In Defense of the Grossly Imperfect

This semester I’m teaching a writing course, the theme of which is Artificial Intelligence. If spending time daily contemplating the looming AI takeover isn’t enough to plunge you into existential dread, I don’t know what is. AI has become so sophisticated that it is already replacing our doctors, our service workers, our artists and writers, me. I have no skills AI cannot do more accurately and efficiently. I am thoroughly, humanly, excruciatingly fallible. Just this week I found out that I forgot to include an important contributor’s piece in the journal I curate, forgot to feed my friend’s cat when she was gone for the day, neglected to latch the gate of a horse who got out and ate some things she wasn’t supposed to, and forgot to tell my class about a major assignment the first part of which was due in two days’ time. That’s a lot of mistakes in short order. I’ve joked in class, much as it makes me sick to think about, that maybe AI really could teach the class better. I’m sure it could write this post on human fallibility better.

The class has prompted questions about what makes us human and what society would look like if AI did all our jobs. The essays I write in my head while my class slogs through their own drafts all circle back to the question of fallibility and efficiency. Humans have always revered those of great skill in their cultures: the strongest, the best hunters, the ones who weave the tightest, most beautiful cloth, or cook the tastiest dish. To strive for perfection would seem to be human—the ultimate of human goals, an aspiration to the godhead. So if there’s a machine that strives and maybe accomplishes this for us, what then? What purpose have we? And if I recognize in myself that no matter the striving, I am uniquely, incorrigibly mistake-prone? What peace to give up the quest for unattainable perfection! To leave that particular depression-inducing drive to a technology suited to it. 

What peace, but also what a cop-out. I have to believe, because I suppose otherwise I’ll lose the last of my marbles, that because some kind of striving—despite the fallibility, in concert with the fallibility—is part of what makes us human, it is not something I, or anyone, should give over so easily. Maybe perfection is not the goal, maybe it is beauty, maybe it is connection, or joy, or fulfillment. Wasn’t it also me challenging students to think about the role “happy accidents” have played in the art world and scientific advancement? Isn’t there that story about penicillin? I can’t say too many of my accidents have been “happy,” but enough that I know their value. There must remain something of surprise or we’ll all grow bored in the wasting of our humanity.

Sometimes the stakes of those mistakes and accidents (my back and Shiloh, to name a few from recent memory) are so high and piled so thick and heavy that it makes the universe seem cruel. I know it isn’t. It’s just indifferent and ye old wheel of fortune has been above average kind to me on the whole, so this is just entropy catching up to me on the flip side and the weight of many stresses inhibiting good brain function.

Do I wish I were both more accurate and more efficient? Yes. It would save a great deal or hubbub and pain. But also no, if I’m being honest. Much as our relentlessly Taylorian culture would have us believe that our perfect destiny is optimum productivity, the substance of a life well-lived cannot consist solely of measured products and outcomes, and we should not have the leisure of being only sometimes mortal. Despite Ray Kurzweil’s insistence that this could be a lovely destiny, I think I’ll keep my body, thanks. I like to breathe. I need the reminders, like a heartbeat, that I am not a machine, and neither should the expectations of me be machinic. The only reason that life seems defective is because I am being asked to hold it against a ridiculous yardstick that I neither agreed to nor condone. I think I need a new narrative, one that celebrates my kinship with the unapologetically mortal and fallible, one where I say with pride, “hell yeah, I fucked that up.”