Turns out my job is safe after all

I imported the 3-D whale model into the program that unfolds it, printed it out and… waited several days to even try to fold up a real life copy, because it looked too dang complicated. Finally I attempted; I cut it out; I made myself fold the flipper. This is the result. Maybe it doesn’t look small an fiddly to you, but I promise it was very small and extremely fiddly.

This image is a little blurry, but I hope you can see that it was so tiny and complicated that the camera couldn’t even capture how tiny and complicated the flipper was.

SOOO I went back to the drawing board— or, more rather, to the 3-D modeling program (Metasequoia is its name). I pulled up the whale model I had, and then started to make a copy, only this time instead of being focused on making it sorta-semi-accurate, I focused on copying the first model, but in as simple a form as possible. I made the body an extruded hexagon, and I played with the edges until it seemed like it was about the right profile for the whale body. Then I pushed out the ends and made them smaller and moved them around so that they were a little bit like a tail and a head.

This is what things looked like about halfway through that process.

In the end, I came up with a model that is not all the way there yet, but which is significantly better than the first draft was.

The interesting thing to me is, while Pepakura (the program that unfolds the 3-D models) is completely capable of adding flaps and labeling parts, it doesn’t have the ability to plan for how humans are going to get the thing together. Like, if the model is entirely closed, which part goes on last? That’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about now.

This is a picture of what the head of the whale looked like after I had simplified it. I made it bigger so that it would be less fiddly, and I left off the flippers entirely; I’ll figure those out later.

For now, what this means is that my job is safe. I am able to think through what other humans will be thinking (and feeling!) as they build much better than AI can— for now. Also that will be the case for the foreseeable future, meaning at least the next five years as far as I can tell. I don’t have it in me to worry about it beyond that.