&gt;<i>Define &#x27;squishy&#x27;. You can&#x27;t, can you?</i><p>Is that supposed to be a counter-argument?<p>Because, that&#x27;s the parent&#x27;s whole point: that the same (they can&#x27;t be defined or at least defined easily) holds for those &quot;squishy human requirements&quot;.<p>&gt;<i>What is it about information machines (as opposed to humans) that make them unable to handle ambiguity?</i><p>Obviously the fact that they only follow specific instructions at their lower level, and thus any ambiguity has to be explicitly translated to a non-ambiguous set of commands.<p>A fellow human does this translation automatically in their mind (and even they, not always perfectly).<p>&gt;<i>Why can&#x27;t a machine handle ambiguous input? It could defer to the operator, did you mean this? did you mean that? It could randomly choose from a number of possible ways to continue. It could deal in probabilities rather than only 100% certainty (both true and false are epistemic locations of absolute certainty).</i><p>Most of these sound recipes for disaster in any practical application...<p>And even that&#x27;s besides the point, since all of these need to be programmed just as well as non ambiguous commands, but with more branching and special casing -- again explaining why handling ambiguity is hard.<p>Oh, and &quot;randomly choose from a number of possible ways to continue&quot; sounds like Clippy from hell...