AI and The Beautiful Humanity in Human Error

I think everybody should know the basics of at least one coding language, because without a rudimentary understanding of how a computer thinks, it is far easier to be flummoxed by them. Computers are ubiquitous now– nowadays, we eat, move, and even think through them. Now, I’m no prodigy coder, especially not at Carleton, but I know enough to follow a technical tutorial and to troubleshoot. When I’m talking a humanities major through a computer problem, I find that most are very quick to blame something innate about the computer or themselves; “I’m just not good with computers” or “my computer is being weird.” This is occasionally the case, but I find far more often that computers are just extremely good at malicious compliance. A working computer strictly adheres to every key you press and every button you click, so computer problems are usually just translation errors. You solve a computer problem by helping your computer understand what you want it to do, in its own language, and you need to speak that language to solve everyday problems.

This is why AI still kind of spooks me. I don’t want the computer to be doing the front-end thinking for me because that’s my job. As a human, as a citizen participant in a government, as a family member, and as someone with relationships, it is part of my innate human job to take in inputs and produce my own best guess at an output. It irks me that people so frequently fail to see the beauty and humanity in error. Computers run perfect algorithms and do exactly what you tell them to do impersonally and coldly, but people do what you’d like them to do as best as they can. Human experience filtered through some degree of human “error” makes art, and human error breeds disagreement which breeds conversation, and our special kinds of human error is what makes us who we are. What endears you to someone you love? Is it that their skin is decorated with sunspots and smile lines, or that their eyes wander a little when they lie, or that they have incredible balance and still manage to trip over their own feet? I would have a hard time loving something completely perfect because I have a hard time loving a machine over a human. Give me a friend who always misspells the word “yippie” over text, or an impressionist who paints in fat sharp-edged brushstrokes, or a chemist who discovers phosphorous while trying to make gold. So much of human innovation is driven by happy accidents and informed mistakes. I think this perspective of mine is the key difference of ideal between AI tech bros and artists– one is pursuing perfection, while one is embracing imperfection, and both of those are human tendencies.

“There’s a difference between pretending to care and caring.”

“Philosophically, I disagree with you… If something can pretend to care, it’s fundamentally the same operation.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/06/tim-berners-lee-invented-the-world-wide-web-now-he-wants-to-save-it

I have to disagree with Berners-Lee here. It’s only fundamentally the same operation if humans are capable of perfection, and fundamentally, crucially, we are not. I don’t want a machine to think perfectly for me. We don’t need to send the perfect email reply, write the perfect essay, or paint the perfect picture, nor should we be expected to, because those errors make us human.

Like some of the people in this class, I used to be a prospective comp sci major when I entered Carleton. I had taken three years of computer science in high school: one of introductory HTML and CSS, one of JavaScript (AP Computer Science Principles), and one of Java (AP Computer Science A). I was immediately weeded out by a data structures class, realized the kinds of challenges involved in a computer science job were not ones I wanted to tackle in my career, and did not touch it again. That said, I am still a casual comp sci enjoyer, and I have missed making silly little projects with my silly little machine.

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Here is some template code I made so coding in HTML on VSCode will be faster in the future.
-->
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <meta name="description" content="It's been four years since I used HTML so let's practice">
    <meta name="author" content="Anahita Lakdawalla">
    <!--It looks like I can set characters another way, too.
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    -->
    <title>Tutorial</title>
    <!--
    Quick note: when I checked the HTML cheat sheet for all the 
    ways I can mess with <link>, it looks like the makers of the website
    added the documentation for <blink> instead. I can't find a help
    page for <link> lol
    -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="tutStyle.css">
</head>

<body>
    <script src="tutScript.js"></script>
</body>

Hi Professor Mason, I’m Missing a Link: I’m not sure if this is the place to do this, but as I was reminding myself of how to code in HTML, I kept the HTML Cheat Sheet open like a regular documentation page. As I was messing around with the <head></head> box, I was looking for a more detailed description of <link> to make sure I understood how the HTML file was interacting with the CSS file. Interestingly, when I visited the help page where they elaborate on each kind of command, it looked like <link> had been mistakenly replaced with <blink>. There is no help page for <link> on that website, just some opinions from the website’s developer about how annoying blinking text is. Touche.