Who Can Fix Zora’s Mind?
No one in the world has the right skills
The door to the conference room opened, and Ken Kroemer, head of the Zora unit entered. He shook my hands and said, “You must be Roger, the production support manager. I thought I would never meet you in my lifetime.” I smiled weakly.
Zora was the 1284 qubit quantum computer that ran the day-to-day operations of the entire world. My team attended to its routine maintenance issues — replacing the failed RAMs, adding disk space, fixing cooling fans, and so on. Issues that happened outside of Zora’s mind. A mind where the billion-line code running the world’s operations is neatly tucked away.
As he sat down, Ken asked, “So, what’s the rush for this meeting? As far as I know, the world is running smoothly. Which means Zora is healthy and functioning well.”
“The hardware side of Zora is healthy, but its software side is beginning to show some cracks…”
“What do you mean? Zora has been fixing its own bugs for the last hundred years. There are no bugs it can’t fix… that… that self-healing aspect has been demonstrated convincingly so many times,” his voice trembled slightly.
“That was true till last week, Ken. But Zora is struggling this week. Maybe the codebase has grown so big that Zora is unable to keep up with it.” I looked at my assistant Raj who was sitting in the corner. He placed a stack of papers in the center and said, “These error logs were produced when Zora couldn’t fix a bug on its own.”
Ken leafed through the logs nervously for a few minutes. When he finished, I said, “Ken, we need a human being to debug and fix the code.”
“Well… we closed the forty-person software division some sixty years ago since Zora didn’t give them any work to do.” He stared at the table for a few seconds and then turned to me. “Are you able to find any… what do you call them?”
“Programmers. They are an extinct species, Ken. An entire generation has grown up without ever coming across the terms Program or Software. That’s how well Zora has performed in the last hundred years!”
“What about the previous generation? Are there any old programmers who can help us?”
“I tried finding them. Either they’re dead or moved on to other professions a long time ago. We don’t have anyone in the world with the right skills.”
Ken rubbed his forehead and asked, “So, what do you suggest?”
“The only option we have is to assemble a team of bright young minds and ask them to learn programming.”
“Where do they start?”
“Well… they can start with this.” I retrieved a dog-eared paperback from my briefcase and placed it on the table. “My great-great-great grandfather had used it.”
Ken picked up the book. Its title read: The Art of Computer Programming, By Donald Knuth.
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