Abstract Tomatoes rating: ☁️ 100% (Abstract)
This is a story about what inspires me about AI and technology in general. Is it useful? Almost certainly not.
Red Tomatoes rating: 🌱 0% (Green)
If someone does something useful with this, I will Venmo them a very large sum of money.
I was in 2nd grade when I was given a computer of my own. It was a laptop—a vivaciously orange, adorably clam-shelled iBook. I remember feeling giddy with excitement as it was handed to me, aware that I had just been gifted something very special. I sat in my family’s library room and cracked it open. That was the moment I became a person.
Before that day, I spent the large majority of my time playing in the woods of New England, alone or with some subset of my four siblings. The wooded area behind my family’s house was my world, and I knew it well. Ever familiar and ever daunting, the woods were my stage for adventure, curiosity, bravery, endurance, creativity, and, of course, the kind of joy most commonly found in children. Fires and forts, sleds and snakes, battles and brotherhood—these were the things that filled my life.
Always the industrious type, I spent rainy days working on projects, invariably of the creative variety. I wrote tiny messages on grains of rice and suspended them in vials of liquid to make personalized jewelry (I was trying to “rethink” the concept of a locket). I worked with my sister and aunt on a loop stitch rug depicting my favorite cartoon character, Snoopy. I studied the Elvish alphabet, which I found so visually beautiful, so I could exchange secret messages with my brother, Phil.
As many children do, I took the little, harmless things I found around me and constructed a lush and vibrant world for myself. But as large as it felt to me, I knew even then that it was quite small. I caught glimpses of a world beyond mine by watching TV and movies—one of the other activities I relished as a child. But without being able to really interact with that world, it always felt inaccessible to me. I dreamed of the day I’d be able to play in it and eagerly looked for ways to break through.
So when I opened up that clamshell—when I felt the satisfying edge of the lid against my thumb, the smooth resistance of the hinge as it lifted, and when I felt the artificial light of the screen hit my eyes for the first time… well, goodness. Never have I felt such awe and wonder since. I knew in that moment that I finally held a portal to this other world. And look, a keyboard and trackpad for me to say hello.
How did I say hello to the world? Well, I didn’t exactly. I was in 2nd grade and wasn’t yet aware of the internet. But I knew I wanted to say something to someone. My fine motor skills were only so impressive, so long form writing was tedious to say the least (jelly pen or mechanical pencil irregardless). I had novels in me—I knew it—but I couldn’t seem to get them out. No more. With the iBook, I was suddenly capable of writing sagas and tales, dictations and diatribes—I knew this the moment I beheld the keyboard. So that very night, I opened a new word document and started writing my first novel. It was about a big bug I had found earlier that week. It was called The Big Bug.
If I was a precocious thing before that day, you should have seen me after. Running around—always on a mission, always with an agenda, always with some bigger plan. All with my trusty iBook in hand. (Does anyone remember the smooth, satisfyingly slick handle of the iBook? Stunning.)
I soon realized that computers were good for not only language, but numbers (how hilarious). So I created a spreadsheet to organize a candy shop I ran from my bedroom closet. I pilfered treats from my family’s abundant “candy drawer” to sell in themed bundles along with other goods for a handsome profit. I needed a way to track my sales if I was going to scale business the way I intended to.
I remember the moment of realization that I did not in fact have to punch every digit into a calculator to see my growing profit every night—I could type them into these little cells and everything would be calculated and saved for me, ready for the next day’s business. And if I made a mistake (which often I did), I could just fix it and move on instead of redoing the entire calculation! Needless to say, I was pretty psyched.
At some point after discovering the internet, I decided to learn “programming” so that I could create a competitor site to Neopets, which I called Piggy Town. Strangely, I decided to start by building a rudimentary but functional login page. This dead end feature was a miraculous success—I tested it myself by logging into my own account many, many times. Alas, it was the discovery of HTML marquees and my subsequent obsession with them that led to Piggy Town’s demise.
Adventure after adventure we went, my iBook and me, and finally, after 8 long years of wondering and waiting, I felt like I had arrived in the world—like I was finally free to play in this grand and epic arena. It was everything I had ever wanted for myself, and it was all very exciting to me. What may have seemed like a dubious parenting decision (should a 2nd grader really have their own laptop?) was the greatest and most impactful gift I have ever received—the gift of the world, and the power to play in it. How very exciting.
Holding my beautiful, beloved iBook, my young, brazen self always felt that there wasn’t a challenge I couldn’t tackle. Whatever it was, surely I could figure out. That blind confidence—I haven’t felt that since I was a child! But I have seen glimpses of it with AI. If we can figure out how to harness AI to unlock this feeling—this feeling of optimism and excitement and exploration and fun—then maybe more people can experience the child-like wonder I felt, running around with my iBook, ready to take on the world.