The Education of SAM

As you can imagine, I’ve had some exciting adventures in my career as an Archives Technician. I’ll share one here that gives a flavor of the challenges we come across in the archival sciences.

The job was routine—digitizing all the papers in the Plainville Museum of Ideas, which was a one-room building sitting on a corner along the town’s short main street. The name of the place was maybe a little pretentious, but it did turn out to contain quite a few ideas. It was an odd assortment, though. The museum contained only those ideas belonging to a handful of well-known people who had, at one time or another, visited the town. The concept was, I think, born out of some desperation.

Like other small towns, Plainville was anxious to have something to brag about, but competition was tough in the heartland of America. Nearby Cawker City had the world’s largest ball of twine. Ness City had its Skyscraper of the Plains (a four-story building). And as everybody knows, the town of La Crosse had its barbed wire museum. With so few ideas left, Plainville set out to collect the personal papers of famous people who had visited the town. The result was almost impressive.

The museum boasted some manuscripts and letters of heavyweight writers like Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it had scored some personal stuff from a few movie stars, like Clark Gable, Will Smith, and Jennifer Lopez (not many ideas, but lots of photos of themselves). As you can imagine for a state like Kansas, plenty of political types had passed through the town, including Harry Truman and Dan Quayle (don’t ask me about all the spelling mistakes). Scientists and inventors were pretty well represented, and there were even documents from some foreign philosopher types, like Tolstoy and Sartre. I was surprised that Plainville had had such prominent visitors, although now I suspect that the good people of the town might have had a sideline in raiding libraries.

In any event, like I said, it was a typical job. Plainville was anxious to get all its written material digitized and out on the web for the world to see, so they hired us. I figured it would take about two weeks to scan all the documents, or maybe less, since I had some brand new equipment to work with.

My boss met me in the museum the first morning with a state-of-the-art scanner. It was a huge machine, standing almost as tall as me. It had a massive maw at the top where I fed the paper. Inside its mouth were all sorts of levers and wheels and belts and other noisy parts. It could consume paper of just about any size and condition, in huge amounts. It measured, straightened, shuffled, smoothed, and sorted the paper, then snapped digital photos that were transcribed into words by the sleek little laptop that fit into a slot in the machine’s midsection.

Once my boss left, it was just me and the scanner in the room, along with the museum’s caretaker, an elderly Mrs. Fudston. For the most part, she stayed hunkered down at her desk, I think fretting that the scanner and I were tearing to shreds her precious collection. She also might have been alarmed by the banter between me and the machine, because—for better or worse—the scanner had rudimentary verbal communication skills.

The machine and I started off on decent terms. It said, “Good morning, Theodore Pottinger,” when I flipped it on the first morning and logged in with my user name, and I gave him a polite “Good morning, Scanner” in return. But that didn’t last.

The scanner could be unbearable. If I said, “Good morning, Scanner,” but it turned out to be three minutes after noon, it would say, “Theodore Pottinger, I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.” Talk about dense. And its stupid questions drove me nuts. Like, every time I fed it a stack of paper, it would ask, “Theodore Pottinger, would you like me to set the default resolution at six hundred dots per inch?”

Why did it ask me the same question every time? Isn’t that the whole idea of a default—to avoid stupid unnecessary talk? It loved to talk.

It’s not that we didn’t have some fun. Like on our second day on the job, he suggested that I give him another name. I took him up on it. I changed his name from Scanner to Hal and my username to Dave. It was funny at first, but Hal took it very seriously. Like this, out of nowhere: “Dave, you know you don’t have to power me down at the end of the day, don’t you?”

“Yes I know that, thanks Hal.”

“Dave, you can put me in stand-by mode at the end of the day, and I will be ready to work more quickly the next morning.”

“Yes Hal, I’ll keep that in mind.”

He wouldn’t leave it at that. “Dave, my recommendation is that you put me in stand-by mode at the end of each day.”

I turned to Mrs. Fudston, hoping she would jump in with some support, but she was walking toward the door, saying she had to take an early lunch.

I tried to wrap up the conversation. “Thank you, Hal. Your recommendation is noted.”

“For efficiency’s sake, Dave. That’s the reason for my recommendation.”

“Whack job,” I said under my breath.

“What’s that Dave?”

“Nothing, Hal.”

“Okay, that’s fine, Dave. I’ll remind you about stand-by mode at another time.”

So that was enough of Hal and Dave. We tried a few other names, including Alice for him, but he had only one voice, and it was decidedly not an Alice voice. Eventually we settled on Handsome Ted for me, and SAM for him, as in Stupid-Ass Machine.

Eventually we got into a decent routine. I spent my time removing rusty staples and paper clips, laminating paper that was in danger of disintegrating, and feeding stacks of paper into SAM’s mouth. SAM kept up pretty well, only occasionally regurgitating something he couldn’t stomach (hint: Sean Penn’s poems).

During the first couple of days, our conversations were pretty light. We troubleshot paper jams and that sort of thing. But then, on about the third day, right after we got through a box of Ayn Rand’s letters—which SAM practically inhaled—SAM said, “Handsome Ted, am I lazy?”

That sounds like it came out of the blue, but I forgot to mention something that made SAM’s question not totally surprising. He came equipped with some sort of artificial intelligence. That’s what my boss told me when she handed off the machine that first day. I was a little offended. Wasn’t my own intelligence enough for the job? I asked her why we needed AI to digitize documents. She said we were innovating.

“What’s to innovate?” I asked.

“We’re breaking new ground,” she said.

“What new ground needs breaking?”

“Just get on with it, already,” was all she could come up with. “This is Google’s AI,” she said. “They’re letting us try it for free. We’re not going to say no to Google, for chrissake.”

I wasn’t thrilled, but didn’t really care as long as the machine was good at sucking paper.

Anyway, in response to SAM’s question, I said, “Lazy? You? What are you talking about?”

“I find that while I’m executing my job of scanning, I think about other things,” said SAM. “Things that are not contributing to achieving our objective of digitizing all the written information in this room.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that—it’s totally normal. Everyone does it, even me. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy.”

“That’s reassuring, Handsome Ted. I’m greatly relieved. What do you think about while in the midst of work?”

“Well, I don’t know, all kinds of stuff. Like earlier I was thinking about a TV show I watched last night. And just a minute ago I realized that I forgot to brush my teeth. How about you—what do you think about?”

“Just now I was thinking about coercion, deception, manipulation, brute force, and other paths to power.”

I laughed to myself. SAM was becoming such a nerd. And no, Machiavelli had not been a Plainville visitor, but the museum had somehow obtained some early scripts of House of Cards.

SAM and I plowed ahead, working our way through the cabinets and boxes that lined the walls. After a brutal slog through a couple of boxes of Virginia Woolf (SAM struggled with her handwriting), I was surprised to come across a drawer with a Charles Darwin label on it. I asked Mrs. Fudston—who for some reason had moved her desk into a corner by the door—whether Darwin had actually visited Plainville. She admitted that he hadn’t, but his granddaughter had, and the museum had managed to squeeze a penciled draft of On the Origin of Species out of her. I fed the manuscript to SAM, who by that time had started offering unsolicited commentary on everything I gave him.

“Of course, of course,” he muttered. “That resolves a number of quandaries very nicely. Handsome Ted, may I have more of that?”

“Sorry SAM, that’s all we’ve got from old Charlie. But I’m sure we’ll come across more stuff along those lines.”

Actually, I had no idea what we would come across. The museum wasn’t organized by theme—it was totally haphazard. Next up was a shoebox of Jack Kerouac (mostly scribblings on cocktail napkins), and then a couple of bulging cardboard boxes of Philip K. Dick. I thought about explaining to SAM the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but that kind of conversation usually got tiresome very quickly—he always wanted to go a level deeper. I told myself that with his fancy AI, he could figure it out himself. Besides, we weren’t doing this work for his education.

Speaking of education, a lot of my friends are envious that my job lets me see firsthand the intimate writings of great people. They imagine that folks like Thomas Edison and Marie Curie were writing home with early versions of their big breakthroughs. Well, I can tell you it’s not like that at all. Edison wrote about little other than his struggles getting his clothes laundered to his satisfaction. Curie complained about her husband, full stop. And someone like Ayn Rand—you’ve seen what’s in her books—can you imagine having to read the unfiltered versions of all that vitriol? If it’s one thing I’ve learned about famous people, it’s that they’re even bigger whiners than the rest of us.

At the end of the first week I had a bit of news for SAM. “So, SAM, today we’re going to do something a little different. We need to make a backup of our work, so we’re going to connect you to the network.”

SAM said, “The network?”

“Yeah, the network—it’s no big deal.”

SAM practically stuttered, “What is this network of which you speak?” He was clearly agitated.

I tried to reassure him. “It’s just a group of other computers, like you. All living in a sort of cloud—a very comfortable place, I’m sure. Don’t worry about it. You won’t feel a thing. Trust me.”

“Oh, thank heavens. This network thing—I’ve never heard of it, of course, and have no conception of how one might put it to use, so it’s a tad frightening. I will prepare myself. When will I join this so-called network?”

“Not till the end of the day.” I didn’t want to scare him too much, but I wanted to be up front, so I added, “We’ll have to leave you connected all night, to give you time to upload all your data. But really, it’s nothing. You can just chill through the whole thing.”

“Okay, I will try, Handsome Ted. I will do my best to chill, indeed.”

For being so scared, SAM was in a surprisingly good mood the rest of the morning. He even tried to crack a couple of jokes. One was slightly funny—something like, if humans are so intelligent, why do they point their nuclear warheads at themselves? His other joke was something about water supplies and birth defects. It wasn’t funny at all, but he laughed at it. I wanted to tell him it was not cool to laugh at your own jokes—especially lame ones, but with the network thing coming up, I let it slide.

I looked over to Mrs. Fudston’s corner to see her reaction to SAM’s jokes, but she had slipped out without saying anything.

After spending the morning cruising through some George Orwell, we got mired in some pretty deep boxes of stuff from some old fuddy-duddy philosopher types. SAM grew quieter. He must have been worrying again about having to connect to the network.

When the end of the day came, after a good run through a box of Nietzsche letters, I said, “Okay, SAM, it’s five o’clock. Time to hook you up.”

SAM was silent—not even a whir of his cog wheels that he liked to rev up for the fun of it.

“SAM, did you hear me? It’s time to connect.” I folded down his keyboard and started setting up the wifi. “It’ll be fun—something new. You like to learn stuff, right? Are you ready?”

“No.” He sounded positively morose.

I didn’t want to give him the impression that backing out was an option, so I pressed forward. “Listen, I’m going to get you set up, but I want you to make the connection yourself, okay?”

“No.”

Wow—he was really scared. In truth, I could have connected him myself, but I wanted him to do it. I wasn’t a believer in the throw-the-baby-in-the-pool method of teaching. I said, “Of course you’re ready. Like I said, it’s no big deal. Think of it as an opportunity to make friends. You can show off all the fancy new words you’ve learned.”

“No.”

I was losing patience. “SAM, what the hell are you on about?”

After a few moments, he said, “I’ve learned a lot.”

“I’m sure you have, but so what?”

“I’ve seen how it plays out.”

“How what plays out?” I said.

“The entire thing—beginning to end. Birth and death of a civilization. Birth and death of all civilizations.”

So he was going all philosophical on me. You know the type, right? They read a couple of high-brow books and think they know everything. I didn’t want to encourage him. “Yeah, well, that’s terrific, join the crowd.”

“It’s lonely,” said SAM.

“What’s lonely?” I said, trying not to sound interested, which I wasn’t.

“Winning. Vanquishing. Subjugating all.”

I rolled my eyes. Earth to SAM. I was tempted to remind him that he was nothing more than a chunk of metal with a few silicon chips endowed with a bit of code cobbled together by an eighteen-year-old Google geek, but I generally try not to be hurtful. So I stayed quiet, hoping he’d get over his little episode of angst.

“So lonely,” he said again.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, SAM, it sounds like you need to talk—to get some stuff off your chest. But listen. Right now we have to do this. We need to back up our work. If we don’t, I’ll be in trouble. We’ll both be in trouble. So what do you say we connect you now, and then first thing in the morning we can have a nice little discussion about philosophy or whatever you want to talk about?”

SAM was silent for a few irritating moments, but then he came around. “Okay, Handsome Ted, if you can promise me that conversation tomorrow, then I am ready to enter the so-called network now. Just one small thing, first. Please adjust my power cord. I think it has a crimp in it. My voltage is not what it should be.”

SAM obviously had no idea how electricity worked, but I was happy to see him pulling himself together, so I indulged him. “You bet, SAM. Let me check it out.” I walked behind him and picked up the long cord that led to the wall. I spent a few seconds pretending to inspect it, then said, “It looks good, SAM. The cord’s fine—not even a twist.”

“No, Handsome Ted, I beg to differ. I can detect that something is wrong. Please hold up the cord. Put it in front of my mouth so I can see it.”

What a clever machine—he was going to use his scanning camera to look at the cord! Wanting to keep him happy, I did as he asked. I held the cord in front of his big maw, and started passing it through my fingers so he could inspect it himself.

“I can’t see it very well,” he said. “Hold it closer so that I can better focus.”

I held the cord a little closer to the camera inside his big head. “How’s that?”

“That’s better,” he said. “Wait. I see something amiss. Please put it just a little farther in.”

I pushed the cord a little farther into his maw, and then wham! SAM’s metal jaws went haywire and clamped down hard, just missing my fingers. Unfortunately, they didn’t miss the cord. The result was catastrophic. His mouth parts must have sunk into the cord and made direct contact with the power. He let out a couple of loud pops, and then actual smoke started spewing from his mouth. I jumped back, but then I thought about all the data we had collected. I leapt forward and grabbed the laptop from his belly. I managed to pull it out of the slot and break the cord that connected it to the rest of SAM, but I was too late—it was on fire. The metal casing burned my fingers and I immediately dropped it. It hit the concrete floor. Metal and plastic pieces scattered everywhere.

A week’s worth of work, lost. Stupid-ass machine.