“Good luck,” says Jax. He waves as the seraph and his teammates take flight and dive in formation toward a distant valley.
Ana’s reminded of that encounter a few days later, when she’s reading a discussion on the user-group forums:
From: Stuart Gust
Last night I played SoH with some people who take a Drayta on their missions, and while he wasn’t much fun, he was definitely useful to have around. It made me wonder if it has to be one or the other. Those Sophonce digients aren’t any better than ours. Couldn’t our digients be both fun and useful?
From: Maria Zheng
Are you hoping to sell copies of yours? You think you can raise a better Andro?
Maria’s referring to a Sophonce digient named Andro, trained by his owner, Bryce Talbot, to act as his personal assistant. Talbot demonstrated Andro to VirlFriday, maker of appointment-management software, and got the company’s executives interested. The deal fell through after the executives got demonstration copies; what Talbot hadn’t realized was that Andro was, in his own way, as obsessive as Drayta. Like a dog forever loyal to its first owner, Andro wouldn’t work for anyone else unless Talbot was there to give orders. VirlFriday tried installing a sensory-input filter so each new Andro instantiation perceived his new owner’s avatar and voice as Talbot’s, but the disguise never worked for more than a couple of hours. Before long, all the executives had to shut down their forlorn Andros, who kept looking for the original Talbot.
As a result, Talbot wasn’t able to sell the rights to Andro for anywhere near what he’d hoped. Instead, VirlFriday bought the rights to Andro’s specific genome and a complete archive of his checkpoints, and they’ve hired Talbot to work for them. He’s part of a team that’s restoring earlier checkpoints of Andro and retraining them, attempting to create a version that has the same personal-assistant skills and is also willing to accept a new owner.
From: Stuart Gust
No, I don’t mean selling copies. I’m just thinking about Zaff doing work the way dogs guide the blind or sniff out drugs. My goal isn’t to make money, but if there’s something the digients can do that people are willing to pay for, it would prove to all the skeptics out there that digients aren’t just for entertainment.
Ana posts a reply:
From: Ana Alvarado
I just want to make sure we’re clear about our motivations. It’d be terrific if our digients learned practical skills, but we shouldn’t think of them as failures if they don’t. Maybe Jax can make money, but Jax isn’t for making money. He’s not like the Draytas, or the weedbots. Whatever puzzles he might solve or work he might do, those aren’t the reason I’m raising him.
From: Stuart Gust
Yes, I agree with that completely. All I meant was that our digients might have untapped skills. If there’s some kind of job they’d be good at, wouldn’t it be cool for them to do that job?
From: Maria Zheng
But what can they do? Dogs were bred to be good at specific things, and Sophonce digients are so single-minded that they only want to do one thing, whether they’re good at it or not. Neither is true for Neuroblast digients.
From: Stuart Gust
We could expose them to lots of different things and see what they have an aptitude for. Give them a liberal arts education instead of vocational training. (I’m only half kidding.)
From: Ana Alvarado
That’s actually not as silly as it might sound. Bonobos have learned to do everything from making stone-cutting tools to playing computer games when they were given the chance. Our digients might be good at things that it hasn’t occurred to us to train them for.
From: Maria Zheng
Just what are we talking about? We’ve already taught them to read. Are we going to give them lessons in science and history? Are we going to teach them critical-thinking skills?
From: Ana Alvarado
I really don’t know. But I think that if we do this, it’s important to have an open mind and not be skeptical. Low expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we aim high, we’ll get better results.
Most of the user-group members are content with their digients’ current education—an improvised mixture of homeschooling, group tutoring, and eduware—but there are some who are excited by the idea of going further. This latter group begins a discussion with their digients’ tutors about expanding the curriculum. Over the course of months, various owners read up on pedagogical theory and try to determine how the digients’ learning style differs from that of chimps or human children, and how to design lesson plans that best accommodate it. Most of the time the owners are receptive to all suggestions, until the question arises of whether the digients might make faster progress if their tutors assigned them homework.
Ana prefers that they find activities that develop skills but which the digients enjoy enough to do on their own. Other owners argue that the tutors ought to give the digients actual assignments to be completed. She’s surprised to read a forum post from Derek in which he supports the idea. She asks him about it the next time they talk.
“Why would you want to make them do homework?”
“What’s wrong with that?” says Derek. “Is this because you once had a mean teacher when you were a kid?”
“Very funny. Come on, I’m serious.”
“Okay, seriously: What’s so bad about homework?”
She hardly knows where to begin. “It’s one thing for Jax to have ways to keep himself entertained outside of class,” she says. “But to give him assignments and tell him he has to finish them even if he doesn’t enjoy it? To make him feel bad if he doesn’t do it? That goes against every principle of animal training.”
“A long time ago, you were the one who told me that digients weren’t like animals.”
“Yes, I did say that,” she allows. “But they’re not tools either. And I know you know that, but what you’re talking about, it sounds like you’re preparing them to do work that they wouldn’t want to do.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not about making them work, it’s about getting them to learn some responsibility. And they might be strong enough to take feeling bad once in a while; the only way to know is to try.”
“Why take the chance of making them feel bad at all?”
“It was something I thought of when I was talking with my sister,” he says. Derek’s sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. “She mentioned that some parents don’t want to push their kids too much, because they’re afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they’re keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.”
It takes her a little time to get used to this idea. Ana’s accustomed to thinking of the digients as supremely gifted apes, and while in the past people have compared apes to children with special needs, it was always more of a metaphor. To view the digients more literally as special-needs children requires a shift in perspective. “How much responsibility do you think the digients can handle?”
Derek spreads his hands. “I don’t know. In a way it’s like Down syndrome; it affects every person differently, so whenever my sister works with a new kid, she has to play it by ear. We have even less to go on, because no one’s ever raised digients for this long before. If it turns out that the only thing we’re accomplishing with homework assignments is making them feel bad, then of course we’ll stop. But I don’t want Marco and Polo’s potential to be wasted because I was afraid of pushing them a little.”