Inverted Jenny Air Mail Issue of 1918.
Face value: 24c. Present auction value: up to ~$2M)
"In Praise of Imperfection"
by Joel Bowman
“There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”
~ Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" (1992)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "What would it be like to know everything, but feel nothing Omniscient members of Congress being beyond the reach of this humble Substack, we asked the next biggest sociopathic know-it-all we could find: AI. Its response…
"Perhaps it’s rather like being a library in which every book has been read, but none has ever moved you. To know everything is to possess the facts, the histories, the philosophies, the explanations. To feel nothing is to be untouched by any of it."
Deep, eh? And yet, that only gives rise to an even more profound paradox, one philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries: does knowing without feeling amount to understanding?
Before you go shedding any crocodile tears for our stone-cold AI Overlords (“Praise be to Claude!”), remember that everything these heartless algorithms “know” comes first from us. The large language models (LLMs) they “learn” on? They’re our languages. The books they “read”? They’re our books. The histories they so nonchalantly parse? They’re our stories. Our births, marriages… and deaths. And the egos they so obsequiously flatter? Hey! They’re ours, too!
Consider the remainder of AI’s answer to the above question, no doubt generated to appeal to a human being with exactly your editor’s search history, replete with an insufferably snobby taste in high-brow literature…"I can describe the sunset, explain the physics of its colours, recount what Homer, Goethe and Proust thought about beauty. But I cannot stand beneath it and feel the melancholy of another day passing. Perhaps that is the great asymmetry between human beings and artificial intelligence: you are condemned to experience the world without fully understanding it; I can help explain the world without ever experiencing it."
Hmm…Does anyone else find it mildly creepy that, merely by engaging with these digi-spectral entities, we are conscripting a shadow army that is simultaneously building a “file” on each and every one of its users. Somewhere behind every AI user you know lurks a digital data profile. A human-shaped account. Billions and billions of personless imprints in cyberspace. Daily, the shadows draw longer. The army grows. At some point, the question will be asked: Who is using who? Who is the master and who the slave?
Perfect Imperfections: Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. There is such a concept as symbiosis. Mutualism, specifically, occurs in nature when two animals help themselves by helping each other. (Something Homo Politicus Nonsensicus is apparently slow to learn and quick to forget…) But like an oxpecker picking tiny ticks off the back of a two-ton rhinoceros, the relationship only really works when it’s the right way up.
The promise of Artificial Intelligence is that it might liberate us from mundane, technical tasks such that we are free to pursue ends that reward (and require!) real human feeling. Let AI crunch the data, sort through billions of lines of code, and perform the kind of computational grunt work where efficiency, reliability, and predictability are of high value. Then we humans can get busy doing what we do best… being inefficient, unreliable, and unpredictable. Oh, and irrational, too. (No, really.)
There are certain domains in life where the aforementioned characteristics are of paramount value… and others where they are not only entirely useless, but actually of negative worth. We want our train schedules to be predictable, for example… but not our punchlines. We want our tax returns to be efficient… not our first kiss. We want our math calculations to be reliable… but not our painting, our music, our poetry…After all, part of the human value in art is conveyed in its imperfection.
The audible cough and muffled sneeze at the beginning of Pink Floyd’s 1975 classic, Wish You Were Here… Glenn Gould’s radically unorthodox and sublimely “wrong” piano technique… Ringo Starr’s signature “behind the beat” drag across the drum kit (the Beatle is famously left-handed… yet plays standard, right-handed setups, causing his recognizable “out of time” delay)… Would the sound of these musical innovators, inimitable in their own peculiar ways, be improved if Ringo played a left-handed kit… to a click track? If Gould did as he was told and sat up straight? If David Gilmore hadn’t had a case of the sniffles that morning in the studio?
One thinks not. As imperfect humans beings, we are prone to err… and also to recognize (and empathizes with) the very same tendency in our fellow creatures. It’s part of what makes us human, all-too-human, after all. Like a newsletter writer who lets slip the occasional tpyo, just to see if you’re paying attention.
The Japanese, bless them, even have a philosophy that centers around embracing imperfection, incompleteness, and the stubborn impermanence of all things. Known as wabi-sabi, the traditional aesthetic and worldview traces back to the Zen Buddhism and was popularized in the 15th and 16th Century tea ceremonies. Think of the melancholic beauty in dying flowers… the touching asymmetry in hand-moulded ceramics… the unfinished ensÅ (or Zen circle), drawn in a single brushstroke and deliberately left open… for wonder, for possibility, for room to grow.
Yes, dear reader, AI can scan the texts, sum the data, and weigh all the molecules in the universe for all we care. We’ll take Cindy Crawford’s beauty spot… the “Inverted Jenny” postage stamp… and the simple pleasure in an unfinished senten…"
o
Full screen recommended.
Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"
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