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.
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?