Tomorrow Is Waiting www.strangehorizons.com/2011/20111121/tomorrow-f.shtml By Holli Mintzer 21 November 2011 If you want the truth, it happened because Anji was feeling lazy. Her AI class wasn't all that interesting, nor was it a field she wanted a career in, so there wasn't any reason she could see for trying especially hard. So she came up with a project that didn't look like too much work, and she picked what looked like the easiest way of doing it. Things just got a little out of hand, after that. Anji's AI class was taught by a grad student who seemed as bored as her students. It was a graduation requirement for programmers, even though everyone knew AIs, as a field, weren't going anywhere much. In seventy years of computing nobody yet had designed an AI that passed the Turing test, let alone did anything really interesting. No matter the computing power behind them, AIs just couldn't be as complex as a human brain; everyone knew that. Anji and her classmates still needed to know how to use the little crippleware bots that ran traffic lights and production lines, though, and that meant knowing the basics of AI programming. At least well enough to pass the final. So Anji decided to pick the easiest-looking project off the list of options: Design an AI that mimics the behavior of a public domain character. There was a list of characters to choose from, mostly stuff she'd never heard of. She picked Kermit the Frog because, she figured, there was a ton of footage of Kermit, even if it was mostly fifty years old, and she could just feed old TV shows to a bot until it started acting enough like Kermit to get her a passing grade. Only it wasn't that easy. For one thing, the bot was too stupid to understand that it was meant to be Kermit. Anji used off-the-shelf open-source language- and image-parsing software, so the bot would understand what it what watching, but she had to write a program to key the bot to Kermit in particular. It took forever. It was actually a pretty good challenge, writing a program to convince the bot that it was Kermit the Frog, that the little fuzzy green thing in the old video was itself—that it had a self, for that 1/11 matter. She ended up using concepts and bits of code from the other classes she was taking, pulling a few all-nighters at the library with books on AI design, and just plain making stuff up in a few places. Her code wasn't anything like elegant, but Anji found herself liking the project a lot more than she'd expected to, even as it got harder. She also found herself liking Kermit a lot more than she'd expected to. Anji had never really watched the Muppets before; her parents, like most parents she knew, had treated TV as only slightly less corrupting an influence than refined sugar and gendered toys. But The Muppet Show was really funny—strange, and kind of hokey, but charming all the same. She ended up watching way more of it than she needed just for the project. Then her friend Brian, who was really into robotics, got wind of what she was doing, and demanded the chance to participate. Apparently he had weird, nostalgic parents who'd actually allowed him to watch TV as a kid, and what he'd mostly watched was Sesame Street and the Muppets, so the chance to make a real live AI- powered Kermitbot was too good to pass up. Of course, that made more work for Anji. She had finally gotten the bot keyed to Kermit properly, so it didn't get confused every time there was another Muppet on screen that looked vaguely froggy or was voiced by Jim Henson, and it was sucking down footage at a pretty good clip—luckily there was so much to feed it, on top of the movies: hours and hours of TV specials and commercials and interviews and even outtakes, all of it in character. But now she had to write a whole new suite of programs so the little AI could operate a robot body. Anji started to worry about finishing the project by the due date. For that matter, she was getting behind in her other classes, and it would be downright embarrassing to do poorly in them because AI design, of all things, was taking up her time. The thing was, her little AI was getting kind of interesting. It had started writing its own code about the time she'd gotten it keyed to Kermit properly, which was one of the project requirements, but Anji hadn't expected much more than a few badly parsed lines. Nobody else in her class was getting more than that, but Anji's AI was producing more code all the time. And weird code, too. Anji couldn't really make sense of it, but it was working, apparently: the bot hadn't frozen up or crashed, and it wasn't having any trouble parsing the footage Anji fed it. 2/11 Brian finished his robot a couple of days after Anji got through the last of the footage. He presented it to her proudly, like a cat gives you something really good it's killed and expects your praise for it. "Good, isn't he?" Brian asked, beaming at her, and Anji had to admit it was convincing. Brian had really gone all out: the little robot was fully articulated ("Enough to play the banjo!" Brian pointed out), and perfectly accurate, with plenty of internal memory built in, and a wireless charger. It didn't even need to be plugged in to upload Anji's code. Not that most of it was really Anji's, anymore. She was starting to wonder if this project wasn't getting away from her a little. The one change Brian had made, in designing his robot, was to give it eyelids. He said it was creepy without them. So when Anji hit the key that uploaded her code, the first sign she had that it had worked was when Kermit gave a couple of slow, sleepy blinks. "Oh," he said, sitting up (Anji was glad to see she'd done a good job with the movement programs), "hello there." "Hi, Kermit!" Brian said, all dorkily excited. "I'm Brian. It's really nice to meet you." He elbowed Anji. "Uh, hi," she said. "I'm Anjali. Anji, really." "Hello, Anji," Kermit said. "Pleased to meet you. I'm Kermit the Frog," and hey, that sounded exactly right. Anji was totally getting an A. Anji let Brian keep talking to Kermit, and went to check her computer to make sure everything had uploaded okay. It looked fine: everything running smooth. Only the bot was still writing new code, even as it chatted with Brian. Huh. Anji looked back over at them; Kermit had said something that was making Brian laugh really, really hard. Bots weren't supposed to be very god at telling jokes, were they? They'd covered that in class: how AIs never really seemed to get how jokes worked, and even AIs designed to tell them mostly just produced a sort of unfunny word salad. Maybe Kermit was just quoting the jokes from the footage she'd fed him. AIs could mimic like that, although if she'd built a bot that could mimic good comic timing she deserved more than just an A. In the weeks that followed, it got harder to treat Kermit like a school project. He spent a lot of his time with Brian, who claimed to need to do a bunch of unspecified adjustments to the robot, although this mostly seemed to entail Kermit being shown off to all Brian's friends. Anji didn't 3/11 mind it too much, though, because it gave her more time to try and puzzle out Kermit's code, and also it meant that Kermit acquired a very small banjo and several sets of little clothes from Muppet fans among Brian's friends. And that seemed to make Kermit happy. That was the freaky thing: Anji had designed a bot that could seem to be happy. She wasn't supposed to be able to do that. She was way, way outside the parameters of her project now, into territory that people who studied AI for a living hadn't covered anywhere Anji could find. Because Kermit could, in fact, make jokes—and if he was mimicking them, the originals weren't in the footage Anji had fed him—and he could noodle around on the banjo in a way that sounded nothing like the precision of music- playing AIs Anji had heard. And he could also do things that freaked Anji out on a deep and meaningful personal level, like the afternoon when Kermit, perched on the edge of the bed in Anji's dorm, stopped strumming his banjo and sighed wistfully. "You know, I sure do miss Fozzie," he announced, and Anji stopped typing mid- keystroke. "What did you say?" Anji asked, trying not to sound as startled as she felt. "Oh, it's not that I don't like it here, Anji. You and Brian are awfully nice. But Fozzie's my best friend, you know? After a while, you get to miss things. The squeak of a rubber chicken.