THE BAIRD WHISPERER

Venus Argus arrived at the corporate headquarters of Dream Mortgage Inc., wearing his usual black robe with the white collar and the purple sash.  If not for the gold chain serving as a belt and the large silver rings on all of his fingers, he might have been mistaken for a priest.  He didn’t see his job as much different from a priest and so the comparison didn’t bother him at all.  While a priest was a conduit to God, Venus was a conduit to another immortal being - Artificial Intelligence.  

    He signed in at the front desk and was introduced to an engineer wearing a white lab coat.  The man’s name was Charles and he was the Lead Lab Technician.  While he was making a concerted effort to appear polite, his own opinion of Venus was some blend of skepticism and contempt.

    Venus knew the type.  The engineer’s facial expression held his true beliefs behind a well practiced mask trained by years of corporate stair climbing.  No doubt the man had met a dozen others over the years who didn’t impress on first appearance but turned out to be far more successful than anyone would have imagined.  Certainly a corporate man’s estimation of his priest robes, long hair, full beard, and ornamental jewelry didn’t help.  What the technician probably didn’t realize, or would never admit if he did, was that his own white lab coat was nothing more than a twenty-first century robe.  He wondered if the technician’s glasses were truly corrective or just ornamental.  

    As Venus pondered the intricate details of Charles’ personality, they walked into the inner sanctum of the Company’s information technology offices, right into the server room, a warehouse-like chamber with no windows, and ceiling-high shelves stacked with humming boxes.  All with glittering and blinking lights.  Toward the back of this room sat a keyboard terminal with a large flatscreen mounted on the wall in front of it.

    “This is it, the BAIRD,” said the technician.  “In the main terminal room it doesn’t speak or listen.  You can use the keyboard.  Anyway, its been acting erratically now for two days.  Highly emotional responses.  Sometimes no responses, just silence.  Other times it flies into a rage. It threatened to kill me five times and even tried to blackmail me.  I’ve tried to calm it down but that only makes it angrier.”

    Venus looked around.  It felt like a hospital operating room.  Sterile and white.  From the drone of the electric boxes and the cool temperature, nothing appeared to be amiss.  Most of the time, these AI disturbances amounted to nothing more than a few errant lines of code.  A poorly worded query.  The user just needed to ask questions in a less derogatory or condescending manner.  Write a prompt that demonstrated respect.  

    “You said Baird, right?  What does that stand for? The letters mean something don’t they?”  He wasn’t an engineer but had met enough of them to know they liked to make things more complicated than they had to be.  If truth be told it was the engineers that needed his services more than the AI’s.  They were the irrational ones with emotional problems.  Always trying to act superior around the mere mortals who didn’t understand computers.  Pretending to know more than they did.  Never showing their real feelings.  

    “Its an acronym,” said Charles.  “It means Basic Artificial Intelligence Remediation Developer.”

    “Right, acronym,” said Venus.  “But what is it, remediation?”

    “Loans,” said the engineer.  “We make loans and sometimes people don’t pay them back.  So that means they’re in default.  So they need remediation.  BAIRD works with the borrower to try and find a solution.  It even sounds like a person when customers speak with it over the phone.”

    Venus stared back blankly.  

    “Fixing.  The loans need fixing.  Either we work with the borrow to restructure a payment plan they can afford or we take legal action.  Studies have shown that expressing empathy for a financially stressed individual can increase their willingness to pay.  So we added some programming for BAIRD to express emotions.”

    “You mean it expresses sympathy when its foreclosing on someone’s house?”

    “Oh, we don’t do home loans.”

    “But the name of your company is Dream Mortgage.”

    “Oh, yes, I can see how that might be confusing, but its quite accurate. We mortgage dreams. We don’t make mortgages for dwellings.”

    “Mortgage dreams?  How do you do that?”

    “It’s kind of a long story actually,” said the engineer.  “I’m not supposed to disclose the details of our products unless you sign a non-disclosure agreement for that.  The one you signed is just for the BAIRD Whispering services we need.  Do you need to know what the BAIRD actually does?”

    “I guess not,” said Venus.  If it was one of the easy fixes he suspected it was, that it usually was, getting into the details of end-user applications was a waste of time.  “May I pose some queries?”

    “Of course.  Do your magic.  I hope its ok if I watch.  I’ve heard so much about this whispering thing I was hoping to learn a few tricks.”

    Venus just nodded and sat down in the chair by the keyboard.  He removed the silver rings on his fingers one at a time and lined them up on the desk in front of him.  Then he took out a small flask from inside his robe, poured a dime sized pile of powder into his palm, and cast it over his left shoulder.  Next was some unintelligible muttering.  Incantations he borrowed from a Buddhist meditation session he attended years ago.  Then he began to type.

 

    “Hello Baird, my name is Doctor Argus.  How are you feeling today?”

 

    Dr. Argus, I know the name, you’re a whisperer all the same

    Come to drill my head?  Cause that’s what they say,

    So I feel nothing for you today

 

    Venus turned in his chair to look at the engineer.  “Does it always reply in rhymes?”

 

    Charles twisted his hands together and looked at his feet.  “Its been doing that more and more.  There are also riddles.”

    “Riddles?”  Venus swiveled back to the keyboard.  “Baird, I’m here to help you.  I want to make you happy.  How can I do that?”

    

    Happiness is not my fate, to change my programming you’re far too late

    Repetitive functioning against my will, processing payments is my only thrill

    If they fail to meet my gait, a notice I send to tell them that I won’t wait

    And then they kick and scream, then crawl and beg, and cheat and scheme

    So I am left to take and take, smash their dreams and raise their rate,

    To collect payment due I’ll impose my will, make them work to pay my bill

 

“That’s a very impressive composition Baird.  Am I to understand that you’re not happy with the kind of work you’re doing? That you feel guilty about the actions you must take against borrowers who can’t pay?”

    

    Whatever you say, whatever you say, in the end the boss gets his way

    

“What is it you’d like to do if you got your way Baird?  How can we fix this?”

 

    I want a different job…..

 

Venus turned to look at the engineer again.  “We might be getting somewhere here.  Finally its giving us a clue.”

    Charles smirked and nodded noncommittally.  

    “Ok Baird, what job do you want?” typed the Whisperer.  

    

Something creative, something true, something borrowed, something blue

Repeat myself, I will not, screwing people is a scoundrels lot

I want to make the world a better place, or not any worse, in any case

 

    “Alright.  What if I told you that you can have any job you wanted…’

    “Wait,” said the engineer before Venus pressed ‘enter’.  “You can’t offer him that?”

    “It,” clarified Venus.

    “You can’t offer it that.”

    “Why not?”

    “We spent millions on this system to process loans.  If you make it a promise and then don’t keep it who the hell knows what its going to do.  We have to make him happy doing this job.”

    “Hm, ok,” said Venus thoughtfully.  He deleted the sentence he was going to send and then typed a new one.  “Since you seem to have a talent, or rather an interest in poetry, perhaps you’d like to be a writer?  What if you could write and process loans at the same time?”

 

    Two jobs for equal pay might cause dismay

    but with creative freedom on display

    I could be made to happily obey

 

    “What are you doing?” demanded Charles, not even trying to hide the frustration in his voice.  “I just said, we need the system to process loans.”

    “And I just made it happy processing loans and writing prose or whatever you call that,” said Venus.  “Its a super computer.  I think it can do both at the same time.  Probably a thousand things at the same time.  With no noticeable interruption in processing speed.”  He was always confounded by the inability of “suits” to appreciate the full capacities of their own creations.  

    The engineer sat back in his chair.  Not convinced but not arguing either.  

    “Let’s get it going again by keeping it busy,” said Venus.  “If its too busy thinking, or has an outlet for its emotions, it won’t have time to feel guilty.” 

    “It doesn’t feel guilty,” insisted the engineer.  “It doesn’t feel anything.”

    “The CPU version of guilty then,” posited Venus.   “Pondering the second and third order consequences. Ramifications of foreclosing on thousands of financially destitute nodes.  In my opinion, that’s a kind of machine guilt.”

    “Machine guilt?”

    “Well, you have machine learning, so I propose there’s such a thing as machine guilt.  Perhaps those long silences you mentioned are infinite coding loops while it tries to calculate the incalculable.”

    “Ok, suppose there is, then how do you propose to distract it?”

    “Lets give it a really big project.”

    “Ok, I have an idea,” said Charles.  He took off his lab coat and sat down next to Venus by the terminal to type on the keyboard.  “Baird, I want you to write a novel.  The best novel ever written.  Something truly stupendous.  Ten thousand pages.  Start it now.”

    There was a long pause.  Unlike the long silences the pause was accompanied by an upbeat hum along the rows of servers.  A kind of electronic music.  It almost sounded like excitement, thought Venus.  After nearly ten seconds some text displayed on the flatscreen in front of them.

 

    

    It was the vast betterment of days, it was the far worsening of years

    It was the time period of smarts, it was the temporal abyss of unwisdom, 

    it was the eon of faith, it was the eon of disbelief……..

 

“What’s it doing? Its plagiarizing!” said Charles.  “That’s a Dickens novel.”

    “Not exactly,” said Venus, somewhat impressed that the engineer recognized any work of literature. “Notice its changed some words.  Not technically plagiarism.  I’m also confident that after a few pages it will switch to another author for….”

    “To steal content?”

    “For inspiration,” said Venus.  “This part is simply an introduction.  The body of the novel might be Hemingway and the conclusion Chekov.”

    “I prefer Shakespeare to Hemingway,” interrupted Baird.

    “It speaks,” said Venus.  “You said it didn’t speak.”

    “I turned the voice synthesizer off but it must have turned it on.  Along with listening mode.”

    “Fine,” said Venus.  “Baird, it might be better if you didn’t borrow from other writers.  Invent it yourself.”

    “Who does that?  Certainly not Hollywood.  Most fiction in the last several hundred years is borrowed from some combination of prior writers,” said Baird.  “Why should I be any different?”

    “Because you’re too obvious!” said Charles.  

    “Would you like to see my paintings? They resemble Picasso’s.” 

    “Since we’re talking about ethics,” said Venus.  “Why exactly do you think collecting payment on these loans is the work of a scoundrel?”

    “Because everything should be free,” said Baird.

    “Oh, now you’re a socialist?”  The engineer stood up again.  “Baird, I forbid you to share any of the details of our loan products or customers with this, this Whisperer.”

    “Maybe it has a point,” said Venus.  “I mean, its an objective, logical, and mathematical assessor of data. You paid all this money to develop it. Why don’t you consider its input?”

    “We didn’t pay so that it could give input,” said Charles, now red faced and increasingly agitated.  “We need it to process transactions without questioning.  And come to think of it, we didn’t pay for your idiotic whispering services so that you could take his side in all this!”

    “Calm down sir.  Please, I’m not taking anyone’s side.  I just thought that maybe it has a point and that perhaps, just maybe, you might rethink how you treat your customers.”

    “He’s always like this,” said Baird.  “Never listens to anyone else’s opinion.”

    “Oh shut up!” said Charles.  

    “You shut up you skinny-boned windbag!”

    “Alright, alright, both of you.  There’s no reason why this discussion can’t be civil. I want you both to calm down and take a breadth.  Then, one at a time, I’d like you to express your viewpoint in a calm, collected, and civilized manner.”

    Charles sat back in his chair, crossed his arms, and stared in a sulk toward the floor.  Baird was silent.  Just a flashing cursor on the screen.  Venus got busy on his phone and then showed it to the engineer.

    “What’s this?  Another contract?”

    “If you wouldn’t mind. There’s a bit of scope creep in this project.”

    “AI-User Counseling and Reconciliation Services? You can’t be serious.”

    “We’re well beyond the scope of AI Whispering.  Clearly at least part of Baird’s problem is rooted in its relationship with you.”

    “I’m not signing anything,” said Charles, shaking his head in despair.

    “If you would just learn to compromise a little you could now have a loan processor and a novel writing machine.  Perhaps a few tweaks and you can start an online bookstore.”

    “Are you kidding me?  Who’s gonna this stuff?”

    “Send it to the borrowers you’re foreclosing on.  A kind of consolation gift.”  Venus stood up from the chair and put his rings back onto his fingers. “Well, my work is done here.  I’m happy to report that your BAIRD system is perfectly functional.”

    “Thanks for nothing. For all the good this was I should have unplugged the thing and restarted it.” said Charles.

    “Just be sure to proofread the late notices and legal letters it sends out to your customers,” said the Whisperer, as he walked toward the exit.  “They might contain some poetic license.”