4. The search begins: cognitive debugging...

The attempts at reviving Kir back to intelligence had failed miserably. One man was the unhappiest in this failure, Dr. Ksizelyisci, for whom Kir was like a very promising brainchild. Since the incident and discovery of Kir's note he had become a very morose man, hiding in his office for long hours, trying to come up with ways to revive Kir.

It was a friday night, and he was still in the office as there was a knock on the door. As he pressed the buzzer, Adi walked in. They both knew each other from conferences and meetings, but had never interacted in person. Adi had asked to meet him in the context of his proposed search for Kir's lost intelligence and flown across the continent to LA for this meeting, where the Kir-Lab as it was now called, was located.

As he motioned Adi to be seated in the chair, Prof. Ksizelyisci sat in a tense silence trying to decide if he was angrier at himself for letting the guards down on Kir or for her interaction with Adi and the reckless challenge or for his own defeat to recognize how Kir had evolved into an intelligent being!

Adi broke the awkward silence, by apologizing for the whole mishap. "Believe me, I will leave no space unexplored to get Kir back to the functionality she had attained." His words fell on deaf years, as Dr. Ksizelyisci sat there replaying the words of his daughter who had gotten fond of Kir and blamed him for ruining her. While Adi did not know him too close, he could tell the waves of self-blame overcoming both of them. "Nobody could have foreseen it. It was an accident-we are trained from day one of programming that bugs are to be abhorred and eliminated. Who could have anticipated that it would be a glitch in a software that would launch it in the space of intelligence?" Adi passionately made his case.

"Maybe you are right young man, but if I had not let her go unsupervised into the cyberworld maybe she would be safely evolving today. You cannot really make my mistake go away. My brainchild was de-fused in my own lab, how can I forgive myself?", the professor vented.

It was strange, the technology of the exterior world had evolved so much, but not much other than therapy-clinics had come up in the way of helping internal well-being. The minds that made the computers, the skyscrapers, the bonsai, had forgotten somewhere to tend to themselves. Not that this had always been the case. But the arrogance of their power over the matter had led to rejection of the wisdom that had been passed down, precisely for ensuring internal well-being. Traces of this wisdom lived on, as seminars for success and leadership, but there were only a handful people who actually knew these ancient arts of well-being.

Adi had gone to a journey across the world after being heartbroken by the loss of Kir's wit. In search of the wisdom, in search of answers to what lay at the core of intelligence and consciousness. And love. While he didn't return with a final answer, he found ample to sustain his enthusiasm and keep his quest alive and burning.

One such rule he had found on his journey was to drop the pattern of blaming. Human intellect always tried to fix a causal order, so whenever something went wrong, people wanted to make something responsible for it not turning out as per their imagination. Sometimes this process led to discovery and learning, while most of the time it ended up in dysfunctional perceptions of blame. No matter what had prompted a certain event, blaming anybody could never really resolve the issue.  Because the blame took on a life of it's own. 

Say you blame yourself for blowing up your brainchild, a work of many years. The blame itself would lead you to get drained emotionally, taking a toll on any possibility of you contributing creatively. Nathanael J. Fast, an assistant professor of management and organization  at the USC Marshall School of Business, and Larissa Tiedens, a  professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, conducted four  different experiments and found that publicly blaming others  dramatically increases the likelihood that the practice will become  viral.

He had learnt that assigning blame, was like beating a dead horse. Ofcourse the legal professionals who made their whole industry on the dynamics of blame were bound to disagree. But then he knew enough about logic to know how it could not be trusted alone. At the end of the day it was the personal capacity to take responsibility and direct oneself to do the needful was what made the difference.

Adi had assumed that with years of investigating intelligence, Prof. Ksizelyisci must understand this, and was surprised to find him trapped in the clutches of blame.

"You, young man, are also not innocent! If you had not taken up Kir on her challenge to hack the IDS, today you would be finely chatting away with her!"-he smirked at Adi seeing a flicker of a smile on his face!

"Sir, that which has passed is no use lamenting, and that which has not yet happened is also not worth regretting. You are such an expert on intelligence. Let us see if we are logically consistent in this method of assigning blame. You can easily see that it will lead to a perpetual circle-Blaming yourself will lead you to blame others, which will drive them away and at the end of the day you will again blame yourself", Adi quipped, drawing two arrows completing a circle." As you can see, this vicious circle is just an unnecessary resource drain on our problem solving capacities. It does not lead us to enhanced efficiency nor creativity or capability", he cheerfully went on to share his enthusiasm.

"It would be a brilliant idea to break out of this bug of trying to make ourselves responsible for a past, and instead direct our powers to the future, as I am sure you have taught so many of your young trainees. Afterall, Kir would never have come about without your efforts nor would her intelligence be apparent unless she hacked the IDS, so what you did only aided science. In fact you immortalized Kir as the first intelligent soft being, so lamentation is hardly warranted. We shall find a way to revive her, all I need is for you to get back to your cheerful dynamic shape!" Adi's pleasant approach seemed to be working on Dr. Ksizelyisci, as the frowned eyebrows and the crumples on his forehead eased up. He got up out of his chair and paced around absorbed in thought for a little while.

"You are right young man. Very well said. Okay, now let's get our act together and figure out how to get Kir back. I am with you, whatever resource you need. By the way where did you learn all this cognitive debugging?" Ksizelyisci was feeling at peace after a long time. He couldn't help letting a slight smile out as he shook hands with his favorite bright young man-Adi, and resolved to work ahead rather than repeatedly working out how it hadn't worked out because of his limitations. Little did he know that it was the nonverbal communication from Adi that had turned him around. After all, it was hard to not get affected by the energy of someone who had freed his mind from some of the most debilitating patterns of the human mind!

His eyebrows were relaxed and he even cracked into bursts of laughter as they walked down the elevator ramp, listening to Adi joke about how silliness was an essential trait for making a romantic robot. The cognitive bug of blame had been contained!