Two cultures of interdisciplinarity

The two cultures described in 1959 by C.P. Snow still haunt the University where he developed his reputation. While the policy legacy of that debate is often reduced to concerns about numeracy skills and the supposed objectivity of quantitative evidence, the class distinctions of sophisticated culture versus lowly trade are again being blurred by social media and generative AI. Working in the other Cambridge, at the MIT AI Lab, Philip Agre advocated critical technical practice . Amid widespread anxiety about the ethics of AI, this is often taken to be an appeal for engineers to be guided by the humanities, and for interdisciplinary centres to focus on the ends rather than the means of AI research. However, in the machine learning era, that agenda can easily become statistically reactive rather than analytically descriptive. In this paper, I argue from the perspective of craft and design, that the most significant distinction, and opportunity for collaborative endeavour, is not between the disciplinary differences between the sciences and humanities, but between interdisciplinary cultures of making and of observational critique.