Ruskin, Hockney, and the Leadership Lesson in AI Adoption
- David Turner
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
The Rising Floor: What Ruskin Got Right About Technology, and Hockney Got Right About Using It
In May 1871, John Ruskin wrote to the working men of Britain about a stretch of Derbyshire dale he loved, ruined eight years earlier by a railway viaduct. In the same letter he turned his contempt on photography, mocking anyone who thought it "a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you." He had spent the previous quarter-century filling boxes with exactly that, daguerreotypes of Venice, the Alps, anything he could not draw fast enough by hand. He took the train to get to most of them.
This was not simple hypocrisy. Ruskin used the camera because it solved a problem painting could not: it recorded a building's exact proportions before restoration or demolition altered them, faster than any hand could draw. What he opposed in public was not the recording. It was the implication that recording was enough, that a box and a lens could replace the discipline of looking he had spent his life trying to teach.
The same split ran through the circle around him. The Pre-Raphaelites he championed for their devotion to painting directly from nature were, by the 1860s, quietly using photographs as compositional aids. Dante Gabriel Rossetti commissioned a session with the photographer John Parsons in 1865, directing his muse Jane Morris through a series of poses in his own garden, then working those photographs into finished paintings for years afterward.
Nobody admitted any of it publicly. Admitting it would have undone the myth the movement was selling, that its realism came from unaided observation. The gap between private use and public principle was not Ruskin's personal failing. It was how the entire generation managed the same problem.
Ruskin's public campaign cost him exactly what such campaigns cost. In 1871 he poured a personal endowment, reportedly some seven thousand pounds, into the Guild of St George, his attempt at agricultural communities built without industrial machinery. The Guild never approached the scale he intended. He distrusted financial detail and his Companions disagreed on what they were actually building. By 1884, when he delivered his two Storm-Cloud lectures in London, drawing on fifty years of weather diaries, the press dismissed them as the ravings of a failing mind. He suffered repeated mental breakdowns through the 1880s. The industrialists he had spent decades calling vandals built the railways anyway.
Ruskin got more right than he got wrong. He was right that the camera would erode a particular skill: the discipline of rendering a building stone by stone by eye, which declined once a lens could do it in seconds. He was right about the smoke. Climate historians now treat his Storm-Cloud observations as among the earliest documented evidence of industrial pollution altering British weather.
He was right, too, in ways that took longer to land. His writing on the dignity of labour reached Gandhi, who translated Unto This Last into Gujarati in 1908 and credited it with changing the direction of his life. His belief that society should value the artisan over the factory gave William Morris the philosophical ground for the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose prints still sell at Liberty in London today. His friendship with Hardwicke Rawnsley fed directly into the founding of the National Trust. The Guild of St George, the failed utopian venture that nearly ruined him, still operates, a hundred and fifty-five years later. What he got wrong was not the diagnosis. It was the conclusion he drew from his one observation about cameras: that the disappearance of a particular skill meant skill itself was disappearing.
It was not. The camera removed the value of mechanical accuracy in painting and pushed serious artists toward what accuracy alone could never produce: a way of seeing that had not existed before the tool. The generation after Ruskin's daguerreotypes had less reason to compete with the camera on likeness and more reason to compete with it on interpretation, which is most of what Impressionism and Cubism actually were.
David Hockney proved the same point twice over. In 1999 he argued in the Hockney-Falco Thesis that the Old Masters used lenses and mirrors to achieve their precision, the same accusation levelled at Ruskin's generation. In 2023 he removed the figures from his own 2014 painting The Dancers using AI, on his iPad, and turned the result into a piece shown at Glastonbury. He did not treat the tool as an enemy of vision. He treated it as a new kind of lens, useful exactly to the extent that a human eye decides what to do with it.
Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.
None of this licenses complacency about the costs. Ruskin watched coal smoke change the weather over industrial England and was dismissed for it until the data caught up with him a century later. AI's own environmental bill, the electricity and water its data centres draw, and its social bill, the real disruption to entry-level and routine work, are not imaginary costs because the technology is also useful. Taking the rising floor seriously means taking its weight seriously too.
What This Means for Leaders Running Organisations Through AI adoption
What follows for a leader running an organisation through this shift is not complicated, though it is uncomfortable. Stop adopting in private what you reject in public. Ruskin's circle ran on that gap for decades and it did not protect anyone's reputation in the end, it just delayed an honest conversation. State where you actually stand, even if the position is cautious, and make your own use of the tool match it.
Find where the floor is rising inside your organisation and say so plainly. The work that used to define competence, first-draft writing, basic coding, first-pass analysis, is the layer a model can now do faster than most of the people hired to do it. Naming this lets you redesign what you actually pay for: judgement about what the output should say, whether it is ethical to say it, and whether it is worth saying at all.
And engage with the tool early enough to shape what it becomes useful for, rather than waiting until your objections have hardened into a position you then have to defend in public. That was the difference between Ruskin and Hockney. Ruskin's resistance cost him the credibility to influence the conversation he most wanted to win, partly because the people he was trying to reach could see he was using the thing he condemned. Hockney, sixty years into a career built on exactly this question, simply used the new tool to ask it again.
The Monsal Dale viaduct Ruskin tried to stop in 1871 still stands. It is now part of the view. People travel there specifically for the scenery he said it had ruined, and walk straight across it.
David Turner is the founder of Kói, an independent technology consultancy advising investors, founders, and boards on AI adoption leadership, technology governance, and organisational change.
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