Perfectly Imperfect Human, finally?

Let’s start with a TMI: When I was in 4th grade, I hated “the.” And I would omit it all the time.

I vividly remember one English test coming back, the whole sheet covered in red carets (^), with my teacher repeatedly writing:

… “the”, “the”, “the”, “the” ….

The truth is, to my 10-year-old brain, it didn’t feel important. There are no super clear rules about where it applied and where it didn’t. So I chose to skip it.

Before you dismiss me as crazy, make these make sense to a 10-year-old:

• I’m going to school. / I’m going to the school to meet my teacher.

• I’m going to the hospital to visit my friend. / She’s been in hospital all week.

Well, maybe you are smarter and can, but I had quite a hard time. It became viscerally confusing, and hence omitting “the” became a deliberate choice for me. 

Maybe I was a rebel from a very young age, maybe I was a first principles thinker from the start, maybe I was someone deeply interested in language, meaning, philosophy, and the difference between what is actually meaningful and what we are simply conditioned to do. 

What I know for certain is that my 4th-grade nemesis was a three-letter grammatical function word. 

I have come a long way since then, and my relationship with “the” is healthier - but my husband often has to proofread my writeups for it. 

Anyhow, the reason I’m sharing this is not to dissect my personality at age 10ish. The reason is that I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

Here is why:

As and if products of GenAI, ChatGPT and such become fully embedded in human society and in how we operate, we might never see these “mistakes” again.

We may not ever have a human questioning these principles of language and how human beings communicate. We may not get to unpack the “humanness” behind this little resistance to “the.”

Language and how we express ourselves may look and feel so perfect that we may never know: what is real intelligence, and what is artificial?

Now you might ask: I’m here to read your reflections on yoga. What is yogic in all of this?

But before I get there, let me be clear: I am not making a case for GenAI.

I don’t like or support how GenAI started nor how it has taken over the world already. I am definitely going through an existential crisis doing “AI” for my main job, before it became what it became, and having to figure out what might be next for me. I hate the anxieties, frustrations, job loss, and sometimes life loss it has brought to humanity.

But if something good were to come out of it, like with all tragedies in life, my latest, and most optimistic and hopeful, epiphany is:

WHAT IF the purpose of GenAI might become to finally teach us humans to embrace our imperfections?

Over the centuries, mankind has evolved to become obsessed with perfection: perfect sentences, perfect straight lines, perfect faces, perfect body shapes.

If GenAI becomes fully embedded in humanity, the only things that might be left imperfect may be the things coming directly out of a human mind.

Imperfection, and little evidence of flaws, might be the only evidence of human-ness left.

This strange, uncomfortable, collective moment we are living through is creating a particular human predicament, and that predicament to me opens up a yogic inquiry.

Yoga has never really been about making ourselves into some perfected version of ourselves.

Because Yogaḥ citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ. Yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind.

However, over the centuries, our pursuit of perfection has become another vṛtti (fluctuation of the mind):

I should have said it correctly.
My body should look like this.
My practice should look like that.
My life should feel like this.
My relationship should be better.
My thoughts should be calmer.
My sentence should be perfect.

And then we try to eliminate every deviation from the imagined ideal.

But the attempt to eliminate every imperfection can itself become extraordinarily agitating. We aren’t necessarily becoming more peaceful. We’re becoming more vigilant.

The more desperately we try to perfect ourselves, the more fluctuations we create around the idea of being imperfect.

Yoga asks us to stop making our worth, belonging, or inner peace contingent upon the elimination of imperfection.

And if AI makes perfect expression increasingly ubiquitous, and imperfection becomes one of the few traces of human-ness left, perhaps we might finally start to come to terms with it.

For ourselves, but also for each other.

The slightly awkward sentence.

The person who takes too long to find the word.

The weird metaphor.

The crooked line.

The unusual perspective.

The person who doesn’t quite follow the expected social script.

The 10-year-old who decides “the” isn’t necessary. 😂

Imperfection may become a practice of aparigraha: loosening our grasp on the idea that things must conform to our preferred form.

And perhaps also ahimsa: can we stop inflicting violence, subtly or overtly, on ourselves and one another in the name of making everything conform?

And svādhyāya: can we become curious about why we react so strongly when something doesn’t conform?

Maybe the great opportunity of AI isn’t that it will make humans more skilled, efficient or fast (aka perfect).

Maybe it will finally make perfection boring.

And perhaps that is one way of understanding nirodha: not the perfection of every vṛtti, but a loosening of our compulsion to chase, correct, control, and perfect every one of them.

The crooked line will get to be a line.

The imperfect sentence will get to be a sentence.

And the imperfect human will finally get to be perfectly human.

Inspiration to this thought thread was this beautiful spoken poetry by Georgie Jones.