People At A Coffee Shop

The kid and the machine had squared off against each other for the prescribed twelve years.

Our educational system, as a practical measure, is focused mostly on STEM and the Humanities. It doesn’t embrace visual arts in the way students like Alden Rathburn need.

Alden’s about to enter a college that will level the playing field. It’ll be as demanding as any university but with requisites geared to students with exceptional artistic and creative abilities.

Alden will say goodbye to his high-school, artist-in-residence status and begin pulling all-nighters to compete among his peers. He’ll face the four-steps-forward, three-steps-back realities required to excel.

Since early on he’s been creating videos, often following a tribe of local skateboarders of which he’s a charter member.

As a large man, as a skateboarder with militantly red hair, he represents the kind of motley menace parents used to warn about until “ollies,” “kickflips” and “grinds” captured the entire world’s imagination at the Tokyo Olympics.

The countdown is on.

There is one discipline Alden would like to explore that isn’t listed anywhere in his four-year syllabus but that may be as important as any of the others.

“I want to learn to take risks,” he says.

We’re going to need people like Taylor Olson to man the wall.

The giants sat in the window of our corner coffee shop whispering into Taylor’s ears.

On one side was the Swedish pacifist who invented dynamite, on the other was the Father of the A-Bomb.

Taylor is working on a PhD dissertation about “ethical intuition” applied to the technology that promises to affect us in ways its creators don’t yet understand. We are going to need a firewall to protect us.

If Artificial Intelligence turns ugly, Taylor will tell you, we’ll have ourselves to blame. If we feed it junk information, indulge its tantrums and don’t set boundaries while it’s still in its infancy, well then, that’s on us.

Contrary to early reports, AI will not be all powerful. It doesn’t process information easily from one field to another. It’s not good with inconsistency. Irony and hypocrisy may trip it up.

Taylor would prefer a university career rather than enter the private sector. But as the experience of Nobel and later Oppenheimer can attest, much of the funding for this revolutionary technology will come from the military industrial complex.

His reading of philosophy, Kant on morality in particular, dovetails with his pursuit of mathematics and computer logic. But the more Taylor comes to understand, the more questions he finds to ask.

It was good be inside on that raw Wednesday afternoon, out of the rain.

There was a rare sighting of feral adolescents at our corner coffee shop this morning.

Rare because the place doesn’t offer much that appeals to a young clientele.

The donuts disappear well before noon and the energy bars the grown-ups use to cheat on their diets are a sorry substitute for Skittles and Reese’s Cups.

It was a helter-skelter morning. The sounds of Ruka and Amoret beans being ground, espressos being steamed and baristas calling out orders were at times deafening.

So at first, no one noticed the middle-schoolers had occupied the coveted table for four in the center of the room.

When things quieted down a bit, sounds of abandon filled the cafe. Our young visitors were ecstatic at simply being together. Every joke, every aside, was judged to be hysterical.

They’d been let out early for a “School Improvement” day and faced a Wednesday afternoon of freedom with no strings attached. In recent years, you’ll remember, they had endured remote learning under house arrest.

So here they sat, escapees making up for lost time over a game of Clue. Colonel Mustard had in fact murdered Mr. Boddy in the conservatory but not with the lead pipe as the four players had first suspected.

Moments like these are fleeting. It’s possible we won’t see these kids again. At least not until they’re home from college, meeting their friends here.

Some of them may be drinking coffee by then.