“Makin’ progress?
“No pressure. Kids are dyin’ is all.”
Finally willing to dispense with any plans of impressing her, George decided to complain to Pandora about the pressure he was under. Unfortunately, before he was able to initiate that particular thread, his phone binged with a message from the target of his would-be showing off.
“So,” it read, “how’s it goin’?”
Pandora’s text was the tipping point for a realization George had felt coming ever since his heart-skipping episode. More and more, he was convinced that he—they—were going to fail. And it wasn’t even his—their—fault. There was something in the air that was coming, despite the hype and headlines: the AI winter, part two.
The study of artificial intelligence was actually a lot older than most people realized, going all the way back to the 1950s at least. There’d been a lot of excitement over early successes. In fact, most of the stuff making headlines now had actually been developed back then, including perceptrons, machine learning, neural nets, even evolutionary code where the computer incrementally tweaks and improves upon its own programming—none of these were new ideas back during the Summer of Love, one of the bigger things to hit San Francisco an incarnation or two ago.
But then AI hit a wall, and the first so-called “AI winter” began. The field’s ideas and strategies had outrun the raw data and hardware needed to implement them. Those were the bottlenecks back then, and the AI renaissance now wasn’t happening because of new approaches, per se, but was due to better hardware and more data for implementing those sixty-year-old ideas.
But there was another bottleneck coming, and it looked like hardware again. All George had to do was read what the tech giants were doing—the Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts. They were all developing proprietary chipsets aimed at some specific AI niche, from natural-language processing, to image recognition and differentiation, to dynamic visioning and navigation systems. The folks who used to be all about better software and algorithms were leaving the Intels and Motorolas behind.
Google had developed its own AI programming language, called TensorFlow, and was developing something called TPUs—Tensor processing units. Just about every other big tech firm in the Valley, European Union, and China were doing the same thing. The age of all-purpose x86 CPUs working together was coming to an end. In its place the industry was increasingly turning to something like the Apple model: walled off, proprietary, and incompatible with everything.
And there was Buzz, their baby AI, destined to choke in its crib thanks to that bottleneck. And it sucked, but George could have handled it, if it was just about him. If all it meant was losing his cushy job, well, he’d lived on the streets before, and he could do it again. But there were those kids out there, taking their own lives . . .
Yeah, that was a good one; George was all bent out of shape about a bunch of teenagers he didn’t know. No. The thing that upset him was the teenager he knew: Pandora. What George couldn’t take was disappointing her.
Correction: what he couldn’t take was being solely responsible for disappointing Pandora. So he could either get Buzz to work—which didn’t seem to be in the cards, not in the short term—or . . .
. . . or maybe he could finally start sharing the glory (a.k.a. blame). Pandora kept saying she wanted more to do, something to take advantage of her skills. And like he’d heard from more than one foster: misery loved company. George figured the same could probably be said about failure, which was when he decided it was time to share his.
42
Pandora wanted to talk about Valentine’s Day without talking about Valentine’s Day. But before she could figure out how to do that, George’s words appeared in the palm of her hand. “We need to discuss the division of labor,” they read. Okay, Pandora thought, here we go. If he suggested some BS busywork like proofreading his code, looking for misplaced commas or Os that should be zeros or vice versa, that was it; he didn’t take her seriously and she’d have no reason to take him seriously. Cut her losses and become a ghost.
But then she recognized what he’d given her: a shoehorn to introduce the Valentine’s discussion without necessarily using the word. She could steer the conversation in that direction by using an amusing anecdote about love among the elderly, sneaked in via the keyword he’d given her: labor.
“It’s funny you should mention labor,” Pandora wrote. “Last night, I saw this old guy wandering around my gram’s nursing home, and he was looking for his sweetie with a big box of chocolates.”
“What’s that got to do with labor?” George wrote back.
“That’s the best part,” Pandora assured. “He was wearing a UAW jacket like he just stopped by after working a shift.”
“Poor guy’s a long way from Detroit,” George texted back.
“That’s what I said,” Pandora wrote. “I think he might be Jimmy Hoffa in hiding.” She followed the message with a “wink” emoji.
“When you say ‘UAW,’ do you mean the one that’s a big gear?” George asked, scanning through the results of the Google Images search on his work computer.
“I always thought it was just a big gear too,” Pandora texted. “But when I got a closer look, I realized the gear’s teeth are really stick people holding hands.”
“Workers of the world,” George tapped out, suddenly longing for the socialist bros he’d abandoned to take this gig—the same job that was stacked against him and working him to death. He concluded with “Unite!” and was about to add something like “solidarity” or “eat the rich” or maybe just a “raised fist” emoji but stopped. He zoomed in on one of the UAW logos on his screen, following the sweep of little cog people—all holding hands.
His mind flashed back to a pair of fosters—Catholics, like his mom—who took him to guitar masses where they sang “Kumbaya” and went around shaking hands with everyone before communion. At one mass, during a lull, he’d clearly heard someone yell, “Bingo!” from the other side of the sacristy, back in the church hall that also served as the boys’ court during basketball season.
George repeated the word to himself, in his office, aloud. He backed over the text he’d written and replaced it.
“Gotta go,” the new text read. “Initiating radio silence, commencing . . . now.”
“Are you kidding?” Pandora hastily texted back. And then waited. And kept on waiting. He hadn’t even sent her the “running boy” emoji. After about an hour, she figured, George’s not answering was her answer.
It was a typical eureka moment—or bingo, depending on your denomination. George had filled up his head with all the necessary bits and pieces for resolving a problem—all the individual trees—but then hit the forest and was overwhelmed. Finally deciding to accept failure, he let his mind get distracted and . . . plop. There it was: the answer.
In George’s case, the distraction had been Pandora’s little detour into labor politics, the UAW logo, specifically. All those people, linking hands. All those people, singing “Kumbaya,” together in harmony. And then a random thought from the compost heap of them in George’s head: It’s too bad all this proprietary tech won’t play nice together. And then the question: Why not? What was preventing it? Some laws and outdated notions about personal property? ICE and the foster system had cured George of those trifles long ago.