3. Kaitlyn Proves Stereotypes Aren’t Always Wrong

A mother's deathbed advice changes the world.

We hang the clothes of our existence on tiny hooks: Micro-moments, as the philosophers remind us, define our fate.

Such a moment, tragic, affected poor Kaitlyn, when she was aged but 12.

Her mum, Juliana McIntosh, was expiring of a cancer of the more painful and persistent sort. When the end was nigh, the surgeons advised Juliana to make her farewells. That night, pulling an upset wee kid into her arms, she told her that life was short and unpredictable, but full of wonder and adventure. Then, pressing her face into the depths of her daughter’s red curls, she begged Kaitlyn not to be lost to sadness after her mum was gone, but instead to find her desires and passions and follow them, never letting others dictate her course.

Which is of course a tragic deathbed scene. But also a warning – if you find yourself facing the onslaught of the grim reaper, be careful what advice you give your crazily bright, determined yet impressionable daughter.

In the years following that traumatic incident, Juliana’s ‘dear wee muffin’, as she’d called her, took her mum’s fervent speech to heart. She transformed herself, cutting and dying her natively red hair into an ever-varying kaleidoscopic mix of colours and shapes. She searched for and found her passions, starting with an obsessive interest in programming and computing, and as the years went by, a passion for love and sex of a sort that ignores the bounds of gender, convention and constraint.

It turned out quite a mix really, and despite the turmoil she caused in the next few years, I suspect Juliana would have been proud of her. Well, except for her becoming so damnably potty-mouthed.

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Graduating with flying colours, Kaitlyn’s intention had been to travel and seek employment with one of the world’s more prestigious software outfits. But her need for money was pressing, and air fares expensive, so when she saw an ad for a new Wellington software start-up, she decided she should at least chat to them.

So, in a coffee shop overlooking the harbour, Kaitlyn met Dame Joeline Pradesh and Sir Martin Beckett.

Well fair do’s, back then they were bereft of honours, being plain old Martin and Joeline, but they were already brimming with clever ideas. Only a few years senior to Kaitlyn, they’d already started a small software company, and even had a couple of clients. More importantly, they were doing exciting stuff, unique software solutions, of just the kind that appealed to Kaitlyn.

Today, Martin and Joeline are household names, and many a business book extols the cleverness of their strategies and business model. It’s mostly bullshit of course – as will become clear in the course of this yarn. Their acolytes are right about one thing though: When you sit them together, they are among the most convincing software engineers in the world. Joeline, organised, sharper than a Global knife, and innately reassuring. Martin, enthusiastic and articulate, bursting with ideas and charm.

They duly convinced Kaitlyn that it was not in her interest to wander the globe looking for a job; they were going to beat Meta and Alphabet, Alibaba and all the others, and it was all going to happen right here in good old Wellie. They offered her an R&D role, for a pittance really, but with a nice touch of equity. More important to Kaitlyn, it came with a good deal of freedom to pursue her ideas.

She looked at the two of them as they interviewed her over a cup of coffee in café Mojo. She knew little about the world of work, but from what she’d heard of software bosses these two seemed pretty decent. ‘Fuck yeah!’ she said when they’d made their offer. ‘Sounds like fun … I’ll give it a crack.’

Which turned out to be a pretty good career decision, despite the offices of AMG Ltd being located in an old warehouse, and being a deal less classy than those she might have occupied in Sydney or Silicon Valley.

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AMG didn’t start out with the idea of making a system more intrusive than the metaverse and more powerful than the titanium encased killers of ‘I Robot’.

Martin and Jolene just wanted to design an AI that required less data and hardware to make decent decisions. Not a 100% accurate and logical super-brain, but a system that makes good guesses and learns from its mistakes – human intuition on steroids basically. Plenty of others were working on this, but our heroes believed they could create something, quicker and more efficient than its rivals.

They particularly wanted to keep everything small. As Martin later recounted to his biographer: ‘We aimed to replicate the power of Google’s algorithms without a bank of super-computers or needing vast amounts of cloud storage space. So you could fit the guts of the system on an laptop, or even the chip in a fridge, and it would get its power by sharing functions with myriad other small devices.’

Kaitlyn’s arrival added another, weirder, ambition. She noted that computers seldom spontaneously change their objectives in the middle of a task. Ask them to give you a run-down on Antarctic explorers, and they don’t suddenly respond, ‘God this is boring, let’s look at the breeding habits of penguins instead.’ We descendants of Homo habilis, however, can move a task’s goalposts on the merest whim.

You know, you wake up deciding that your morning’s objective is to do a 3km run along the seafront. But it’s a sunny day and the smell of baking from the beach-side café is enticing. In an instant you perceive that really your main aim for today is a nice sit-down with a chocolate Danish and a flat white.

This mental trick, the ‘whim’ principle of objective-changing, was what Kaitlyn desired to teach computers.

AMG then, was attempting to develop AI systems as powerful as anything Silicon Valley had ever dreamed of, but with the ability to work on the chip of an old Nokia phone and the capability of modifying their aims and objectives more regularly than Wellington’s wind changes direction. Pretty cool, huh?

Certainly ambitious, anyway. In most alternative universes not much would have come of it except for the company joining the list of the “interesting idea” start-ups that regularly appear in insolvency proceedings.

But then Kaitlyn intervened.

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