AI's blind spot: the history nobody writes down
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
I recently noticed a big blind spot in AI: most of what it reads is knowledge left behind by people who succeeded.
Failed projects rarely get a full post-mortem.
The real reasons something failed are often unclear even to the people involved, let alone written down.
The client who quietly said "we won't use this" never makes it into a document.
That sudden change of direction may not have been a strategic upgrade at all. Maybe someone was just tired, fed up, or had lost confidence.
But the version written afterwards almost always sounds logical.
So AI can easily fall into an illusion: that everything happens according to logic.
The real world doesn't work like that.
A lot of things don't happen by logic. They happen because of people.
Some happen because of emotions. Some because of relationships. Some because of a moment of hesitation, or a single judgment call.
That is why people who have truly been through failure carry something AI finds very hard to learn.
They have seen the version of history that was never written down.
That version is incomplete, not pretty, and not rational.
And building a business was never a fully rational process to begin with.
At many of the moments that decide success or failure, what matters may not be the framework, but the people.