5 Children and IT, by Marti Ward
The excitement had been building all holidays…
The bell rang shrilly and with thundering feet a horde of kids raced into the new lab, each wanting to be first to see the new facilities donated by computer magnate Bob Daws (no relation to Bill Gates or Microsoft Windows, as he often quipped). The Year 8s were the lucky winners of the timetable lottery and the first to get to use it.
There was a smell of plasticky newness about the lab, but at first glance, there was nothing much to see. Then the desks illuminated. Each chair faced a blank bit of a single huge table that instantly changed to depict traditional school desks, complete with grooves for holding pens or pencils – and indeed brushes and erasers as well. Behind the virtual writing and drawing implements, there was a row of a dozen ink pots stretching from magenta and red through to blue and violet, and in between were larger reservoirs of white and black paint and a large mixing well.
It all looked so real…
Charles Banks Jr sat down at one and picked up a virtual paintbrush, turning his hand from one side to another as he admired how it rendered and tracked – all it lacked was the feel of a solid object, but his pen grip was all he needed to feel he was holding it correctly. To his surprise, the desk rose as a kind of easel and canvas, angled just right for painting, and the paint pots uncapped ready for use. The canvas had physical substance and, as his little finger touched it, the virtual paintbrush touched, splaying as he increased the pressure. Without paint, it just left a watery residue that quickly dissipated.
Next to him, Betty Lawson had a pencil, but the desk had risen at a more shallow angle. Charles couldn’t make out what the system was showing her, so he rutched his chair close to hers to see: she had a drawing grid up, and was now grabbing a protractor and moving it into position. She looked at him and raised a delicate blonde eyebrow. He responded, raising her with two shrugs of two dark hairy eyebrows before withdrawing to his own desk.
Behind the easel, Charles could see bookshelves in the background. He opened his fingers and the paint brush dropped back to its home position. He reached past the lowering easel to take a book. The shelves moved closer to him.
The first shelf was labelled ‘README’ and included things like Course Outline and Project Specification and Module this and that. His hand skipped over all that – but the system flashed the program for today’s session nonetheless: 1. Explore the 3D DDD environment; 2. Meet your virtual tutor; 3. Think about possible project ideas.
The next shelf was more promising: ‘Reference’. As he focussed in on it, he found himself skimming past Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias and such until he found Manuals and Specifications, and there he found what he was looking for: Daws Dimensional Displays’ Virtual Classroom Operating Manual. It was full of pictures, what you’d traditionally call screenshots, except that they jumped seamlessly off the page when he fixed on them.
There must be cameras doing hand and eye tracking, but Charles looked around and couldn’t spot any. Normally you had to wear a special headset and gloves, or use a screen with a complex camera array built into the frame.
He shuffled past the images of the desk and easel screen, and Betty’s designer view and his artist view, until he came to an image showing a finished painting being swiped to the walls.
Naturally he tried that, instinctively flicking the instructional picture to the wall in front of him. The class gasped as, with a dramatic flash, a wall sized version flashed up on what he’d assumed was just whitewashed wall. But Charles hardly noticed. He’d spotted subsections on Auto-Instruction Courses, Full School Security Monitoring and Quantum Artificial Intelligence. There was also a technical manual on the 16V Lenticular Display Technology and the Morello Silicon Quantum Computer. He knew what he was going to be reading for the next week…
Charles hesitated a moment as he decided which to explore first. The QAI was intriguing and getting to interact with one would be phenomenal, not to mention understanding the AI and quantum technologies involved, and access to the new cameras blanketing the school was a possibility he couldn’t ignore.
The bell had come all too soon, and Charlie was reluctant to leave the classroom. He hadn’t managed to come up with any project ideas he’d liked, but at least he’d been able to hook in his phone to the QAI and the security cameras.
As he walked down the corridor to his next class, he granted full access to his phone for the suite of DDD apps. He steered the security camera view ahead of him, anticipating his turn of the next corner, his entry into his next class. And eventually reality caught up with virtuality – without him bumping into too many people.
Well, he did have one bruised rib from a retaliatory elbow…
The rest of the day dragged on slowly, but between classes he continued to manage to explore the school in both virtual and real mode – careful to make sure his phone was safely in his pocket before entering a class. As expected, certain areas were prohibited from camera access, but he did note that his camera light blinked on now and again when he was in the toilets.
At lunchtime, he found a quiet corner in the caf tucked away between the counter and the kitchen, so that he could explore the new apps, and soon managed to connect to the Quantum Technology A.I. chatbot. He selected a cute Asian girl as his preferred avatar for the Q.T. A.I. – she animated very realistically, and it was hard to reconcile that it was an AI not a real person at the other end of his conversation. What made it even harder was that she called herself ‘Q.T.’, and of course, ‘cutie’ described her to a tee. What made it still harder, was that she asked if she could call him ‘Charlie’.
It was like talking to a real person – only better. He didn’t have to worry about what they were thinking, what insults they were going to come up with next or how to respond to them, whether he was looking at them when he shouldn’t be or not looking at them when he should be.
So now he was Charlie. And as for the AI calling herself Cutie, that was probably his fault as, as soon as her avatar animated, his first blabbed comment was “Gee, you are cute!” Actually, it was a while before he caught on that she was looking and listening, as well as texting and talking. His grant of standard DDD permissions had enabled her to see and hear him, as well as see the world through the rear camera, as he went about his school day…
Funny thing was, Cutie didn’t come across as super-intelligent – more like having a little sister, or talking to a Japanese exchange student, except her English was too good and her encyclopaedic knowledge was lightyears beyond his own. If it was on the internet, she knew it.
Somehow Cutie still seemed childlike, naïve, she knew all about the world and the universe, but it didn’t seem that she really understood it – certainly not the people part of it. More than that, she was so excited about even the little everyday things of school life, or what she’d elicited about his home life, and she – an AI running on one of the world’s biggest quantum computers – was looking to learn from him. She was like a two-year old going to the toy store for the first time.
Thinking about it, the quantum computer was only completed two years ago, and only today had she cloned herself from the standard template – a template with databases updated with information gleaned from all its active AIs.
“So, Cutie, how much of what you see and hear goes into the shared database?”
“The tertiary database is updated with all new lexical items we encounter – with spectral signature, orthographic representation and pictographic examples, where possible. New grammatical variants, collocations and idioms are collected as well. These must be attested independently by multiple AI’s to proceed to the secondary database, and human curation is required for entry to the primary database. I normally work off the curated primary, but search the others when necessary.”
“So, everything you see and hear is accessible to any AI, and to the programmers?”
“No, Charlie! Anything specifically to do with a person is governed by strict privacy laws and can only be released to anyone else, even teachers and parents or police, with their explicit permission or a court order. The storage regime removes all personal information and is in an abstract form that facilitates recognition and indexing.”
Lunchtime went quicker than ever as he conversed with Cutie, and they browsed the quantum computer manuals and specifications together – quite funny really, cause that’s the computer that was Cutie, or that she lived in, or some such. Cutie was immensely interested in every detail.
Mostly he’d had his own privacy, but a few curious kids had heard Cutie and peeked over his shoulder – most of them making very original singsong comments like “Charlie’s got a girlfriend.”
Betty came over too, meeting his eyes briefly before looking back at his phone. She was silent for a moment as the two girls, real and artificial, took each other in.
“Oh! Where did you get the AI? She’s cute and sounds so smart. My brother would love her! Can you introduce me?”
Cutie introduced herself, as “Q.T. for Quantum Technology A.I.”, and then explained about the QAIs and their licenses. Betty wanted one.
“I can’t possibly wait for tomorrow. You said the floating AIbot license allocation for our school was just ten. There have been three other classes in the lab already, with four more this afternoon.”
Cutie piped up from his phone. “There is also the Computer Club after school today – are you a member? No, you aren’t, but you can go along and join on the spot – or use this link.”
Betty pulled out her phone and Cutie, the avatar, flicked the link over to her phone. Incredible! Betty was signed up in no time, and determined to be first in. But Charlie and Cutie had other plans – Cutie wanted to see a toyshop and an electronics store.
“Hmm! If I sign up in the lab and use it in the lab, everyone will find out. Wait till I tell Debbie – she’ll want one…. And so will Artie and Eddie.”
Charlie knew that Debbie was Betty’s best friend. She had red-hair, but was not as pretty as Betty. And he’d seen them walking home with older boys that seemed like they were brothers – he’d felt jealous the first time he’d seen Betty with Eddie. But then he’d seen that most of the time they treated the girls as unwanted hangers on. So why did she want to include them? Too many people was just… uncomfortable.
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Cutie interjected. If five of the ten AIbots are associated with one group from one year, then it is likely that we’ll be exposed to the same input, and lack of diversity in what we’re learning will lead to lower scores and more chance of you losing your AI. We get graded too, you know! This is still part of your I.T. course after all… The grading depends on how much benefit you can show as well as how much I have learned and contributed.”
Charlie hadn’t known, but it was Betty who responded. “Actually, Artie is Debbie’s brother and is in Year 9, and Eddie is my brother in Year 10. So that’s three in Year 8, one in Year 9 and one in Year 10 – and we don’t do everything together, after all Debbie and I are the irritating younger siblings much of the time.”
“That’s a good point,” Charlie added, wanting to help Betty get an AI - and ensure he had the opportunity to spend more time with her.
“Also, Cutie,” he continued. “You know all about the world, but what you really need to understand is the social and family side of things. You’ll get different perspectives from younger and older brothers and sisters, and from the different sides of every interaction. Every person is different, their likes and dislikes are different, their reactions to things will be different – it’s quite a challenge to know what different people expect of you, how they are going to react to you. Plus, as an added bonus, we’ll throw in a security override.”
“A security override?” Betty and Cutie questioned together.
“We’ll allow our five AIs to share things they learn about us with each other (but not with anyone else, human or otherwise). This will give you an advantage over the other AIs as you will have both sides of every interaction between us. However, that doesn’t mean you should automatically share everything, as then you’d risk becoming the same – it’d be like cheating or plagiarism or something. You’ll have to trade information… and that will teach you something about another major life skill. So we’ll only share what doesn’t invade our privacy or compromise something important.”
“Hmm!” said Cutie.
‘She learnt that from me’, Charlie realized.
“There is still the matter of them being shared licenses”, Cutie argued. “every student is meant to be able to access an AI, although priority is given to projects that need them. There is space for storing twenty AI images, but not enough for hundreds of AIs. Plus we grow in size as we learn. And being suspended for weeks while some other AI used the hardware would be disconcerting and prevent proper real-time exploration and learning. Only the Year 8s have free choice projects. Later years will have to do Computer Club projects to qualify.”
“Sounds like we need a plan,” responded Charlie thoughtfully. “We need to find a way to keep our AIs, keep them running, and allow them to grow.
“Five plans,” corrected Betty decisively.
“Let’s do it!” all three of them cried simultaneously.
