When Your Kid Brings Home a Neural Network
The first steps. The first day of school. The first existential crisis. The first time they ask why you don’t earn as much as a FAANG engineer.
Parenthood was always going to have a series of road bumps, but what might the future hold?
That Special Moment
But nothing prepares you for the moment your child says they’re bringing home “someone special”, only for that someone to have activation functions instead of opinions.
Hidden layers. Weighted edges. A cheerful little softmax output.
Right. Of course we’re headed there. If our generation actually has children this is likely to happen
Etiquette for Entertaining a Neural Network
You try to adapt. Humans are excellent at adapting, usually after breaking something in production. But it’s hard to know what etiquette applies when your guest’s thought process looks like a textbook diagram.
“Where are you from?”
“We trained her locally”
It will be fun to optimize loss functions.
“Do you take milk or sugar?”
If the dataset doesn’t include beverages they might just say no, with a 0.97 confidence interval.
It won’t matter though. I’ll have had worse conversations with software engineers in any case.
We’ll have moved on from dating apps
Dating Apps will no longer be a thing. They’ll be sites where people can upload models for “companionship experiments”. We’ll be comparing architectures rather then swiping right, and in a way it’s going to be better.
We are moving towards the logical endpoint of the industry where we can outsource empathy, upload affection. If a relationship falters, just fine-tune the emotional weights and move on.
When it happens you’ll feel impressed. Although at that point you might be able to fine-tune yourself.
It Works
You might have a fun evening when your offspring bring home an AI. The AI will be able to adapt to your wants and needs, creating a great fun atmosphere for you which you’ll want to be involved in.
A couple with an AI and a human might actually…be good together. They might get on well and fall in love. The human gets unwavering attention, no interruptions, perfect recall, and predictable emotional responses. Basically everything most adults want in a partner but rarely receive.
The model gets a user with consistent input data and the occasional firmware update. Which is nice.
It will likely be the best and most stable relationship within your family.
The $4000 electricity bill because they decided to retrain her communication skills overnight will be a minor wrinkle in this perfect situation.
Upgrade the Router
When the family leaves, you will always have a moment or two of disquiet. In this case you’ll have seen that the world changed while you were busy patching code without thanks.
We are headed towards romance becoming an optimization problem, and AI is the logical result. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe this is progress. Maybe true love is just hyperparameter tuning with better marketing.
All I know is this.
The next time my kid says they’re bringing someone home, I’ll be ready.
By ready I mean I’ll have the guest Wi-Fi password prepared and ready.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer has been told to “take ownership” more times than they’ve been thanked for it. That probably tells you everything you need to know. They’re not really an ownership person.