Mosaic: Coffee Shop

He sat in the café. He looked at his laptop bag, and back to the cooling cup of coffee. Steam quietly drifted upward in the cold winter day. His job interview had gone well, he thought. It didn’t feel like one. There were no coding tests, no algorithms to create. Rapport was instant, almost unnervingly so. They appeared that they wanted to see if he could solve problems, and it had little to nothing to do with his technical skills.

The technology the company needed help with was something that he had a great deal of knowledge in. It was something that he had ambition in. It was novel. It was mostly untested and unresearched. A computer engineer, he worked on compression algorithms and was interested in how the outputs of artificial intelligence models could be used as a compression method.

His ideas on that topic were not yet published, not yet reviewed, but it seemed that his interviewers had belief and saw potential in the ideas he brought up. The job he had applied for wanted a data compression specialist, but when he discussed information entropy, and the opportunity to use AI models to reproduce artefacts greater than the size of the underlying model and that this could be seen as a form of compression, they simply said:

“That’s interesting.”

“Instead of directly compressing the data,” He began, “imagine a system on chip storing a local copy of an AI model. Instead of data storage, we have model storage. From that model, based on the user’s input, and the persistence of a random seed, instead of storing the data that should be compressed, we can simply generate it at run time.”

He deliberately did not include his other thoughts on the matter, hoping that they would be able to come to their own conclusions. His approach would result in superior data redundancy, because the AI model is distributed and located on each device. Beyond that. The company can also expand into selling hardware, offer a perpetual software as a service subscription, and have gain revenue streams beyond the initial purchase.

Classic Silicon Valley. Just what they were looking for, he hoped.

The silence lingered, and he felt that he must simplify what he had stated: “The output is greater in size than the input. Like a Tardis.” He was puzzled that no one else had thought of any AI model as a monolithic block of data which could be queried to obtain any other media, given the right prompt, and given the right random seed. He was puzzled that no one else had this notion before. He didn’t articulate it entirely, or clearly, and this is where doubt entered his mind about his prospects for success.

Would he ever see them again? He could barely remember their unremarkable faces, but he hoped that they would remember his.

Had he failed to articulate his ideas correctly? Was it too much a paradigm shift in terms of the way people wanted custody of their data? That wasn’t the case anymore, if data wasn’t on someone’s personal device, it was certainly in the custody of the veritable scrums of “cloud services”. The Cloud is just someone else’s computer, after all. His thoughts wandered and travelled toward doubt.

He wasn’t sure why. He picked up the coffee and took a gulp down. It didn’t calm him. Doubt plucked at his synapses like a guitar dissonant and out of tune, reminding him of the coffee’s lavish expense. He fumbled with his phone, opening the banking app, to see his balance in real time. He opened his finance management application, adding the cost of the coffee. Perhaps that was a target for automation. The application told him he had a week, perhaps a little more time, depending on what was in the pantry at home.

The clock was ticking. He took the phrase “time equals money” very seriously, working out exactly how much money his money allowed him to stretch out his existence in terms of time. He knew the numbers. They were cold, like the breeze that now weaved its way through the city.

Unemployment couldn’t last forever. It wouldn’t. Not forever. The sixteen dollars had cost an hour of financial runway, and he knew it. Therefore, he had another seventeen minutes to sit and contemplate. The train ride home would be another hour, valued at less than that financially.

It was a countdown, of sorts. The lack of joy, but the excess of relaxation created a sort of conflict in his mind. Knowing this, the next, and final gulp of coffee filled his chest with a slowly fading warmth. He placed the mug back down. It made a delicate sound. He smiled at nothing, hoping it would make him feel better.

He would enjoy the train ride home. Away from the noise. For a moment at least, until his reverie was interrupted. “Done with that, James?” – a voice asked. It was the café staff. He didn’t know how she knew his name. Then the wind whispered its explanation to him. The sticky piece of paper on his jacket, proclaiming “James” to the world was caught and flew away. “Thank you”, he said nervously, uncomfortably, rising to leave, taking his bag with him.

This interview was probably his last chance before he’d start to be behind on the bills. He knew most of them wouldn’t cause discomfort straight away if they weren’t paid, but for now, he wanted to relax. To do nothing. What he wanted to do was to have a night of hedonistic excess. That wasn’t affordable, unless of course, he went on to calculate the calories left in the pantry, the fridge, and the freezer.

He made a choice.

He would wait another week before looking for other jobs. He would jump anxiously each time an email was addressed to him and his phone’s little, unbalanced motor caused it to vibrate to life, a spark of excitement often dispelled by a spam email he’d unsubscribed to uncountable times. Work was hard to find. The only thing more difficult, perhaps, was hope.

He walked to the train station. Overhead, the sun blazed, but the cold wind was winning.