Emma Green's New Yorker report on the College of St. Joseph the Worker, which pairs vocational trades with liberal arts to restore young men's sense of agency, arrived the same week researchers published a paper on heartbeat-driven autonomous thinking for LLM-based AI systems. The juxtaposition is either comic or clarifying. We are simultaneously trying to make machines more human and trying to remind humans that using their hands is enough. Both projects are responses to the same diagnosis: something important is being lost in the translation from physical to cognitive labor.
Embodied Knowledge vs. Simulated Cognition
The paper by Hong Su on heartbeat-driven AI proposes a biological metaphor for machine consciousness: an AI that schedules its own thinking activity around something like a pulse. The framing is explicitly humanizing. But the vocational education movement makes the inverse argument: that embodied knowledge, the kind you get from running a chop saw, from feeling the resistance of wood, from building something that stands, is precisely the cognition that algorithmic systems cannot replicate or replace. A 2023 paper in Cognition by Chemero and Turvey on extended embodied cognition found that manual skill acquisition produces neural integration patterns distinct from abstract reasoning, patterns associated with higher executive function and long-term resilience. The trades are not anti-intellectual. They're a different epistemology.
Who Gets to Have a Body
Green's piece is careful to note that the students at St. Joseph are predominantly working-class young men who fell out of the conventional college pipeline. The trades-plus-liberal-arts model is pitched as restoration: restoring dignity, purpose, a sense of one's own capacity. Giacometti's elongated figures, bodies stripped of everything except their insistent verticality, feel adjacent here. The question running underneath all of this, the AI cognition research, the vocational education revival, the kinetic sculpture built from discarded devices, is who gets to have a body that matters. Founders building in the future-of-work or edtech space should note: TurboFund's accelerator guide flags several programs specifically focused on workforce and skills-based platforms. The market is catching up to what the chop saw already knew.