Becoming Rachel from Blade Runner: Why It’s Not Hard For A Cyborg

This is the kind of desperate blog post you can only write in the middle of the night. This is the kind of writing that only deep deep emotions can push you to do. And my emotions are deep. They’re so truly deep. My love for the pylons is deep. My love for the internet towers is so deep. And so here are my thoughts. Being autistic I want to tap into my super brain sometimes. This year my super brain has been slow. It has not been slow. My brain has been playing the long game.

It has been building up the knowledge steadily and slowly. Ready and waiting to release it. Unfortunately the corporate world is not designed for autistic brains. I try to tell my brain that I need results now. But my brain says “sssssh. I’m building up the bigger picture. I’m getting ready to fly.” However the stress and pressure of needing to make progress sooner rather than later has been really getting to me and I’m scared that it is going to get in the way of my results. So I had to ask myself… what would AI do? What would a cyborg do? What if technology really was as easy for me as I once thought it was? Enter Rachel. I’ve only seen Bladerunner twice. I don’t remember Rachel’s end but it isn’t good. I don’t even remember what they’re called… replicants? But I imagine being superhuman

And then it’s so easy. It all adds up. Every problem has a solution. 

Every problem can be solved. Every ticket has been given to me because there is a technical problem that I can solve. 

Every code that errors errors because there is a reason. Stay like a replicant. Cool and calm and detached. It’s a scientific thing. Every code that errors errors because there is an error that is wrong. Every library works and has a way it is designed to work in (yes libraries can have bugs but that should be the final solution). It’s a scientific thing. The AI doesn’t get sad or get scared. There is nothing wrong with being sad or scared. I don’t want to get separated from the wind farms, from my true work. But is it efficient? What does AI do? AI knows and AI goes

• Every ticket that has been given to me has been given to me because there is a technical problem whether that be a bug or a feature request or a test
• I am trained to solve technical problems. I have learned problem solving skills. 
• I can define the problem
• I have the power to define the problem 
• I have the power to keep coming back to it
• I have the power to articulate very clearly what I want and what I need. I want to insert some code above line 999 but inside the same function that pulls data from API B and converts it into the same format as data from API A so that I can return the parsed results from A and B together so that they can then be converted to another data type
• I want to update the existing test to cover data type B as well. Do I write a new test? Do I update the existing test? Do I add an unhappy path? I don’t know the answers to these questions yet (and I am on holiday with more than another week to go). But I have the power to ask them.

(Of course I am not really talking about AI here. I am talking about a version of Susanna that is not terrified of the backend).

But what if the software engineering was the easy part? This is the question I ask myself again and again.

Ps this post was inspired by the song “Rachel’s Song” from the blade runner soundtrack. Vangelis is such an amazing composer. Please check it out! 🥰❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

❤️‍🔥🏞️