If perfect knowledge is the theoretical endpoint of human understanding—an omniscient, frictionless clarity—then perhaps its inverse, incomplete information, is the essential condition of drama, comedy, and life itself.
During my computer science studies, our introduction to artificial intelligence didn’t begin with neural networks or robotics, but with a parade of definitions:
As a teenager, I was all ideas and no follow-through. Every week brought a new concept, a new scheme, a new startup in my head. I wore my imagination like a badge. But over time, I had to confront something uncomfortable: ideas weren't rare. They were a ten a penny, a kind of noise that kept me from actually doing the hard work.
In a recent piece, I made the case that we should stop trying to build "perfect" AI. That imperfection is not a failure mode — it's intrinsic to how these systems work. Here, I want to go one step further: not just to excuse AI's flaws, but to explore how we can use them. How we can design with imperfection in mind.
We seem to have stumbled into a strange contradiction: we demand perfection from our machines, while tolerating imperfection from ourselves. The same people who chuckle at human error in the workplace will denounce AI systems for the slightest misstep. "It hallucinated a fact!" Yes. And you never have?
A useful way to understand the successes—and the stagnation—of big tech is through the lens of organisational advantage. Not just what a company did, but how it was set up to win.
As I recently posted, I bought the AirPods Max and one of the nice features there was its massive 20-hour battery life. This is actually the third device I've bought in six months where battery life has been a massive part of loving it.
As a lifelong Apple user - yep my parents were designers and I've never owned a PC - I've always slightly tongue-in-cheekily said that Apple products just work. And, of course, they do work pretty well.
I absolutely love wandering around stationery shops and it's taken me a good long while to begin to resist buying absolutely unnecessary notebooks which I inevitably end up not using very much of.