“Pongo pliy bill,” says the digient, startling Ana.
“Playing with the ball? That’s great. Can I play too?”
“No. Pongo bill.”
“Please?”
The chimp looks around and then, never letting go of the ball, toddles over to a scattering of wooden blocks. It nudges one of them in Robyn’s direction. “Robyn pliy blicks.” It sits back down. “Pongo pliy bill.”
“Okay then.” Robyn walks back over to Ana. “What do you think?”
“That’s amazing. I didn’t know digients had come so far.”
“It’s all pretty recent; our dev team hired a couple of PhDs after seeing their conference presentation last year. Now we’ve got a genomic engine that we call Neuroblast, and it supports more cognitive development than anything else currently out there. These fellows here”—she gestures at the day-care-center inhabitants—“are the smartest ones we’ve generated so far.”
“And you’re going to sell them as pets?”
“That’s the plan. We’re going to pitch them as pets you can talk to, teach to do really cool tricks. There’s an unofficial slogan we use in-house: ‘All the fun of monkeys, with none of the poop throwing.’”
Ana smiles. “I’m starting to see where an animal-training background would be handy.”
“Yeah. We aren’t always able to get these guys to do what they’re told, and we don’t know how much of that is in the genes and how much is just because we aren’t using the right techniques.”
Ana watches as the panda-shaped digient picks up the toy car with one paw and examines the underside; with its other paw it cautiously bats at the wheels. “How much do these digients start out knowing?”
“Practically nothing. Let me show you.” Robyn activates a video screen on one wall of the day-care center; it displays footage of a room decorated in primary colors with a handful of digients lying on the floor. Physically they’re no different from the ones in the day-care center now, but their movements are random, spasmodic. “These guys are newly instantiated. It takes them a few months subjective to learn the basics: how to interpret visual stimuli, how to move their limbs, how solid objects behave. We run them in a hothouse during that stage, so it all takes about a week. When they’re ready to learn language and social interaction, we switch to running them in real time. That’s where you would come in.”
The panda pushes the toy car back and forth across the floor a few times, and then makes a braying sound, Mo mo mo. Ana realizes that the digient is laughing.
Robyn continues, “I know you studied primate communication in school. Here’s a chance to put that to use. What do you think? Are you interested?”
Ana hesitates; this is not what she envisioned for herself when she went to college, and for a moment she wonders how it has come to this. As a girl she dreamed of following Fossey and Goodall to Africa; by the time she got out of grad school, there were so few apes left that her best option was to work in a zoo; now she’s looking at a job as a trainer of virtual pets. In her career trajectory you can see the diminution of the natural world, writ small.
Snap out of it, she tells herself. It may not be what she had in mind, but this is a job in the software industry, which is what she went back to school for. And training virtual monkeys might actually be more fun than running test suites, so as long as Blue Gamma is offering a decent salary, why not?
His name is Derek Brooks, and he’s not happy with his current assignment. Derek designs the avatars for Blue Gamma’s digients, and normally he enjoys his job, but yesterday the product managers asked him for something he considers a bad idea. He tried to tell them that, but the decision is not his to make, so now he has to figure out how to do a decent job of it.
Derek studied to be an animator, so in one respect creating digital characters is right up his alley. In other respects, his job is very different from that of a traditional animator. Normally he’d design a character’s gait and its gestures, but with digients those traits are emergent properties of the genome; what he has to do is design a body that manifests the digients’ gestures in a way that people can relate to. These differences are why a lot of animators—including his wife, Wendy—don’t work on digital life-forms, but Derek loves it. He feels that helping a new life-form express itself is the most exciting work an animator could be doing.
He subscribes to Blue Gamma’s philosophy of AI design: experience is the best teacher, so rather than try to program an AI with what you want it to know, sell ones capable of learning and have your customers teach them. To get customers to put in that kind of effort, everything about the digients has to be appealing: their personalities need to be charming, which the developers are working on, and their avatars need to be cute, which is where Derek comes in. But he can’t simply give the digients enormous eyes and short noses. If they look like cartoons, no one will take them seriously. Conversely, if they look too much like real animals, their facial expressions and ability to speak become disconcerting. It’s a delicate balancing act, and he has spent countless hours watching reference footage of baby animals, but he’s managed to design hybrid faces that are endearing but not exaggeratedly so.
His current assignment is a bit different. Not satisfied with cats, dogs, monkeys, and pandas, the product managers have decided that there needs to be more variety among the avatars, something other than baby animals. They suggest robots.
The idea makes no sense to Derek. Blue Gamma’s entire strategy relies on people’s affinity for animals. The digients learn through positive reinforcement, the way animals do, and their rewards include interactions like being scratched on the head or receiving virtual food pellets. These make perfect sense with an animal avatar, but with a robot avatar they look comical and forced. If they were selling physical toys, robots would have the advantage of being cheaper to build than plausible animals, but production costs don’t matter in the virtual realm, and animal faces are more expressive. Providing robotic avatars seems like offering imitations at the same time that you’re selling the real thing.
His train of thought is interrupted by a knock at his doorway; it’s Ana, the new member of the testing team.
“Hey Derek, you should watch the video of this morning’s training session. They were pretty funny.”
“Thanks, I’ll check them out.”
She’s about to leave, but then stops. “You look like you’re having a bad day.”
Derek thinks hiring a former zookeeper was a good idea. Not only did she devise a training program for the digients, she had a great suggestion about improving their food.
Other digient vendors provide a limited variety of digient food pellets, but Ana suggested that Blue Gamma radically open up the forms that digient food takes; she pointed out that a varied diet keeps zoo animals happier and makes feeding time more fun for visitors. Management agreed, and the development team edited the digients’ basic reward map to recognize a wide range of virtual foods; they couldn’t actually simulate different chemical compounds—Data Earth’s physics simulation is nowhere near good enough for that—but they added parameters to stand in for a food’s taste and texture and designed an interface for the food-dispensing software allowing users to concoct their own recipes. It’s turned out to be a big success; the individual digients each have their own favorites, and the beta testers report that they love catering to their digient’s preferences.
“Management decided that the animal avatars aren’t enough,” says Derek. “They want robot avatars, too. Can you believe it?”