by Alan Tien
Mr. Smith’s class was different. We were supposed to use our hands in MakerSpace. MakerSpaces started out a long time ago as a playground within schools, basically a modernized version of “shop.” But instead of learning how to drill, lathe and weld, the original MakerSpaces allowed students to play with “3D printers,” which were very new and expensive at the time. Nowadays, everyone has one at home, and we just call them “printers.” They make, or “print,” most utilitarian things needed at home. If you want something beautiful or extremely durable, it’s still better to buy something mass-manufactured or even hand-built, but the printed items were fine for most basic things used on a daily basis.
Mr. Smith made his MakerSpace focus on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics. There were tons of very clever robots out there, but they all approximated human intelligence; they didn’t pass the “Turing test.” Mr. Smith shared this definition of the Turing test from the net:
A test devised by the English mathematician Alan M. Turing to determine whether or not a computer can be said to think like a human brain.
In an attempt to cut through the philosophical debate about how to define "thinking," Turing devised a subjective test to answer the question, "Can machines think?" and reasoned that if a computer acts, reacts and interacts like a sentient being, then call it sentient.
The test is simple: a human interrogator is isolated and given the task of distinguishing between a human and a computer based on their replies to questions that the interrogator poses. After a series of tests are performed, the interrogator attempts to determine which subject is human and which is an artificial intelligence.
The computer's success at thinking can be quantified by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject.
We set ourselves the lofty goal of creating the world’s first true AI. Really quite silly considering that our school’s computer, though quite powerful for a school to own, was like a single neuron in a brain compared to the computing power of the supercomputers that the think tanks and R&D centers were using to reach the same goal. We had already passed the year of 2045, one of the more famous dates predicted for “singularity,” when AI was supposed to surpass human intelligence. The AIs out there are wickedly smart and can do all sorts of astounding things, but none of them have proven self-awareness yet.
The goal was far enough out that it basically gave us scope to do anything we wanted. The other kids in the class were way better programmers than I was, but I was the best at wiring things up, and putting together the Lego-like pieces to build a robot. Everyone was a theorist because the Chinese prized the thinking part; the doing part was seen as beneath them. “Getting your hands dirty” was not a good thing. So I was the engineer, the necessary evil to build an actually functioning robot instead of just a piece of software.
I worked best with a boy who strangely went by an English nickname, Willy. I wanted to explain to him that no self-respecting teenager would keep the childish “y” affectation to their name. Billy’s became Bill. Sammy’s became Sam. Joey’s became Joe. But even worse, he didn’t realize that the way he spelled his name was what we called, you know, a guy’s private parts when we were kids.
However, considering my own name challenges in China, I vowed to tell Willy to change his name only if he ever went to America, which was unlikely. I subtly tried to change it for him by calling him “Will,” but he stubbornly told me it was “Willy. With a ‘y.’ ” As if he were proud of the spelling too.
I could just imagine the harassment he would get in the US, from the “in group” in my old school. Those jocks would tease anyone for even whiffing of homosexuality, even though the last resisting state of Alabama had eventually legalized gay marriages. They would tease you mercilessly if you weren’t wearing the most fashionable clothes, and god forbid if your socks weren’t matching. I winced at the thought of this slight Chinese boy introducing himself as “Willy, with a ‘y’ ” to those jocks.
That was one benefit of being in China. I never had to worry about being teased by what I wore or if I had bed head. I just got out of bed, threw on whatever clothes were on top in my drawer, and ran to the bus. No, the Chinese kids didn’t tease on appearances. But, they would tease you if you said something wrong, particularly if you got the tones wrong.
Mandarin Chinese has 4 tones, which makes it sound “sing-songy” to older Americans who grew up before learning Mandarin was compulsory in schools. But even for the American kids who grew up learning Chinese, the tones were difficult to master because English is non-tonal. I used to think it was an issue with our vocal chords not being able to reproduce the sound correctly. Kind of like my excuse that I sang out-of-tune because I had a bad voice for music.
But then, I met a rare deaf kid who was on an exchange program to my American school. He came from a country so poor that they didn’t even have the medical facilities to cure such a simple disability as deafness. He spoke really funny, and I then realized it wasn’t because there was any problem with his vocal chords, but it was because he couldn’t hear what he was saying and couldn’t compare that to how it was supposed to sound. So I realized I couldn’t sing well not because of any problems with my voice but because I was tone-deaf.
So though I could approximate the 4 tones in Chinese, having been drilled in it since preschool, I still sometimes messed them up, in amusing ways to the Chinese kids. There was one time when a kid was kissing up to a teacher, and it was sickening me, even though the teacher didn’t seem to mind or even notice. After class, I said, “Pai ma pi!” which literally translates to “Slap a horse’s ass” but means “to flatter, to fawn on.” I thought it was pretty clever of me to use a local idiom, but it backfired on me. The kids who heard me started cracking up and repeating my hilarious mispronunciation to others around.
The word “ma” has many meanings based on the context and tone. As a simple example, ma1 (first tone) means “mother,” ma2 means “numb,” ma3 means “horse,” and ma4 means “to yell at.” Well, I guess my ma3 was too flat and sounded like ma1. To my fellow classmates, it sounded like I had said “Slap mom’s ass.”
After a few similar mistakes, I learned the pattern. The Chinese teased you based on what you did, whereas the Americans based it on how you looked. Now that I understood the difference, I tried hard not to say things the wrong way mostly by not saying much at all. But I was relieved I didn’t have to keep up my appearances, as I had done in America.
I know this teasing pattern may sound like a conflict with my first experience, being bullied about my name. But in reality those kids weren’t focusing on my name. No, they were hitting at the core, highlighting the fact that I wasn’t Chinese, that I was a foreign devil unwelcomed in their land.
What seems like another contradiction to my observations around teasing is when the Chinese note the obvious embarrassing fact, like “You have a big zit on your nose.” In the US, they would say something sarcastic, like, “Did you grow a second nose?” But in China, they’re just calling it as they see it, not really trying to embarrass you, even though that’s what it does. I had to learn not to react angrily. Like my efforts to control my sarcasm, I just had to play it straight and agree, “Yes, I do have a bit zit on my nose.”
Anyway, with all that cleared up (Ha ha, get it? Zit? Cleared up? Never mind.), let’s get back to Willy. We worked great together. He was a whiz at programming, often taking my pages of code and rewriting it into a few lines that did the same thing, more elegantly and more efficiently. Yeah, I know it’s strange I’m talking about coding.
Most people just work at the meta level, reusing the Common Objects Library (COL), but if you’re trying to break new ground, you can’t just take what’s off the shelf. So we had to go retro and write our own objects and actions in actual code. Though Willy was amazing at the coding, he was hopeless with the building of the robot.
It was weird; someone so smart couldn’t seem to connect the wire from one end to the other without mi
xing up the colors and frying the whole contraption. I frankly thought of accusing him of faking his stupidity just so he wouldn’t have to do the manual work. But then I realized I wouldn’t have anything to do, so I gladly became his partner and accepted my supporting cast role.
Our overarching assumption was that it was unlikely 2 teenagers were going to break the code on AI, so we decided to stand on the shoulders of giants. We basically downloaded every AI bit of code we could unearth from the public domain and tried to find some way to mash them together. It was really like a big integration project.
Some AI instruction sets were better for solving problems; some with language; some with dealing with sensors and motors; some with deciphering human emotions. My job was to find the best open source example for a particular function, and Willy would then hack away to make that piece of code work with the rest of our project. He often shook his head in disgust at the poor programming style and debated whether to rewrite it from scratch. Reading code was like listening to music for him, and he had perfect pitch. He could instantly see where the genius lie in the code and extract that bit out.
While he was doing the hard work of linking the different pieces and encouraging them to play nice with each other, I worked on our physical robot. Most of the other classmates were working on fighting robots to take part in the All China Robot Ultimate Fighting Championship (“ACRUFC” was an unwieldy acronym in English, but it sounded fine in Chinese characters), the winning team not only gaining access to the most prestigious universities automatically but also garnering the adoration of teenagers throughout the land. Well truth be told, mostly the adoration of boy teenagers.
We decided a different tack. I was building our robot – which we started calling Willstin (“Willy” + “Austin”; yeah, very imaginative) – for speed, flexibility, and, I admit it, cuteness to get the girls. I remembered how my dog in the US was such a girl-magnet whenever I walked it through the park. If Willstin could only be half as cute, I’d be set.
I made Willstin have big round eyes, like a doll. Funny thing is the girls liked small eyes on boys but big eyes on dolls. Too bad I wasn’t a doll. I gave Willstin just a button of a nose and a very small mouth. I wasn’t going for anatomic accuracy; I was hoping to tap that human instinct to love small and cute things that saves us from throwing out crying babies.
For Willstin’s skin, I was experimenting with a rubber polymer that was light and strong and perhaps most importantly, cheap. The cool thing about it was that it could change colors. I could make Willstin change colors to a beat, for instance. Now I had to work on his arms and legs to see if could make him dance!
Mr. Smith would often give me tips as I worked, but he couldn’t really help Willy; Willy was way beyond Mr. Smith’s programming abilities.
After school, on the days I wasn’t doing language exchange with Chang Lin, I would come to MakerSpace to tinker on Willstin. Sometimes Willy was there, but most of the time, he worked from home where he had his computer lab set up just the way he liked it. He would occasionally ping me to connect Willy to the net so he could download some new piece of software he had just finished, to see if it would actually do what he intended it to do. Most of the time it did, but sometime there would be a bug that would cause Willstin to go into hysterics, so I would have to pull the physical plug.
I always felt a little guilty doing so, as I felt his big blue eyes staring at me accusingly. “Sorry,” I would say as I shut him down, and then I would feel stupid for apologizing to my robot.
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One weekend, a few months into the school year, my mom called me down from my cave, my bedroom. “Austin, can you come downstairs? I’d like you to meet someone.”
The someone was a tall Chinese man, dressed in a government official’s long gown. I immediately bowed and stayed that way until he said, “Rise.” I noted that his gown was a golden color, indicating his rank was pretty high up.
“Austin, this is Mr. Li. He is my friend.” The way my mom said “friend” made me glance at her quickly. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Mr. Li strangely. “Mr. Li has kindly asked me to go with him on a business next week.” It took me a second to realize why the look was so strange – it was the way I looked when I peered at Chang Lin when she wasn’t looking. My eyes half-lidded as I became suspicious. Did Mom go get herself a boyfriend without telling me?
Some unidentified feelings roiled in me, and I felt my palms get sweaty. A few competing thoughts crowded my head. How dare Mom find a boyfriend when she’s still married to Dad? But Dad left Mom! And Mom’s been so unhappy. I should be happy for her that she’s found someone, a Chinese government official at that!
Before the part of my neocortex that manages manners and etiquette could react, my animal fight-or-flight part of the brain rushed past the defenses and threw the impertinent words out of my mouth. “So what ministry are you part of?” What I meant was, “Are you good enough for my mom?”
My hands flew up to my mouth, as if trying to catch the words before they got to my target’s ears. Even with my mixed martial arts training, my reflexes were slower than the speed of sound.
My mom’s eyes grew big. She stood stock still. What I had just done was punishable by lashes, speaking to an official before being asked to and without the proper honorifics.
But Mr. Li acted as if nothing out of the norm had happened. “Hello Austin. You are a very lucky boy to get to come to Shanghai.” He meant I was lucky as a white boy to come to China at all. “Your mother tells me you are doing well at school. Education is the bedrock of our society.” He then said, in a didactic voice:
Zan Yu said, "Once there are so many people, what should be done?"
"Enrich them," said the Master.
"Once they are enriched, what next?"
"Educate them."
How did I know he was going to quote Confucius? But my neocortex was finally getting a semblance of control over the rest of my brain, and I nodded submissively, mumbling, “Yes sir.”
“As you may know, I’m from the Ministry of Education. Your mother’s work has been invaluable to us. It’s helpful to have an outsider’s point of view.”
He wasn’t even intentionally insulting us by calling my mom an “outsider.” Even though she was of 100% pure Chinese blood, she grew up in America and thus was still a barbarian, albeit better than foreign devils like my dad and Mr. Smith.
I felt like quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:
Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles.
I was trembling a bit as I fought to bring my limbic system to heel. My martial arts master popped into my head, telling me to breathe, to focus. I took a deep breath and blew out slowly, hoping it wasn’t too obvious.
Mr. Li continued without noticing my battle of emotions. Or perhaps noticing and not caring. “We have an important meeting with the Ministry next week in Beijing, and I have asked your mother to attend. I’m sure you understand what a great honor this is.”
My mother finally recovered from my breach of etiquette and said, “Ding Ding ayi will take care of you, ok? Please listen to what she says. I will be in meetings all day so I won’t be able to call you, and I can’t take any calls either. You do understand, don’t you honey?” Her eyes pleaded with me.
“Yes Mom. I’ll be fine with Ding Ding.” Ding Ding was our “ayi,” which is a euphemism for “domestic helper.” Ayi literally means “aunt,” and in the Chinese culture where family relationships are of paramount importance, all your parent’s adult friends are called “aunt” or “uncle.”
Like Willy, Ding Ding didn’t know how silly her name sounded in English. Her given name was “Ding,” and it was common to say it twice as a cute, easy-to-remember nickname. I tried to make her name cooler by calling her “Double D,” but Ding Ding would only recognize her Chinese name, sort of like Willy ignoring my attempts to call him “Will.”
I liked Ding Ding a lot. For all pract
ical purposes, she was my caretaker, doing all the household chores my dad used to do in the US like laundry, cooking, shopping, and cleaning. She even helped me with my Chinese when I was too embarrassed to ask Chang Lin. But I was old enough not to really need a babysitter. I think it just made my mom feel better that she wasn’t abandoning me.
Having told me about the trip, Mr. Li was finished with me. He turned to my mom and launched into complex Chinese that I couldn’t understand. My mom gave me a quick smile, which I read as, “You can go now. I love you.” I beat a quick retreat to my cave and turned up the music real loud. I was a real rebel, blasting the music in my headphones.
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“Man, you’re sulky. What’s up?”
Even though I was trying hard to be unreachable, I was secretly proud of how good Chang Lin’s English had gotten, being able to say that line just like an American girl. Too bad my Chinese hadn’t improved at the same rate. Girls are just better at languages, I consoled myself. Unfortunately, Chang Lin’s math was also better than mine.
“What’s up?” she repeated, this time looking up from her books.
“Nothin.” I wanted to be drawn out. She obliged and asked me the third time, which is the barest minimum number of times required for a boy to keep his pride intact before revealing any inner thoughts.
“Really, it’s nothing. It’s just my mom’s going away next week, to Beijing, and it’s the first time she’ll be away for that long since we’ve been to MK.” I didn’t mention that she was going with Mr. Li.