https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwuQPfvSSlo (Extreme example: At one point in time, people would sometimes hold sharp swords by blade -in the middle of a swordfight - and win!)
To cut something you need sharp object + cutting motion. No cutting motion means no effect.
I say relatively safe; because of course you're putting yourself in a position where you theoretically can get hurt if you accidentally loosen your grip.
In my situation I'm grasping a handful of utensils blindly (they're under soapy water), some which are knives. I can pull them up and sort them out w/o damage. Why?
The hand, and the combination of hand + eye, are remarkably facile. But in a suds-filled sink the eye is useless and the hand alone governs.
Of course, we don't have to live quite that dangerously ;-)
If knives were to instantly cut on touch, blindly groping for them in the suds would be way too dangerous. (And I haven't really ever gotten cut that way either, so go figure)
While washing dish utensils through my life I have observed something I thought was truly surprising and unexplained. Can't we focus on that?
To be fair I honestly did think that that was the part that was mystifying you. Sorry about that.
I guess you're focusing more on the neural-network self-learning going on? Or... what's the interesting part to you?
But I've been washing and drying dishes since I was a child and my early years of conscripted dish washing were spent learning to optimize washing and drying procedures. So I'm very fast and efficient.
For a family of more than 4 persons, a dishwasher likely is handy though by no means a necessity. In the absence of a dishwashing machine, one person washed and a second dried.
As for the "pre-clean" phase - soak dishes and utensils in a sink or bowl of warm soapy dishwater for 5-10 minutes to loosen/remove most food residue. Then the dishwasher (wo/man or machine) will work properly.
But the true conundrum is this: in all my years of washing dishes both for myself and for commercial firms (college jobs as dishwasher) I have always washed knives - sharp knives. Yet I have never cut myself on a knife or a sharp utensil. I have learned that I can grab a handful of sharp knives from a soap-and-water filled sink blindly and quickly without fear of cutting my hand.
Something is going on that I don't understand: possibly the soap modifies surface tension around the blades and prevents them from penetrating my skin. This happens whether my hands are dry or soaked by hours of dish washing. Any ideas what is happening here?