Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernst Fischer

A neat piece of dialectical provocation: Fischer flips the usual machine-age storyline. Where modernity promises salvation through optimization, he insists the opposite is what will stand out. If machines are built to be ever more efficient, then efficiency stops being a human aspiration and becomes an automated baseline. The more “perfect” our tools get, the more human value has to migrate elsewhere.

The subtext is quietly anti-capitalist and deeply 20th-century European. Fischer, writing in the shadow of fascism, industrial war, and Soviet-style planning, knew how easily people can be treated as components: quantified, standardized, replaceable. “Perfection” here isn’t a compliment; it’s a warning label for systems that eliminate friction, ambiguity, and dissent. Machines are “perfect” because they do exactly what they’re told. Humans are dangerous, in the best sense, because we don’t.

“Imperfection” is doing a lot of work. It gestures to error, yes, but also to imagination, tenderness, contradiction, moral hesitation, the ability to change one’s mind. Those are flaws from the perspective of production, but they’re the raw material of art and politics. Fischer’s intent is to defend a humanism that doesn’t compete on the machine’s terms. He isn’t romanticizing incompetence; he’s arguing that a fully optimized world reveals what optimization can’t measure.

Read today, the line lands as a rebuke to algorithmic life: if perfection looks like predictability, then greatness may look like the stubborn remainder that refuses to be computed.