Wiper Fluid (Part 1)
Screech . . . the green Tesla Roadster activates its emergency brakes in front of me, an epitome of human engineering and skill made available to consumers in a neat package, attempting to go from 150 miles an hour to 0, but you can’t beat physics. Not yet at least. My legs suddenly thrust against the ground and I am pushed to the side with a force that would match the car’s in front of me. The vehicle barely grazes my tie and comes to a skidding halt 10 feet away.
“Whoa dude … that was some sick inhuman reflexes” said the purple-haired teenager, exiting from the car.
I stare at him, my mind still not fully comprehending what happened. I catch a whiff of marijuana when he speaks. Still in shock, I cross the black and white stripes on the road and walk two blocks away to my office, past the data center.
As I enter the building, Alan stops scribbling on a notepad and calls out to me, “Hey dude, ya look like ya’ve seen a ghost”
“Anyway, hope you’ve finished polishing the youu aaye, ‘cuz we gotta start making our system smart soon”, he adds, “Them investors be breathing down my necks, homie”
‘PEAK.IO’ reads the giant mural on the wall, our startup founded while we were in college, or rather Alan’s startup, since I was not very keen about it at first (still am not), and treat it like just a regular old job that keeps the bills flowing. Alan thinks of me as a genius, although he doesn’t voice that opinion out loud, and this must be the thirtieth time he has tried to push me to explore this machine learning thing.
I sit down at my desk, a rather sparse one, considering we’ve been funded 15 million a month ago, and wave back at one of our new interns, a Vietnamese guy who has always waved at me for 3 weeks straight and I have not spoken a word to.
As I wait for my desktop to boot up, I take a deep breath and attempt to reprocess what the hell happened just a few minutes ago. This recklessly driving kid, who happened to be high (not sure if that is a causation or coincidence), nearly offed me while I was on a zebra crossing. But the incredible part was my reaction. How on earth could I have reacted so quickly? That car was barreling at nearly a hundred fifty miles and should rightly have been the death of me.
The nearly-felon’s words ring in my head, sick inhuman reflexes .. inhuman reflexes .. inhuman reflexes .. in-human.
Alan comes hopping over, and I put the thoughts out of my head and show him the finished UI. He pats my shoulder, grins and says “That’s my man. Now I know you’ve been putting this off for long, can’t think why, but now we gotta get you started on this AI thing. Everybody and their grandma’s adding this to their products, yo!”
I nod and he continues, “No excuses this time man. Just get started an’ if it’s difficult, no pressure, we still got like 5 months until we crash.. so you can take it slow. Now get to work ‘cuz I also got an important job, coming up with a new slogan for PEAK!”
I sigh and fire up Google. Alan finally leaves me alone when I type in ‘Machine learning and data processing systems’. Well, might as well try this thing out.
I spend the next three hours engrossed in reading about neural networks, reinforcement learning, the plethora of machine learning algorithms, and the likes. I finally stumble upon an article dating six years ago, which discusses on a self-improving agent and the means by which to achieve it.
Hmm.. seems like a legit article that attempts to tackle the biggest challenge, creating a general intelligence. As I go through the piece, the idea hits me like a boulder rolled down a hill by some unseen force. The thing described in this writing .. no it couldn’t be .. shit.
[to be continued]
Zerone is an undergrad publication at I.O.E, Pulchowk focusing on People (their creative side, their thoughts, their lives) and Technology (the new, the old, everything).
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