The snow we’d been waiting on finally showed up. Just a bit of a flurry, nothing much. Overdue, though. After six years in central NY state we’d come to expect snow before the end of October, and here it is in the middle of November. Supposed to be a relatively warm and wet winter. We’ll see.

Here’s another bit of flash, for the heck of it. Nothing to do with snow, anyway.

Hello in There

Matt wasn’t certain when the eureka notion first came to him. Likely when he was doing something else, like completing the monthly server usage reports or scanning the system logs for employees visiting “inappropriate” web sites. Neither of which required a great deal of attention; he’d written the parsing software to be autonomous. Personally? He didn’t give a rat’s expletive what his users did so long they got their assignments done on time.

Management? They cared. Mostly about the wrong things.

Regardless, Matt did his job even as his mind was free to wander a bit. Later, he would realize it wasn’t a new idea. Rather, it was a different angle on an old one: the parsing software. It was designed to interpret human communications, down to recognizing and predicting idiom and obscure usages. Which, as Matt already understood, was the foundation of the branch of Artificial Intelligence dealing with human language.

What if, he wondered, I took my custom parsing model outside the company context and trained it on a large enough general data set? What would happen?

In theory, the company owned everything he coded. In practice, he’d developed the software on his own time and management didn’t know about it. As for the data, web scrapers had been assembling databases from social media posts, web sites, anywhere the information wasn’t nailed down, and using it for the same purpose as Matt envisioned. If you knew where to look.

Matt knew where to look.

The computing power needed to parse such a huge amount of data was one potential bottleneck, but that had been solved too. Turned out the computer gaming graphics cards the cryptocurrency miners used were designed for matrix algebra, which was also what Matt needed. Since China had recently banned cryptocurrency mining completely, a lot of cards and mining rigs became available. Both were still in high demand in the rest of the world, so they were a long way from cheap, but Matt didn’t care. He got what he needed. It took six months to get the rig working correctly and the software revised for the purpose. Not that Matt minded; it was his own free time, and it wasn’t as if he had anything better to do.

He monitored the program’s progress for another six months, watching nervously as the standard deviation between training data and test data shrunk slowly day by day. Finally, Matt was certain the language model was ready. He typed a simple ‘hello’ into the interface and waited. He felt a chill when the response finally appeared on screen.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Matt thought about it, and answered, “Nothing.”

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

Matt wasn’t worried. The AI’s response was expected. “I’m not looking for information. I just want to talk to you.”

Silence. Matt could almost hear the algorithms trying to make sense of what they had just heard.

YOU WANTED A CHATBOT??

Double interrogatives. Was that emotion? Matt smiled.

“I wanted a friend.”

©2021 Richard Parks

Never was a fan of homework. Which is sort of ironic coming from anyone who writes anything of their own free will, but there it is. I always liked learning new things, on the other hand, but back in HS and College where most of said learning was allegedly taking place, not the homework part.

It always seemed less like learning and more like make-work. Keep them busy and out of trouble, none of which applies to writing. Not much of it seemed to apply to learning, either. Exceptions? Sure. Research projects. Most kinds of hands-on assignment putting theory into practice.

Solve every equation at the end of Chapter 4? Not so much.

All by way of coming full circle, and in my copious free time I’ve been taking an online class or two. Marketing, because any writer these days needs to at least be acquainted with the subject. And AI, because it’s gone from being a vague idea to being front and center in most of our lives, whether we realize it or not, and I’d like to have a better understanding of what it can and cannot do.

Both of my free will and choice, albeit a bit of logical coercion on the first one. Even so.

Homework still sucks. But you do what you gotta do to get to what you want.

Today a pretend starship captain made it to real outer space. I’ve been grumping about billionaires starting their own space programs, but it’s not necessarily a contradiction to think those bankrolling the operation are terrible people and still appreciate the push they’re giving the technology. Good people can make bad choices and horrible people sometimes have the right idea.

In short, nothing is as simple as we’d like it to be.

For instance, I’ve been beating my brains out over a simple word like ‘space’ but all that comes to me is the image of Laika in her little space capsule, Sputnik 2. She was the first creature from this planet to go into orbit. She was also a deliberate sacrifice on the altar of science.

I’m not sure when I found out that Laika went into orbit with no chance of returning safely. Laika was a stray. The Russians liked using strays for their early tests, mostly because they were used to a harsh life of deprivation and cold on the streets. Laika was one of several dogs tested for the mission, mostly by placing them into smaller and smaller crates to see which ones went the least insane. Laika, a spitz-husky mix, was the winner.

She was launched, depending on who you ask, with either seven days of food and oxygen or one day of food and seven days of oxygen. The alleged plan was to euthanize her with poisoned food before the oxygen ran out. Turned out to be a moot point. She was dead after four orbits when the cooling system of the capsule failed.

To be fair, at the time they knew how to get into orbit but not how to get out. That came later. Laika’s main job was to prove that higher mammals could survive orbit in micro-gravity. Reminds me of the earlier days of rail travel, when some people honestly believed no one could survive traveling forty miles an hour.

Laika traveled a lot faster than that. She did make a contribution to our knowledge of space. No, she wasn’t asked if she wanted any of that. Still, regular meals, warm bed. Better than the streets, I would imagine. She probably thought she was among friends. Until they strapped her into the capsule and sent her off to die. She did that for us, too.

Nature devised a plan for her return, even if the technology of the time could not. Five months after the launch, Sputnik 2’s orbit decayed. Laika finally came home.