The Case for Imperfection
From porch bricks to McDonald’s fries to AI: where “good enough” lasts
My front steps have been wobbly. It’s the kind of minor pain you feel when a guest reaches the door and you see their foot find that one loose brick.
There have been attempts to fix it, but they were half-measures that left something to be desired. More specifically, they left wobbly bricks.
So on a Sunday afternoon, the family piled into the Tesla and we headed to The Home Depot for mortar.
This is not my world. I have never been accused of being “handy.”
But removing a few loose bricks and laying fresh mortar seemed straightforward. Why pay thousands for someone else to do it? Sure, their lines might be a little straighter, but mine would be sturdy—and good enough.
I asked my eight-year-old to come along, partly because he likes helping with this kind of thing, and partly because it’s basically grown-up mud.
While mixing the mortar, I took off my watch and set aside my phone. Truly disconnected for the first time in I don’t know how long.
He sat on the stairs and watched me slowly get better at buttering bricks. By the last one I was barely competent. He washed my watch and my hands. He fetched tools from inside but avoided getting his hands too dirty. We both agreed mortar is shockingly caustic, and that having it dry under a fingernail is not an experience worth repeating.
We chatted about nothing in particular. I did the best job I could. And, honestly, it was good enough—the bricks don’t wobble anymore.
The imperfect
Earlier that morning I said out loud, in front of him, that he’ll graduate in ten years. “I wonder,” I said, “what the world will be like when you’re going to college.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, AI. Daddy thinks a lot about AI and technology. What will you be doing? What can you do?”
He was unfazed.
“I’m guessing,” I said, “that you’ll be an actor.”
“Why?” he asked. He’s in his third play and loves being on stage—something I never had.
“Because people will always want to watch other humans. There’s something flawed and imperfect about us that’s captivating.”
Sometimes I don’t know how much he listens versus how much he lets me ramble. But faced with the imperfection of my shoddy mortar work, I kept thinking about it.
Why automate?
We automate to get closer to “perfect,” in a way. I saw a video on how McDonald’s French fries get made. The process starts with treating the potatoes—preserving, standardizing, extending shelf life.
They’re cut as uniformly as possible (even the potatoes are grown for uniformity) so the quality is consistent going into and coming out of the fryer. They’re blanched and sprayed with sugar and sodium acid pyrophosphate to prevent discoloration, then par-fried, frozen, and shipped.
At the restaurant, they’re deep-fried in oil with preservatives and antioxidants, salted, and served hot.
At each step, the system tries to turn an imperfect biological thing—a potato—into a standard process.
This kind of automation is rigid and large. It can’t really sense when a small fry and a large fry are both perfectly golden. It can’t easily tell a great potato from a mediocre one. Without AI, it can’t even tell you when a bug is present.
So the system overfits. It relies on chemicals and non-biological steps because you can’t get consistent, in-store, fresh-cut fries at scale: the variance is too high. Learning to fry perfectly takes skill. Training a worker to crisp pre-cooked frozen fries produces consistency and saves cost.
AI, AI, AI
It always comes back to AI for me. New systems will handle imperfection. They can create consistent quality from inconsistent inputs. That’s the beauty of last-mile solutions (I wrote about this recently).
But there’s work we won’t want to automate—the kind that speaks to the soul. AI may become a tool for artists, but it won’t replace a moving human performance.
Maybe we’ll build AI that eliminates the need for mass-production overfitting—distilling the skills of every great chef to make perfect fries, every time, for basically free. Maybe it’ll lay bricks with the lifetime skill of a mason.
Still, I feel oddly accomplished with my somewhat janky steps. I feel like I own my home more. Imperfect as they are, I made something that will last.
In the spirit of wabi-sabi, maybe that makes it more beautiful.