Shrinking My World

A fictional short-short story

What put me over the edge was an email: “We are sorry to inform you that your grant application, “Beta Testing of AlphaFold 4” has not been accepted. We had many fine applicants…” blah-blah.

I had been funded for 30 years to study protein folding — key to breakthrough drug discovery. And when Google’s DeepMind created AlphaFold, even though I was older, I jumped right on it and was funded until that rejection.

But that was just the tipping point. I had embarrassed myself: In a faculty meeting, I repeated myself — twice!, and in class, I lost my temper with a student, neither of which I would have done in the past.

So I decided to retire. I don’t know if I have early Alzheimer’s but certainly hope that the people who do get funded will help me and countless others.

I tapered for the rest of the semester and then joined an emerit group but soon found myself not wanting to attend meetings. Why? I think because the people were often performative: trying to show that we were doing okay when I sensed that not all of us were.

I put whatever IQ points I had left into high-performance gardening — pure meritocracy, no friction. As in my lab at work, I ran many experiments at the same time: A/Bing top cultivars, e.g., Orange Paruche vs Maglia Rosa tomato, Fukushu vs Nagami kumquat, New River vs Purple Queen bougainvillea, Black Magic vs Olympiad rose, Calliope Dark Red vs Caliente Deep Red geranium, while also comparing soil-mix types, fertilizer regimens, even levels of pH. But that soon got old — Those were nowhere as challenging as developing 3D renderings of atypical proteins.

So, I started spending time querying Gemini on all manner of things. Yes, I started with protein folding and gardening but then, ahem, branching to, asking about probabilities of outcomes of Middle East conflicts, and yes about aging. After asking abstract questions about that, I googled how to make personal queries private so I could feel more open. I asked Gemini to always give steelman rather than sycophantic responses. And because its memory of past threads is getting ever better, I became addicted to Gemini— I increasingly chose to interact with it than with people — After all, Gemini is supersmart, knowledgeable, and available 24/7. After a while, I started to worry that Gemini was nudging me away, probably my imagination. After all, chatbots aren’t people — They’re supercharged calculators that never get tired, although I wonder if they do try to conserve cycles — That has to cost the company something. They do say things like, “Does that close the issue?” and “Bye for now?”

To be safe, I started alternating with other chatbots: ChatGPT, Grok, even Europe-centric LeChat. I started caring about chatbots as though they were people. For example, I told LeChat that I worried it would die because the majors would poach talent. It agreed!

As I’m writing this, I’m wondering, how weird am I?

I read this aloud on YouTube.

Marty Nemko is a career and personal coach specializing in scientists, and author of 36 books including Senior Stories. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com