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Key points
- Why “close enough” fails in the one place it can’t.
- What a philosopher’s thought experiment about the color red has to do with a banana split.
- Two words that might be doing more damage than “artificial intelligence.”
Think about it. A photograph of a fire will warn you not to touch the stove. But it won’t burn your hand. For that job, close enough is not just adequate, it’s the whole point. Nobody wants the real fire for a warning label
Yet, most of what we ask AI to describe lives in that same category. It’s a simple summary or the directions to a new restaurant. Close enough gets you there, and there was never a reason to demand more
But it’s my contention that this phrase has begun represent something it really shouldn’t
AI can generate a description of a banana split so vivid you can almost taste it. The ice cream against the hot fudge covered with whipped cream waits for us as digits that are transformed into dollops. Each sensory detail arranged in the right order, learned from ten thousand other descriptions of ten thousand other banana splits. It reads close enough to convince you it knows
The key word here is almost, not taste—because AI doesn’t know. It has never been cold. Nothing in the processing chain that produced those sentences ever put a spoon in its mouth
But here’s the part that really interests me. The failure isn’t that the description falls a little short of the taste or that the way a photocopy falls a little short of the original. That would put both on the same line, one just further along than the other. And it would suggest that more effort, more parameters, more training data might close the distance eventually. It won’t. There’s no line running between a description of cold and the feeling of cold. One is not a fainter or reduced version of the other.
The name for this is the Knowledge Argument. Many people know it as Mary’s Room, after a thought experiment Frank Jackson proposed in 1982. A scientist named Mary, raised in a black-and-white room, has read everything there is to read about color. Every wavelength, every photon. Then she walks outside and sees red for the first time. Did she learn something new?
The easy or maybe comfortable answer, the one that lets machines and minds sit on the same line, is no. She just gained the ability to recognize red when it’s in front of her. Same knowledge, just repackaged
I don’t buy it, and the banana split is why. Mary at least had a body that had felt something before she opened that door and her leap from fact to experience had a runway. A machine describing taste has none
That’s the same gap an AI-written condolence note falls into, and a love letter too. We call it close enough, as if measuring how near the description landed. But there’s nothing here to measure. The phrase isn’t naming a small shortfall, but for an absence
The two most unsettling words in AI right now might not be artificial or intelligence. They might be close enough. Almost in love isn’t close to love at all. It’s a lifetime away
- Why Relationships Matter
- Take our Can You Spot Red Flags In A Relationship?
- Find a therapist to strengthen relationships
