Think about the most valuable thing you do in your life, it could be at work, it could be with your family, but there must be something valuable you do in your life that you consider your purpose at this precise moment. Maybe you haven't found your purpose yet, but you know that what you're doing right now is the most valuable thing. Let's describe that valuable thing you do as a recipe for a cake. That way, every person has a different cake recipe, and that's what makes us consider our cakes valuable.
Imagine you can write your cake recipe step by step, but not vaguely. You write it in a way where you even explain how you should be standing while making it, where to put your hands, how many seconds each step should take, which fingers should touch the dough… you can describe absolutely everything, to the point where you know that if someone takes it, studies it with precision, and practices it 1,000 times, they'll be able to do it exactly like you, with a result identical to yours. Now, imagine I come to you and say that an AI, given your written recipe, can make and imitate your recipe with nanometric precision. It even has your body, your hands, everything. It's a clone of you.
This is where I ask you: what gives value to what you do? And I want to be specific, people don't know whether the cake was made by you or by your clone… What gives it value?
We often say "I make it with love," but does that really give it value? I believe it does, but do other people actually value the fact that you made it with love?
With all the changes that have come with the growth of AI, I've asked myself this a lot: what will people prefer? Because it seems like everyone values a result, everyone values what AI can give them, to the point where we're starting to let people go because they're easy to replace. We're replacing human error, we don't want human error. That's how the industry is talking. The industry wants perfect cakes, and it seems like we do too.
But let's go back to basics: why is it that, if I ask you what you'd prefer, a cake from a machine that makes nanometrically identical copies of whatever recipe you give it, or a cake from a small shop in a country known for its homemade pastries, people always prefer the homemade one? Because in the end, if something could copy my recipe with perfect precision, the difference isn't in the result: the difference is in my mistake.
My imperfection is what gives beauty to my results.
Because it's only in my imperfections where I'm truly being myself, where people truly "are." There's no lie in mistakes, because mistakes are involuntary, and an involuntary act is a pure act. Unconsciously, we appreciate imperfection. It's our reason for living.
We live to seek perfection, not to live inside it.
We have at our fingertips a technology that can copy the perfect recipes of countless cakes, and that strips beauty from life. A perfect world is a world without meaning. The cake with lumps because it was made by hand is beautiful because it's imperfect, and it tastes better.