Good Shopwork begins with solid Headwork.

One of the ideas that has been sneaking up on me for years is what I’ve taken to calling domain walking.

Sounds fancy, but it’s really not.

It’s just the learned ability to stand in more than one mental place when looking at the same problem. Academics hate it – because they want High Tower ownership – big silos for specialized people.

To be fair? Most people work from one favored domain and stay there.

The accountant stands in numbers. The carpenter stands in materials. The engineer stands in systems. The marketer stands in persuasion. The trader stands in price. Nothing wrong with any of that — until the problem in front of you requires more than one kind of seeing.

That’s where domain walking begins.

Ure’s Mind Amplifiers Book – for the Shop????

Seat belt snug?  OK…

In the short version of Mind Amplifiers, the core idea was simple enough: humans have always built tools not just to amplify muscle, but to amplify mind.  Imagine: Thought going to print with zero friction!

The hammer extends the fist. The lever extends the arm. The abacus extends memory. Writing extends memory across time when recall fuzzes out with age. The spreadsheet extends calculation.  Who recalls what a “stddev” is? And now AI — when used properly — extends synthesis, pattern recognition, comparison, and ideation.

Not perfectly, not morally, not automatically.  But materially?

Oh HELL Yes.

So, you shouldn’t be surprised that every silo prince and princess of academia is dying to seize control – a kind of carpe thinkum!  It’s power and they’re too lazy…but let’s not go there.

Point? Ideas don’t stop at desks and screens. They also don’t stop at borders – since I assume you know the USSR fell as much to smuggled VCRs as the Stasi‘s East German spy failure?

Oh, and now – if you look close and know what to look for – it’s coming to the shop.

No holding it back.  Snuck in the minute humans stopped just smashing wood and started thinking about what they were doing.

At the beginning, shop work was direct and brutal. Hit this. Cut that. Scrape here. Chisel there. Basic wood-smashing and rough shaping. But then the real story of shop evolution began: tools started carrying not just force, but mental models. A hand saw implies straightness. A square implies geometry. A chisel implies controlled subtraction.  (Combined, they imply a lodge, but that’s a different tale than this morning’s…)

A lathe implies rotational symmetry. Every serious tool is a frozen thoughtform. It is a theory of how the materiality ought to yield to fallible human’s upward drive…

Router to…uh…Router?

Then came rotary power, and with it an explosion in what ordinary people could do. Circular saws made straight ripping and crosscutting faster and more repeatable. Lathes let form emerge through spin and tool rest instead of sheer hand skill alone. Drill presses brought vertical precision. Sanders and jointers improved finish and fit.

The machine age did not remove the human mind from the shop. It multiplied what the human could hold in mind and execute in wood, steel, plastic, or whatever else happened to be under the blade.  We sniffed ammonium from blueprints, but we’re into clean clicks, now.

Newbies and children’s note: The classic architectural “blueprint” process that everyone remembers from the 1940s–1980s (the one that smelled like cat piss for three blocks around the print room) used ammonium vapor to develop the prints.

The Space Race and Closer Tolerances Followed

Then came the tool refinement era — the period where tools no longer just cut or shape, but allowed recovery, restoration, and re-interpretation. Improved band tools, better planers, better resawing setups, thicknessing, surfacing, edging — all of these made it possible not merely to build from new stock, but to recover value from old material.

That Amazon bandsaw with some Rockler tooling? That old maple gym floor? Once upon a time it might have gone to a burn pile. Today, with the right tools and some imagination, it can come back as bench tops, tables, trim, shelving, or heirloom work.

The tool is no longer just for fabrication. It becomes an instrument of vision. And our salvation from swimming in landfills on a burned out cinder.

And that’s the point where domain walking really came into the shop.

Because once you move beyond “What can I build?” into “What can this become?” you are no longer standing only in the domain of cutting and joining. You are now walking through materials science, geometry, aesthetics, workflow, economics, salvage theory, and even time.

Yes. Time

Because reclaimed material carries earlier labor in it. Earlier growth rings. Earlier finishing decisions. Quarter-sawn, is it? Earlier use patterns. To work with it well, you have to read backward as well as forward.  I keep looking for a local college course “Recovering Shit: Living Better with Less.”

A good shop person is rarely “just” a shop person.

He is part engineer, part designer, part mechanic, part scavenger, part economist, part historian, and part prophet.

Prophet because every shop build starts with a future object seen before it exists. (*No, not the transcendental object at the end of time…)

That’s the hidden part of making: before there is sawdust, there is foresight.

Then Computers Showed Up

At first, not as “magic” but as glorified helpmates. A big screen for PDFs of patterns and manuals. Design sketches. Wiring diagrams. Cut lists.

Later, slicers (got Cura?) for 3D printing when I had more time to fool with that. And my CNC machines and laser etcher and…

A computer on the bench turned out to be every bit as useful as a square, a notebook, and a coffee cup — because once projects get even a little bit complicated, the value of being able to see, zoom, compare, and revise without redoing everything by hand becomes obvious in a hurry.

But now we get to where the road bends.

Because the point of my latest book, Co-telligence, is not that computers came into the shop.

It’s that intelligences came into the shop.

My new book, Co-telligence, is now live on Amazon.

Additive, subtractive, SPICE emulators, CAD, CAM, CNC, laser paths, plasma, toolpathing, simulation — all that is a fine beginning. We can now cut steel like it’s butter. We can route, print, resurface, simulate, and iterate faster than any previous generation of makers could have imagined.

But the bottleneck has moved.

It’s no longer the tool steel.

It’s the idea steel.

What’s missing now is not horsepower.

Big Brains = Big Money = Big Future

What’s missing is mind-bending design.

I remember my old friend OilMan2 hanging around in the patch maybe five years back when sintered metal 3D printing started getting serious attention. (I called one of the places Slumber Play, lol.)

The reason was obvious: once you can do real 3D metal work, you can make shapes that used to belong in UFO stories and fever dreams. Internal passageways. Hidden lattices. Forms with no seams where old-school fabrication would have required welding, machining, assembly, and compromise.

You stop asking “How do I make this the old way?”

And start asking “What becomes possible now that the old constraints are gone?”

That is a completely different shop question.

And that is where AI collaboration — and Co-telligence — come into play.

You and me? We’re intelligences.

But so is Grok. And Chat. And Alexa. Not like us, exactly. But in their own way. Along with the rest of the silicon Collaborators lining up behind the curtain.

The trick in the Ure family which gives us “super powers”?  We’ve begun learning the art of not merely using one AI, but doing bounce-work (new term): taking a good human-AI idea and running it through the mental sander of a second machine, and in legal matters maybe even a third or fourth.

One model may be good at expansion. Another at compression. Another at finding weak joints in an argument. Another at pattern completion. Put them together with a human who knows where he’s trying to go, and suddenly the shop is no longer just physical.

And in Electronics? Ham Radio? OMG!!!  But the orchestra conductor still needs to be sharp.  I had to explain to Grok for example, which end of a loaded multiband vertical (ham radio antenna) the 10 meter resonator goes to.  I know the topology, Grok is my go-to math engine (and Python coder and GCoder and…)

It’s cognitive.  Not me.  US.  Something three or four of us.  Spitballing, protos, tests, reworks…

Bounce-working AI

That may be the biggest tool jump of all.  Chat for ideation and flow. Grok for mathing and coding, and the sanding and finishing?  Your call, buddy.

Ten years ago, coming into the shop, I’d ask: “What can I make with what I have?

Today? The question is “Which domain should I start in – what’s the vision and then the workflow?”

Suddenly, I remember. “Alexa, get me another pack of 20 of those 1/4-20  stainless 4-inch bolts, please.“

“Sure George. Tell me your voice code…”  BLAM! “Get George2 on the line, too.”

“Mobile or office, Boss?”

I may be 77, but we’re still rolling hard out here.  Mentally 17.

Sometimes that means stepping from woodworking into metallurgy. From electronics into enclosure design. From salvage into finish carpentry. From mechanics into aesthetics. From handwork into AI-assisted planning. The old boundary lines between kinds of making are getting thinner. The modern shop is becoming less a room full of tools and more a room full of interoperable domains.

Disney Imagineers got their first – to their everlasting credit – and using old school, hand tools.

Which is exactly why I keep coming back to this notion of mind amplifiers.

Because the story of tools has never really been about steel, batteries, cords, motors, or cutting edges. Those are just the visible parts. The deeper story is that every generation finds new ways to get part of its thinking out of its head and  laid down in phys-real – the local non-thought world of materium.

• First into hand tools.
• Then into powered tools.
• Then into instruments of precision.
• And now, increasingly, into systems that help us think before we cut, and sometimes think while we build.

Shop work used to be mostly about strength.

• Then it became about skill.
• Then workflow.
• Then precision.
• What comes next may be integration across mind tooling.

And for those paying attention, that may be the biggest tool jump of all.

Which is why, this weekend, I’m out in the yard.

Not because I’m done with any of this. Quite the opposite. Because the InSide/OutSide ratio needs normalization. We all need some work-life balance, and I’ve gotten into a bad habit of…

What’s this I’m doing all the time now? Playing all the time, yessir.

Which, if you think about it, may be the surest sign yet that co-telligence is real schiznit: when the work gets so damn interesting it stops feeling like work, and starts feeling like the world’s biggest and best-equipped shop.

“Elaine, honey. I need to buy an Amusement Park.”

“You have one, darling!”

Write when you get rich, and maybe you can get one too.

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