‘Nothing’ is a difficult concept.

Seriously. Think about it. What exactly is ‘nothing’? Does it even exist? And if it did, how would we know? Aside from what, how about where?

Have you ever been looking for something lost, and somebody says, “Have you checked the closet?” And you say, “I did. It’s not there.”  Or, sometimes, “There’s nothing there.”

That statement is false. There’s certainly something there, if only cobwebs or a stray dust bunny, or air, or maybe a lost button. Possibly even clothes. Those are all somethings, to belabor the obvious, just not the something you were looking for. It’s easy to find something because it’s impossible not to do so. Finding nothing? As in the example, people claim to have found nothing all the time: Data scientists when they can’t find a correlation, or detectives looking for clues, or a child looking for fairies. They found nothing, they say. They’re always either lying or being very imprecise in their word usage. Say rather you didn’t find the specific something you were looking for. That’s fair. Say you found nothing? Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Which would certainly be something.

Quantum Mechanics says that something can be two things at the same time, like a qubit that can simultaneously be on and off or somewhere in between. Nothing may be less amorphous by comparison, but it has to be somewhere. Good luck finding it. Don’t bother looking in the closet, though. I already checked. How about deep space? It certainly looks like a vast bit of black nothing, only we know it isn’t. Even when there are no other stars, planets, or moons, there are always hydrogen atoms humming to themselves and perhaps wondering, if capable and inclined, what all the fuss is about.

Scientists theorize that there is a phenomenon called “Unruh radiation” produced by quantum fluctuations in the “nothing” of the vacuum of space which could, properly accelerated by, say, a massive black hole, produce heat and light. Yep. Light from “nothing.” Still only a theory and way above my cognitive pay grade. We’ll let the experts sort that one out.

Current cosmological theory says the universe is expanding. Into what? Nothing, say the cosmologists. The universe is its own thing, and there’s nothing else. So, logically, nothing exists, but does so beyond our physical universe. Which we cannot see except in the sense that if we could see to the end of the observable universe, we would see only the boundary beyond which nothing exists.

You’re way ahead of me. Yes, I pointed out the flaw in my own argument in the first line. ‘Nothing’ is a concept, not a physical something. In fact, it only exists in reference to and dependent on something. We define the absence of the desired something with its antonym—nothing. It’s just that the analogy doesn’t hold so far as I’m concerned. If something is capable of being both concept and the embodiment of that concept, why not ‘nothing’? Hardly seems fair. Worse, it’s limited thinking and it feels wrong. After all, there’s a balance and symmetry to nature that this sort of uneven pairing violates. Nothing has to be something, or there’s no something.

There may be a flaw or two in the reasoning. I should work on that.

After all, I have nothing to lose.

©2021 Richard Parks

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.