“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.
I found her cowering in the bathtub and staring at the toilet, eyes wide with terror.
“What happened?”
“A rat! There’s a rat in the toilet!”
I put down the textbook, picked up the plunger, knelt down before the toilet, and pried open the seat cover just an inch so I could peek in. Yep, there was a rat in there all right, as big as my forearm. As I watched, it swam around the toilet leisurely, its beady eyes staring at me as though annoyed that I was interrupting its Jacuzzi session.
“How did it get in there?” Sophie asked, her voice close to a shriek.
“I’ve studied the urban legends around rats in toilets,” I said. “There’s actually some truth to the stories.”
“Obviously!” Sophie said.
“Rats are good swimmers. We live on the first floor, and there’s not a lot of water in the trap to keep it out.”
“How can you stay so calm about this? What are we going to do?”
“It’s just an animal looking for food. Go get the dishwashing detergent, and we’ll flush this guy back where it came from.”
With her back pressed against the wall, Sophie gingerly stepped out of the bathtub and shuffled out of the bathroom to run to the kitchen. When she returned with the detergent, I propped up the lid again and squirted practically the whole bottle into the bowl.
“This makes everything slick and dissolves the oil on its fur so it can’t stay afloat as well,” I explained. I could hear the rat splashing in the water and scrabbling its claws against the porcelain in protest.
I flushed the toilet, and, even though I didn’t hear any more noises after the water swooshed away, I flushed it a couple more times for insurance. When I opened the lid again, the bowl was empty and squeaky clean.
“I’m going to call the landlord,” Sophie said, finally calming down.
I waved at her to be quiet. I had caught a glimpse of an idea, and I didn’t want it to be scared away.
*
Oh, how the engineers laughed at me. They sent me e-mails with rat jokes, rat cartoons, and a stuffed rat even appeared in my cubicle after lunch break.
“This is why we shouldn’t have nontechnical PMs,” I heard one of them whisper to another.
In truth, I wasn’t sure they were wrong.
Amy came to visit.
“Save the rat jokes,” I said. “Not in the mood.”
“Me neither. I brought you some tea.”
Hot tea was indeed better than coffee for me in my jumpy state. We sat and chatted about her new house. She complained about having to clean the gutters as the fall deepened, and there was also all the money she had to pay to clean out the HVAC ducts and make sure the sewer pipes were free of roots. “There’s a lot of nooks and crannies in an old house,” she said. “Lots of places for critters to roam.”
“You’re the only one who’s been nice to me,” I said, feeling a bit guilty at how aloof I’d been with her earlier.
She waved it away. “The engineers have a certain way of looking at the world. They are like the city mice who think the ability to steal cheese from a dinner table is the only skill that matters.”
“And I’m the country mouse who can’t tell a table apart from a chair.”
“I happen to enjoy new perspectives,” she said. “I didn’t start out as a coder either.”
“Oh?”
“I used to work at Bazaar as a warehouse packer. I had some ideas for how to improve the layout of the place to make shipping more efficient. They liked the ideas and put me in charge of solving other problems: cable management for their server rooms, access control for secure areas in the office, that sort of thing. Turned out I had a knack for technical puzzles, and I ended up learning to code even though I never went to college. This was before they required degrees for everything.”
So she’d been an outsider once too. “I’m not sure I’ll ever fit in,” I said.
“Don’t think of it as fitting in. It’s . . . more about learning a culture, being comfortable with telling your story using their lore. The engineers will come around when you can paint them a vision they can understand. A map of the obstacle course to the new cheese outside, if you will, little country mouse.”
I laughed. “I’ve been trying. It’s hard, though; there’s so much to learn.”
“Why did you want to work in robotics anyway? I thought you liberal arts types just wanted to teach so you could stay in school forever.”
I thought about this. “It’s difficult to put into words. I’m fascinated by stories, the stories we tell each other and the stories we tell about ourselves. In our world, the stories that matter the most are all stories about technology. The dreams that move people today are all soldered and welded and animated by code, or they’re just spells operating in the ether. I wanted to have a part in these stories. I’m sorry, that’s probably not making much sense.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard from you. Technology is our poem, our ballad, our epic cycle. You may not be a coder, but you have a coder’s soul.”
It was possibly the oddest compliment I’d ever gotten, but I liked it. It was nice to have a friend.
After a moment, I asked, “Do you think my rat idea has a chance?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I do know that if you are afraid of looking foolish, you’ll never look like a genius, either.”