardised parts and mechanical automation. The goods themselves were eventually redesigned around the logic of the factory line, becoming composed of mass-produced parts, and engineered to be assembled by unskilled or semi-skilled labour. The result was an explosion of metal goods, to the extent that even a relatively poor household today probably has a number of pots, pans, knives, forks, spoons, scissors, razors, and other iron and steel goods that would have been the preserve of the upper-middle and wealthy classes in the pre-modern period. That these goods are often of indifferent quality, unadorned and one-size-fits-all doesn't matter all that much in light of just how cheap and abundant they are. So, where our ancestors would have been very insistent that their one kitchen knife should have a perfect blade profile, fit their hands well and look the way that wanted it to, today we content ourselves with half-a-dozen knives with vaguely uncomfortable black plastic handles. And, overall, we are happier for it.

The effect on the village blacksmith was just as profound, as the production of goods in factories has few places for a skilled generalist. Instead, the labour market for metal workers bifurcated over time. Some, the masters already overseeing large smithies perhaps, more or less seamlessly became factory bosses and engineers. Some, likely those who would have been apprentices or stayed on as journeymen, found themselves becoming instead tenders of the machines - mechanics and technicians - or else skilled operators performing the same tasks over and over on lathes, mills, rollers and stamping presses. And some lingered on in the gaps where factory-made goods had not yet penetrated, or where finished items needed to be hand-fitted. 

Today, nearly all mass-produced metal goods are made by two classes of people: low-skilled workers who feed raw materials into industrial machines, and highly-skilled specialists who design the machines themselves and the things that they create, with a small substratum of specialised labourers and technicians to keep the lines running. For specialist items or industrial products with limited production runs, there are a relatively small number of trained machine tool operators, machinists and welders with varying specialities and abilities, who may be seen as the ultimate inheritors of the craft. But there are almost no jobs within the system for skilled generalists. Even the remaining 'blacksmiths' are now nearly all specialists themselves: bladesmiths and gunsmiths who make a small selection hand-crafted, high-end goods (such as damascus-pattern knives and shotguns), farriers, artisanal ironworkers, and a few sculptural artists. From the perspective of blacksmiths as both a specific discipline of manufacture, and as a broad social class, this was a slow-motion apocalypse. A few remain to this day, still training under master-apprentice relationships, producing luxury goods and commanding high prices for their work. Nearly all of the rest have disappeared, leaving anvils scattered around the country as inadvertent monuments to a once-common profession.

The data on this is really remarkable. For instance, research on blacksmithing in the USA found something like 10 000 shops in 1850 (well into the industrial revolution), most of which employed 1-2 people. This implies around 21 000 full-time blacksmiths in a country of around 23 million people - one per thousand or so. Today, there are perhaps a thousand full-time blacksmiths in the USA, one per 350 000. The comparison is obviously not an apples-to-apples, but it illustrates the stark decline in the amount of human labour that goes into making iron and steel goods. It also mirrors the shift in how that human labour was applied, as the work itself became folded into that of engineers, industrial designers and factory workers.

This analogy is, I think, a good one for fields where scattered, skilled, generalist labour is subject to centralisation and automation. The accounting and legal profession are good examples in the age of computers, search engines, and now AI. The key lessons from the analogy are that automation tends to reshape the nature of the finished product to better suit its own principles and techniques, providing relative abundance to consumers at the cost of a significant loss in customisation and individualisation. And, for the workers themselves, the interaction, and competition, with the sorts of economies of scale that automation can provide can drive a stark process of change that can see the old models of workplace organisation fail almost entirely. Those at the top end of the field may continue to survive, even thrive, by providing a bespoke, high-value product. Those at the bottom may end up resigning themselves to becoming glorified data-entry technicians and sales clerks. Those in the middle may be able to move to a related field, become one sort of specialist or another, or else disappear entirely. And nearly everyone will end up specialising in the process. 

We are now in the latter days of the small-town lawyer and the do-everything small legal practice, having already gone through the equivalent of the rise of the large master-owned smithies in the form of big law. What comes next for legal practitioners will be hard, as we all discover whether we are to become the equivalents of factory owners, engineers, mechanics, technicians, highly-skilled artisans, or factory labourers. 

Good luck to us all. 

PS: something that came up in subsequent conversations is that, where you to go back in time and tell blacksmiths what technologies will be available, they might still struggle to conceptualise the factory or the types of work (industrial engineering, mechanical engineering) that flow from it. We may yet see the creation of the law factory, and whatever the equivalent of the industrial engineer is inside it (legal engineering?). But the lawyers themselves might not be the ones to conceptualise it.