A machine might be able to make an objectively better thing, but that’s not what people are paying extra for. It’s the story about a real person applying their skills and effort to make it. Demand for that will likely never cease to exist. I bet it’ll just increase.
Let’s say that I start making hand made spoons in clay, and they become so popular that I no longer can keep up with the demand. I hire 10 other clay makers (I dunno if this is a term, but I guess you get it) and they learn to make these spoons like I do.
That allows me to focus on increasing my catalogue of hand made clay objects and now I have 10 different items I can sell and the demand explodes, so now I have 50 people sitting making hand made clay forms, and then a machine is mass producing spoons and other items, but each item have 50 unique variants, initially designed by me, and then later 50 employees created a form for a machine to produce.
Is it hand made or machine made? Technically it’s machine made, but you’ll most likely not meet another with an identical one.
My apologies for this comment, I am extremely bored and in physical pain, so this happened… And it probably doesn’t make any sense to anyone but me.
It’s a valid comment and a concept that is fussed about everywhere in hand craft circles. I do woodworking and I use a CNC machine sometimes. Woodworkers without a CNC say that’s not woodworking but most who have one say it absolutely is woodworking, because you have to know what you need the wood to be, you have to know how to make the machine do it and you have to know what the limitations are, etc.
I think the concept you’re looking for is mass production or corporate owned production. To me, that’s what differentiates. If a person in their garage is making something using a machine, it’s a lot closer to someone using hand tools than a corporation buying or building machines to crank out things while paying others to operate the machines as cheaply as possible.
20 years ago I used then cutting-edge computer tech to make abstract art images for printing. The printing itself was somewhat of a craft, but ultimately once setup I could produce one, or ten, or thousands of each image if I had buyers for them. A local art gallery encouraged me, invited me to shows where they turned away about 80% of applicants, but the things didn’t sell themselves. The “best” outlet I found was a local restaurant which showed work of local artists on a rotating basis - I got in there for a week and sold one piece at a “profit” if you can call $100 for the effort of framing and hanging five pieces that cost $100 each to produce and bringing four them home when only one sold for $200 a profit.
At first I thought that of course it’s still hand made (I still do) when using a CNC machine (never heard of CNC machines before, so had to read an article about it), and I thought that it’s a completely different case than what I described, but is it?
What I described was inspired by a Danish entrepreneur who got famous for making these small hand made ceramic flagpoles, each hand made and each varied a lot… But she got some exposure in a Danish version of Dragons Den, and suddenly you could buy these ceramic flagpoles in every city. She no longer made the flagpoles herself, but she kept designing new products and taught her employees to make them like she did. They were at that point still hand made, but I think the definition gets a bit blurred, because when do something become mass produced?
The famous painter Rafael ran a studio full of apprentices - he was a painter the way Thomas Edison was an inventor… it’s virtually impossible today to be sure how much of a Rafael painting was done by Rafael himself, though some of his apprentices had styles distinct enough for todays’ analyists to point to which part of which canvases they worked on.
See also: Rodin bronzes.
If a human made it, then it’s handmade. Whether it’s actually made by who is claimed to have made it is a separate question.
I feel like only when you start involving things like 3D printing, laser cutting, or CNC milling does it enter that gray zone of whether it’s made by a human or a machine.
It is definitely difficult to draw a line in the sand between what is hand made or not.
I would say that 3D printed items is still “hand made” if the design was made by the creator.