Robots vs. Fairies(10)

“Making more money?” I was a little disappointed, to be honest. Amy sounded like a jaded cynic who believed all corporations were evil, and even I knew that wasn’t wisdom.

“Oh, the money is not what drives people like Jake and Ron,” Amy said. “The credo of the Valley is that all the world’s problems can be solved by a really smart geek with a keyboard and a soldering iron.”

I looked at Amy more critically: ShareAll backpack with a date from a decade ago, Centillion version 1.5 launch T-shirt, Abricot cell phone holder with their old logo. I had seen these as badges of honor, of her tours of service in the trenches of the greatest companies in the Valley, but maybe they were signs of something less admirable, a cynicism that was corrupting and made it impossible for her to fit in anywhere.

“What’s wrong with wanting to change the world?” I asked.

“Nothing, except a lack of humility,” Amy said.

“Well, I think it’s pretty cool that we’re finally making the future instead of just dreaming about it.”

I deliberately leaned a bit away from Amy. I didn’t need her negativity dragging me down on my first day. Besides, the HR rep was finally talking about the 401(k).

*

The team I was assigned to, Advanced Home Automation, had a vague mandate to create breakthrough products for the home, distinct from weRobot’s mainstay moneymakers: vacuum cleaners, laundry folders, and home security devices. Most of the engineers were veterans from other teams, and I got the distinct sense that many of them were here because they wanted to spend more time with their families and didn’t want to compete with the hungry twentysomethings.

To my dismay, I found Amy assigned to my team as well.

“I’ve never worked with a folklore PM before,” she said.

“Building a product isn’t just about coding,” I said. “A PM’s job is to tell the story of the product.” I was grateful to the VP of Product Marketing for having used that line earlier on the baby PMs.

“No need to be defensive,” she said. “I think the Valley needs less techno-utopianism and more sense of history anyway. It will be fun to work together. For example, since you studied myths, I figured your deadlines will at least be less mythical. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean, amirite?”

I groaned inside. Great, she thinks I don’t know what I’m doing and she can just slack off. This assignment did not bode well for my career advancement.

I opened the graph paper notepad from earlier and printed across the top of the page: Advanced Home Automation. I underlined the words three times for emphasis, and then decided to erase the final n and rewrote it as a cursive tail that trailed to the edge of the page. This seemed to be a bolder statement than the original, a symbolic gesture at thinking outside the box.

But the rest of the page, blank except for the spiral grid, seemed to be a maze that mocked me.

“Did you sign up for the seminar from the research division?”

I turned around and saw Amy behind me, leaning against the wall of my cubicle with a fresh mug of tea.

“No,” I said, trying to look busy.

“Here’s a free tip: you don’t need to sit in your cubicle to get paid. They don’t take attendance here. Take advantage of that.”

I’d had enough. “Some of us like to get work done.”

Amy sighed. “WeRobot has some of the world’s most advanced researchers working for them—cognition, computation, anthropology, linguistics, nanomaterials—you name it. These free seminars are pretty much the best part of the benefits package.”

I pointedly said nothing and started to write on the notepad.

What are some unsolved problems in home automation?

“Kiteo, his eyes closed,” said Amy as she strolled away. “The lectures are probably too technical for liberal arts majors.”

It wasn’t until I saw the smirk on Amy’s face as I settled down in my seat near the entrance of the seminar room that I realized that I might have been manipulated.

*

Sitting by myself in my bedroom, I stared at the notes from the seminar and the pile of AI textbooks I had bought from Bazaar—I still preferred physical books to reading on-screen. Neural networks, cascading inputs, genetic algorithms . . . How was I ever going to make sense of all this stuff?

The diagrams I had copied from Dr. Vignor’s slides stared back at me as I struggled to remember why I had thought they were so exhilarating. Right then, they looked about as interesting as chess puzzles.

. . . the long tradition of behavior-based robotics took inspiration from research on insect behavior.

But why settle for inspiration when we can go directly to the source? Instead of programming our robots with simple algorithms that imitate the behavior of a foraging ant, why not imprint them with the neural patterns extracted from foraging ants? The new prototype robotic vacuum cleaner is able to cover a room in one-third the time of the previous model, and the efficiency improves over time as the machine learns which areas are likely to accumulate dirt and prioritize these areas . . .

“Eeek!” The scream came from the bathroom. Followed by the thud of the toilet seat cover. “Comeherecomeherecomehere!”

I grabbed the nearest weaponlike thing at hand—a heavy textbook—and rushed into the bathroom, ready to do battle with whatever was threatening my roommate, Sophie.