“It’s gone!” Samsa was in a panic. She’d finally gotten through to her friend Cricket Tannis using the bookstore’s phone.
“Huh?”
“My Est, it’s gone! I put it on the desk by the counter, there was a man, uh, well, it’s just gone! What do I do?” Many girls had taken to calling their Social Tech devices Ests, while the boys used the old name.
“Call Mrs. Sampson, right now.”
“I can’t! Not like this, no, help me Cricket, please!”
“Oh, alright, just a sec.”
Cricket picked up her Est and drew a special symbol on its surface. The device immediately turned on, went into audio mode and acted as if the “Suggest” button on the touch screen had been pressed.
“Initiate call to Mrs. Denya Sampson, yes or no?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Sampson answered right away.
“Cricket, is that you, are you calling for Samsa?”
“Yes, please, what should we do? She’s lost her Est! It was taken.”
“Damn. Let me check.” There was the briefest of pauses. “Her Est is going South, fast, but its not registering her gait, the way she would walk or run. It must have been stolen.”
“That’s what she said when she called me, just now. What do we do?”
“I’ll try to reach her by phone at the bookstore. Could you just come to my house, now?” It was a weekend, Samsa was working at the store, her teacher had been resting at home.
Denya Sampson called Sally Aston first, who said she would arrange for someone to come down and help out at the bookstore while Samsa was away. Denya called Samsa and told her where her friend would be going. “Tell your boss he’ll get another student to help out in a few minutes, then come here, to my house, as soon as you can. No, wait, I’ll pick you up. I’ll call Cricket back. If she is not getting a ride, I’ll pick her up too.”
Moments later Samsa and her friend were both in the car with their teacher, headed for Sally’s house instead. Soon both girls and Denya were met at the door by Sally’s husband, Drake Phillips.
Drake handed Samsa another one of the little cellphone-like devices. “Here’s another Steitch”, he said, using the old name that boys preferred. Once they had been called Soteitches, for Social Tech Hardware device, but that had quickly been dropped.
“Sally is trying to restore yours into this one from backup. She remotely killed most functions your stolen one had, but left it on. It called for help while you were on the way here.”
When the girls walked into the living room with Dr. Phillips they saw his wife sitting at a desktop computer with a large screen, her Est beside her. The small device must now be linked to the big computer, to use the display, at least. Sally was watching the progress of a red dot through city streets, while text flowed down a narrow column on the right side of the screen.
“It’s still in motion, but its going faster, travelling more smoothly. It’s probably in a car.” She turned up the audio, producing sounds that did not sound like someone running, more like the inside of a sound insulated car, with minimal traffic noises outside.
Not long after this the car seemed to have stopped, having turned into a building which partially shielded it from the outside, judging from the way the carrier signal was attenuated. Sally hit some keys, but was unable to turn on the video. There were sounds as if the device was being broken into, then the screen on Sally’s computer changed again.
“They’ve cracked open the case, but for the moment it’s playing ‘possom, pretending to be dead, I only get burst transmittions, like static.” This did not last long, however. Soon the device gave up, sending no more.
“I imagine it is being taken apart by a team of experts, ready to be reverse-engineered”, commented Drake. “It was inevitable. How long do you think we have, Sally?”
“I don’t know. Months, maybe. I better call one of the Greens. Let’s see who I can get through to.” She hit a couple of on-screen buttons, requesting an emergency contact with the family corporation which had provided her school with the devices.
“Hello, Dr. Aston”, said a suave voice, which Sally recognized as that of Ken Green himself.
“One of our hardware units has been stolen and apparently broken open.”
“We know. I have Beth on call, but can probably handle this myself. What you want to know is how long we have.”
“Yes sir, exactly.”
“Well, I happen to own the chip-fabrication plant which makes all the important chips in the unit, including the hybrid neural network chip. It will take a while to reverse-engineer them. We probably have a couple of months longer, but we anticipated competition within a year anyway. Once people know something can be done, it is easy enough to do it again.”
“Will that be a problem for you?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. What about, well, our school.”
“Don’t worry, Dr. Aston. A scattering of machines amongst those who can afford them will have little effect. Then there will be more imitators, leading to a price war, but it will take a long time before the poor people who really need them will get a chance. As for your school, I’ll have a few boxes of units on a plane momentarily. Hand them out to everyone in the school community, parents, friends, whatever.”
“That’s a lot of people now.”
“Not really. It should only be about 23 hundred people now, because your expansion is still incomplete. It’s enough to keep the school as the key nexus in the expanding network of machines. That will be good for us all.”
“Alright, sir, I mean, alright Ken. Can’t get used to calling you that. I don’t know many fine gentlemen who own chip-fabrication plants.”
“I don’t know anyone like you and your Trio, Dr. Aston. I think if you try you can talk our joint software, running on our networked supercomputers, into doing a little more than what the little machines can do. You should figure out exactly who to give the handheld ones to, and what instructions to pass along with them.”
It took less than four hours for a courier to deliver a half dozen boxes from Vancouver. They must have come on a private jet. The boxes contained enough carefully wrapped Social Tech devices to hand out to the entire school community. Drake was sure that these were no longer made by hand, no longer just prototypes, but they must still be expensive.
It remained unclear exactly what the units did, except from the basic functions which all the students and teachers knew about. At a meeting of the three founders of Tech Fantasies and the leaders of Project Match, Helen Walker had told them all her views.
“I think we have seen a progression. First there was our questionnaire based profiling software. Then we advanced to software which used a dialogue with the user. Pretend that someone used that software again after every social event which happened, entering new data, answering new questions. That would be much better, we could created more sophisticated models of individuals and their social environments.”
“But that would place too much of a burden on the user, wouldn’t it”, Helen’s husband, Don, continued. “So the Greens, maybe just Beth, they invented a hardware device to do as much updating of information as possible. So we still get the sophisticated models, but do not need the user to do so much. The services they offer the user are just so much icing on the cake. What the machines really provide is a substitute for regular user input. They are model building tools with specialized data collection abilities, beyond those readily visible to the users.
That view became the consensus of opinion, but some mysteries remained. Ann and Don argued that a network of linked devices might have artificial intelligence capabilities. Maybe.
“Let’s think back to the dialogue stage. Suppose all the data from one network of machines is info fed into question generating and answer processing software, so incredibly insightful questions can be asked”, Ann began. “Imagine that same program, with whatever help its network of linked Ests provide, accepts and processes the answers, like our software already does, but on a much larger scale. Then imagine another program running on another machine, also with a linked network of Ests. Let them talk to one another. Would they be or become intelligent? I think it’s possible.”
Don disagreed, “Remember when the programs Eliza, the fake psychiatrist, and PARRY, the fake paranoid schizophrenic were set up to talk with one another. The conversation completely degenerated into a feedback loop. I think that is inevitable, though with powerful programs backed by a lot of memory, the degeneration might not be visible for a long time.”
Don and Ann argued about this a bit more, then Sally intervened. “We are not talking about a bunch of Ests sitting around doing nothing. They are being carried around and interacting with a lot of students. We don’t have to question the possible intelligence of the network of devices. We need only consider the possible intelligence of the integrated network of devices and the students who use them. We already know that the students are intelligent. Very intelligent, we picked from the best. The network of students and devices together is intelligent, because it contains the students as active components. We need only ask if the network is more intelligent than some collection of students by themselves.”
“Oh. Oops. Thanks, Sally”, Ann said, looking embarrassed. It had been so easy to overlook the obvious.
Drake had not fallen into that trap, to his relief. He pretended not to have ever thought either side was right, saying “Ken Green described the school as a nexus. It is. It brings together in one place a collection of students all working on their studies but also all using the Steitches as social intermediaries. Now their families have them too. Together the school and its community are a unique centre or core. No matter how many competitive devices are used by however many people, the school will be the key nexus. Nothing would be gained from copying the hardware. Not unless the school itself was copied.”
Would even that change anything? Perhaps only one core nexus would ever be needed. Perhaps only one was possible.