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“Some of Skinner’s work originated with rat behaviors, yes. He moved on to examining the fundamental drivers of all animal learning. Including human learning.”
You’re walking into an area of glass-walled classrooms now. The rooms are small, no more than half a dozen students in each. All the students are wearing black backpacks—not slung casually over a shoulder, as a normal student might, but fastened across their backs. Danny also has such a backpack, you realize. It accompanies him in the car each day, though you’ve never seen him wear it.
“Is that where they keep their things? Those backpacks?”
Hadfield nods. “And the power supplies for their clickers.”
“Clickers?”
“It’s what the students call their GEDs—their graduated electronic decelerators.”
It’s not a term you’re familiar with. You wait, in the hope it might come to you, but before anything does the principal adds, “The GED delivers a small contingent aversive whenever the student exhibits negative behaviors.”
You have to puzzle out the jargon. “Contingent aversive—you mean punishment? You’re giving the students electric shocks when they misbehave?”
“Misbehave isn’t really a word you can use of these learners,” Hadfield says with a smile. “Or punishment, for that matter. We don’t assume they know the difference between right and wrong. We simply ask, What are the behaviors we want them to display less of? And then we provide a negative consequence every time it happens.”
Your eye is drawn through one of the classroom windows. A teenager has begun flapping his hands in front of his face, his elbows pumping up and down. A member of staff sitting at the back reaches out to a bank of controllers and taps one. Instantly the student’s body jumps, as if stung.
“We make no apology for using these techniques,” Hadfield adds. “If you look at the studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of behavioral approaches, they all used similar methods.” He nods through the window. “When Simeon came to us a year ago, he was biting his hands until they bled. His parents had taped boxing gloves to his hands to try to stop him, and he was deranged with stress from trying to rip the tape off with his teeth. Using the GED, we’ve reduced his hand biting to around three episodes a week.”
“And Danny?” you say, appalled. “Does he get shocked too?”
“He has been. I’m glad to say that, in his case, the aversives had a very beneficial effect.”
“You mean, he no longer hurts himself as much, because he knows that if he does, you’ll hurt him even more.”
Hadfield shrugs. “That’s the basic idea, yes.”
You look at Tim. “And Abbie agreed with all this?”
Throughout the principal’s spiel Tim hasn’t said a word. But you’ve sensed the intensity with which he’s been watching you.
“It took her a while,” he says. “But eventually, yes. Because it works. We’d tried everything else. Vitamin shots, craniosacral head massages, sleeping in an oxygen tent, crazy diets…Abbie even took him to some guy who claimed to be able to identify the cause of Danny’s autism by examining the irises of his eyes. None of those therapies made a shred of difference. This did.”
You’re silent.
“We don’t even have to shock him now. Or very rarely. A clicker comes home with him in his backpack, and if he ever becomes uncontrollable, it’s enough just to show it to him and he stops.”
“The threat alone terrifies him, you mean,” you say quietly.
“What we do here is highly regulated,” Hadfield insists. “Only last year, at the FDA’s request, we reduced the intensity of the shocks by five milliamps.”
“And Sian? She went along with this, I suppose?”
“Sian Fraser was one of our highest-rated interns,” the principal says. “Your husband poached her from us.”
You snort. “I bet he did.”
There’s an awkward silence. Tim says patiently, “Look, I know it takes a while to get your head around this. We both struggled with it, back then. But ultimately we came to the view that what matters is Danny. If something helps him, however unpalatable or unfashionable, it’s worth a try. You wouldn’t refuse to carry out a medical operation on a child because the surgery might be painful, would you? So why would you refuse to administer a small skin shock with no lasting side effects? When you’ve had time to think all this through again, Abs, I’m certain you’ll come to the same conclusion as you did back then.”
TWENTY
We didn’t see so much of Tim after he and Abbie got engaged. He started doing a four-day week. And even on the days he was supposed to be in the office, he either wasn’t around or was closeted with a firm of architects. Those who sneaked a look at the papers on his desk reported that he was designing a house. We immediately guessed this was a wedding gift to Abbie—somewhere by the ocean, perhaps, where she could surf. When we heard he’d bought a house in the Mission, San Francisco’s hippest district, and was installing a restaurant-grade kitchen, we assumed his plans had changed. But the meetings with the architects continued. It took us a while to figure out that he intended the two of them to have the house in the Mission and a custom-designed beach house as well.
Tim had never lived more than a mile from the office before. People who’d visited his home said he’d never even gotten around to plugging in his TV. Now he was almost an hour’s commute away. What’s more, he was immersing himself in a new lifestyle. Abbie knew lots of people in the city, and suddenly their evenings were busy with openings and exhibitions. Dragging themselves up and down Sand Hill Road, where the venture capital firms were housed in identikit glass-and-chrome offices, didn’t have quite the same glamour.
For our part, we loved that time. Tim was relaxed—happy, even. Occasionally he hung out in the break room and chatted with us. It felt like we were in a golden period.
It took a while to sink in that, actually, the reverse was true. When Scott Robotics first announced the shopbot program, investors had fallen over themselves to get a piece of it. Tim was the chatbot genius, after all, with a proven track record. It was simply a question of being first to market.
And yet, and yet…There had been snags; some technical, some psychological. Every time we did a field trial to refine what the marketing guys called the UX, or user experience, we were surprised by the negativity of the feedback. It seemed many people, especially women, actually quite liked being able to chat to salesclerks while they shopped, or to ask their opinion on a potential purchase. When the clerk was a robot, it made it much more obvious that it was only flattering you to make you buy stuff.
Tim came up with a solution to that one. Men hate shopping, he pointed out, so let’s target men’s stores. But by that time men were deserting brick-and-mortar stores so fast, the economics of staffing a retail environment with million-dollar robots made no sense.
We had to find ways of bringing the costs down. And that, frankly, was a task Tim wasn’t very good at. He was a visionary, not a bean counter. So the problem never really got solved, and the funding slowly drifted away. We were stagnating.
It was Mike who eventually called Tim on it, a couple of months before the wedding. He walked into Tim’s office, shut the door, leaned his back against it and folded his arms. His whole posture shouted, We have to talk.
Someone reported that, through the glass, you could see his knees shaking.
The discussion was amicable at first. Tim got up from behind his desk and paced. Mike stayed with his back to the door, talking.
Then things started to get heated. There was shouting, although we couldn’t make out the words. At one point Tim picked up the framed picture of Abbie on his desk and waved it at Mike.
“Tim force four?” someone suggested, watching.
“Five,” someone else decided.
There were a couple of newbies around who had never seen a full Tim eruption before. “Watch and learn,” we told them. “This is what it used to be like all the time.”
But actually, this was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It escalated beyond a five to a six, a seven, and even beyond. Eventually the door of Tim’s office crashed open. He was gesticulating at Mike. “Get out,” he was shouting, amid a stream of profanities. “You’re fucking fired!”
“Fine,” Mike yelled back. “But when you realize I was right, don’t ask me back.”
From which we deduced that Mike’s pep talk hadn’t gone so well.
“Listen, you fucking creep,” Tim spat. “She’s worth a dozen of you. And that sexless stick insect you married.”
It was only then we realized they hadn’t only been arguing about the company. They’d been arguing about whether Tim was doing the right thing marrying Abbie.
59
