Forever Yours
23
Specialization
ALL KAITLYN REALLY WANTED to do was play golf. She was certain to become a force in the LPGA within a year or two if she could maintain her training. To maintain her training, she needed support. She hadn’t considered Henry a potential candidate the year before, but her visit home in the summer had moved him up the ladder.
It seemed her family had connections. Their connections wanted control—control of Open Cloak Design.
Her family had established a trust fund for Kaitlyn that could have supported her golf career. The fund, however, withheld that support until she was twenty-five or married. It looked like the family and their connections had nothing against using Kaitlyn to achieve their objectives.
The infant Open Cloak Design had strong potential in the market, but no proven track record. The connections—a company Henry couldn’t decipher the name of because it was named in Chinese characters—had determined the quickest and easiest way to gain control of the Open Cloak was to marry into it. They were ruthless in using other people.
When Kaitlyn had been rejected by Henry, she put together the plan to fake a pregnancy and pressure Henry to marry her. That, too, had failed. She was desperate. The promise of funding for her golf career from the trust fund she would gain control of if she married Henry was disappearing.
Unknown to Kaitlyn, within three days of her confrontation with Henry, all these details were known to him. His AI driven search had uncovered the conspiracy, the email, text messages, and even phone conversations through two degrees of separation.
Henry was up all night Monday, analyzing the data from his search of Kaitlyn. His AI had revealed the data, but making sense of it was a process that could take him days. What he understood immediately, though, was he needed to neutralize the threat from Kaitlyn. That was his most immediate problem. If she wasn’t pregnant—which he assumed—she might try desperately getting pregnant so she could blame him. There was just too much destruction of lives involved with that.
While Henry had gained access to email, bank accounts, the trust, and other documents, the problem with interfering in them was that much of the communication between her parents and their connections was in Mandarin. While his AI could tap other sources to get a reasonably accurate translation of their conversation, he could not depend on it to translate an English message into Chinese. He could comprehend the translated messages from Mandarin to English, but they were nothing like what a native English speaker would say. He could only assume the opposite would also be true.
While Henry had no particularly loving feelings toward Kaitlyn, he didn’t want to see her hurt for the pressure that had been put on her. She needed a secure financial outlook. Her parents could have given her that at any time by changing the terms of the trust. The next four years would be critical for Kaitlyn’s development.
It took Henry two more days to decide what to do. At what point was it okay to do something technically illegal to save someone from people who were applying illegal—or at best unethical—pressure against them?
A year ago, he’d struck out at a man threatening Chastity. He’d supplied evidence of wrong-doing to police and the university. And he’d asked Paul Riordan for help. Tom had died in a supposed gun battle in front of Chastity’s apartment building. He deserved it. Kaitlyn didn’t. And attacking her parents and their connections could lead to a different kind of conflict—one Henry wasn’t sure he could win.
He thought her parents had been pressured to use their daughter as well. The trust fund they’d established for her was in the millions and would give her a great head start on life.
He finally decided to act.
It was not that difficult to break into a bank if you were only targeting one customer. He could impersonate her parents and have access. The bank was in San Francisco, so the documents and communications he needed were in English. He changed the terms of the trust so it would transfer to Kaitlyn upon reaching the age of 25 or having graduated from college. That meant she’d gain control of the trust in June. He also had the trustee changed so her parents could not alter it again. Then he sent the necessary correspondence from her parents to the bank and from the bank to Kaitlyn.
Since graduation was still five months away, nothing would show up immediately other than Kaitlyn being notified that the terms had changed. That should satisfy her need to marry Henry in order to get the trust money and partial control of the company. She was free and he erased all signs of his interference.
Henry did not, however, trust that the connections would be satisfied with the results. They wanted his company and he’d be damned if he let them have it. He’d reduced the range of the hacking counterattack software on the company server. He reactivated the full range but set the software to alert him to any perceived attack rather than to counter immediately. He connected the alert to his phone so he would get it at any time and location.
Monday being a holiday, the spring semester began on Tuesday the eighteenth. Henry had finally managed to frontload his classes to the first four days of the week so he would have Fridays off for a long weekend. That was his way of establishing a three-day work week at the office.
His Tuesday/Thursday classes that met for an hour and a half each day were AI Society and Humanity, Language and Thought, and Decision Making. On Monday and Wednesday he would have Modern Regression (Statistics), Design of AI Products, and Search Engines.
Lisa was in all three of his Tuesday/Thursday classes but had different classes on Monday and Wednesday. She was as loaded in her schedule as he was with eighteen hours. Josh had also managed Fridays free, so the office on Friday was likely to be busy. He had a class with Henry on Monday/Wednesday and one with Henry and Lisa on Tuesday/Thursday. There was some overlap with others in their study group as well.
It was Fridays that interested Henry the most. He was soaking up the information in his other classes as fast as he could absorb it, including staying up late at night reading the several texts assigned. But Friday morning, Josh, Lisa, and Chastity all showed up and headed to the fourth-floor office. Henry was already there.
“Okay, you’re going to have a dev meeting in a few minutes, but Luke wanted us all together for a Zoom call first thing this morning. I’ll connect,” Chastity said.
Luke’s picture filled most of the monitor with a single picture of the four of them in the office. Isobel showed up in another window.
“Good morning, partners and contractors,” Luke said. “I felt it was worth our time to hear this good news all at once. We have received our first royalty deposit from EMEE, representing business in the fourth quarter. Drumroll, please!” He flashed an image of an electronic check on the screen. “Yes! We made $21.92 on sales of eight units of the new Open Cloak Optimization software. We are in business.”
“Oh, geez, Luke. Twenty-two dollars? Really? Can we even pay for this call with that?” Isobel shouted.
“Keep in mind, my friends that we were only in business for two weeks in the fourth quarter. Granted, if we made that every two weeks it would still only be $263 a quarter. That won’t pay anyone’s salary here. But it’s a good sign, nonetheless. We do have a real product and we do have sales. It will only get better from here. Let’s have a little cheer and everyone get back to work!”
“Whoopee!” they all yelled, laughing. Chastity cut the connection.
“Okay,” Henry said. “As to the work—as if we don’t all have enough work to keep us busy with school—Lisa is still on the revamp of our website. It’s coming along nicely. Lisa, guide us through it, please.”
Lisa took control of the presentation, flashing up the current site on the screen and comparing it to the new UI. It was clean and professional, but also stood out as a masterful UI implementation. The interface was fast and smooth. The graphics were beautiful but not ostentatious. And most of all, the PR firm had sent a list of suggestions that she’d been able to implement.
“When is this going live?” Henry asked.
“We should have the last bits tested by next weekend,” Lisa said. “Then it lacks only your signal to go live. The changeover will take us about an hour.”
“Fantastic!” Henry said. “Just in time for you to get involved with the next project I want you to work on. Josh, your project is to take over development of the Open Cloak search engine. I think we’re pretty close on it, but I want every line of code reviewed. We’ll bring on Simon and Leonard for the review, but the time for them is limited. You’re the lead. You’ll have leeway to propose improvements and implement them on approval.”
“Hot damn! I’ve wanted to get my fingers in that code,” Josh said. “Does that mean I can install it and start using it myself?”
“After code review, I want to release it to all our testers for code bashing. Until then, your machine only. No other distribution.”
“Got it. What are you working on?”
“I have a new project we’re going to use to test the singularity concept,” Henry said. “It’s a narrow AI trained in just one field. It needs to be kept small, but allowed to acquire new knowledge based on queries. In some ways, it will be similar to the search engine, but it will be searching only a single device and then using predictive text to formulate answers to questions. We might need a few dozen testers for this one.”
“Cool. I’ll start the code review now,” Josh said.
“I’m on the UI final,” Lisa said. “Can’t wait to get the new project.”
“I’m ordering in deli sandwiches for lunch,” Chastity said. “That will take care of our royalty.”
With classes in full swing, Isobel and Luke back at Villanova, and the new pressure on Henry, Lisa, and Josh to get software ready to release, there was little time to consider anything else—like dating. However, at the end of January, Henry received a brief text message from Kaitlyn.
“False alarm. Sorry.”
He responded with a thumbs up emoji and didn’t hear anything else.
Darla Gallitzin, the PR agent, called that day as well, pushing all thoughts of Kaitlyn out of Henry’s mind.
“I’ve arranged for you to have an interview with Gene Grey on the Grey’s Analysis podcast,” Darla said when she connected. “It’s a great opportunity to promote the Open Cloak Optimization software. Could be a big break for us.”
“And why am I doing this instead of Luke? He’s the front man for our company,” Henry said.
“I’m getting the company business exposure with Luke. Harvard Business Review is talking about a bootstrapping article that will feature Luke as one of the young CEOs,” Darla answered. “But Gene is a techie. His show is about technology. He isn’t interested in marketing and promotion. But he is interested in the philosophy of technology. He wants to talk about your personal philosophy regarding AI, and how your product answers some of the big ethical issues generative AI has brought to people’s minds.”
“So, we’ll get right into the ethics discussion?” Henry asked.
“Probably. But keep in mind that Gene will probe for how the software works. Don’t give away the store. And be mindful of your license agreement for the first optimization patent. Don’t imply that it was an early version of this or they’ll be all over you for violating the license agreement.”
“Got it. Okay. When am I supposed to do this interview?”
“Set up a place in your office where you can be on Zoom with him and I’ll set it up for Friday.”
Chastity went to work getting a Zoom-appropriate station set up for Henry. With herself, Josh, and Lisa in the office upstairs, it wasn’t an appropriate place for the interview. Added to that, they’d brought in Simon and Leonard on Friday afternoons to help with code review. Henry was pleased with the results and felt the search engine would be far more efficient than anything else on the market.
The space she determined was best for the interview was Henry’s private study in his third-floor residence. She made a couple of purchases to enhance Henry’s look, including a ring light and hi-res camera, and a background Lisa created, featuring the company logo that would make it look like Henry was in a professional setting.
On Friday afternoon at the appointed time, she checked Henry’s clothing and hair, making sure he was an appropriate representative for the company. She stopped at the last minute and cleaned his glasses. Then she left him alone to accept the meeting request from Gene.
“Hello, and welcome to Grey’s Analysis. This is your host Gene Grey, and we’re launching our 79th edition of the podcast. For today’s chat, I’m fortunate to have with me one of the founders and chief technology officer of Open Cloak Design, Henry Pascal. Welcome, Henry.”
“Thanks, Gene. I’m happy to be here.”
“I have to ask you right off if your name influenced your choice of professions. Are you a descendant of the famed French mathematician Blaise Pascal?” Gene asked.
“Hmm. I don’t think so. Maybe I should pay more attention to ancestry than I have. However, my father, Ryan Pascal, certainly influenced my early interest in computers and programming,” Henry said.
“I just had to ask,” Gene said lightly. “I’m going to jump to another totally inappropriate question because it was a surprise to me when we connected, having not met you before. How old are you, Henry?”
“Yeah, that’s kind of inappropriate, but understandable. I’ll be twenty next week. I’m a junior at the university and expect to graduate next year.”
“I ask because I’ve purchased a copy of Open Cloak Optimizer for my computer and I’m seriously impressed that someone so young could develop this software. I was told, though, that you are the sole developer,” Gene said.
“I also have a UI designer,” Henry said. “She’s a college colleague who comes from a similar background and has been designing software interfaces from her early teens.”
“Tell me about the software,” Gene said. “What inspired you to create software for computer optimization?”
“My mother,” Henry laughed. “She was constantly complaining that every software update forced onto to her computer broke something or made it run slower. I tinkered with her computer for years trying to make it run more efficiently.”
“You’ve been developing an AI for years?” Gene asked.
“In a way. When I built my first computer, at age eight, my father explained all the parts to me. He said there were four essential ingredients: hardware, firmware, software, and wetware. The human brain is the wetware part of things. We tell the software, hardware, and firmware what to do. I started developing an AI tool to replicate what the wetware would do in some limited applications.”
“Aren’t you concerned about replacing a human touch with thinking programs?” Gene asked.
“I see a fundamental problem there,” Henry answered. “There is a constant drive for humans to specialize. My mother is a nurse. She has no real idea how to optimize her computer. I could do it because I specialized in computing. But the vast majority of computer users are like my mother. They want the computer to do the tasks they ask of it, quickly and efficiently. But they have neither the working knowledge nor the interest in learning how to optimize their computers.”
“So, the wetware you are replacing is a computer consultant?”
“That’s an interesting way to put it,” Henry said, nodding.
“When the explosion of AI apps hit just a few years ago, there was—and continues to be—a huge outpouring of opposition because it was copying from people without their permission. But now you are producing an AI or artificial intelligence program and suggesting people voluntarily install it on their computers. I’m sure you’re aware of the number of red flags that are being waved at this idea. How do you ever hope to overcome that?”
“Over the past few years, the desire has been to expand into general AI. That is an AI that replicates all the functions of the human brain completely. I believe that is the wrong direction. Oh, we’re learning valuable things from it, but the amount of memory and power that are expended to create a general AI are hundreds of times what is available in a human brain. Maybe that’s why humans tend toward specialization. We only need peripheral awareness of things outside our areas of specialization. And for decades, we’ve been using software to replace those functions we only use rarely.”
“Decades? For example?”
“What’s 361 times 287?” Henry asked. “I’m sure there are people among your listeners who can simply give you that answer off the top of their heads. What do the rest of us do? We go to a calculator app and type in the numbers, press a button and read the result: 103,607. We’ve replaced the bulk of our math specialization with software. Most of us who graduated from college could sit down with a pencil and paper and follow the rules we learned in arithmetic to figure out that answer. But why should we? We have tools to do that.”
“You’re comparing your AI to a calculator?”
“I think that comparison has been made for years and years. Ever since the development of the first calculating machines. The point is that the calculator is a highly specialized tool we use almost every day. It’s not scary. In the same way, other highly specialized AIs can be developed that make specific tasks easier for us. That’s what we’ve done with Open Cloak Optimization. The AI only functions in the area of optimizing your computer the way you’d like it to run. And instead of interrupting your workflow at inopportune times to ask you what you want to do, it learns how you work and makes adjustments to your computer when it is idle.”
“And I suppose you collect all that information so you can push advertising and promotion to the customer,” Gene said.
“No. That’s the other flaw with the huge AIs that make people not trust them. They are connected to the cloud and report the information about your usage to agencies for use in promoting other products. Our AI will work on a completely disconnected computer because it does not access or report to anyone but the person installing it. You can open the UI and ask for reports on what it has done, but you are the only one who has access to that information. You called it a consultant a while ago. I’d call it a personal assistant for optimizing your computer. It’s not a personal assistant to constantly search out things it thinks you might be interested in buying. It is specialized like a calculator.”
“An application this powerful must take up a huge amount of computer memory and storage,” Gene suggested, already knowing the answer.
“No. That would be contrary to the purpose for the app in the first place. All the information needed to train the AI is already located on your computer, so it doesn’t need to create any other huge database to learn from. It would function on less than 100mb of memory when active. You probably have a dozen applications running on your computer right now that are taking up more memory than that—like this communication program that makes it possible for us to have a conversation between Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley as if we’re in the same room. Added to that, the application only activates when the computer is idle, so it doesn’t occupy any cycles you might be using.”
“This is fascinating, Henry. Let’s go into what the application actually changes on your computer in order to optimize it,” Gene said.
The conversation occupied a full hour, but Gene said the edited version would probably be about forty minutes.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
