Guess: What is Close to Reality and What is Pure Fantasy

Guess: What is Close to Reality and What is Pure Fantasy

This post is written by Larraine Solomon and Sonali Verma – colleagues with an interest in how technology is shaping our future

Step into the future! It’s now 2033 and artificial intelligence systems are ubiquitous. Our work day has changed beyond all recognition – come with us for a preview of what’s to come.

Your work day starts when you roll out of bed and strap yourself into your chair in your home office. Gone are the mouse and the keyboard. You simply need to think about what needs to be done, and the AI in the computer can detect signals from your brain that it translates into words and then actions. Your spreadsheets and analyses are ready.

After a couple of hours of deep thought, you remotely interview candidates that AI has already vetted for summer positions. No longer are the junior-most jobs filled by bright young people who can quickly collate information from disparate sources, crunch some numbers and write it up. Now that AI takes care of that, the summer staff are hired for their ability to code and write prompts, as well as their knowledge of philosophy, ethics and other topics that the machines are still not exceptional at applying.

You wander downstairs for lunch, where your AI-controlled house has taken care of preparing a hot meal (you felt like Thai, and there was a good AI-generated recipe that your fridge spotted, ordered a meal kit for and alerted your smart stove to) and cleaning up (your robotic vacuum/mopping system is old hat; now, the dishes are clean and dry as well).  

After lunch, you take a quick look at the AI-generated reports that are awaiting your attention: the auditors’ report, a brief from Legal, the finance department forecasts, the marketing copy, the letter to shareholders. You quickly read the news as well. News sites are now supported by not only subscriptions but also from fees from AI companies that use their reliable, fact-checked content to train their large language models and search engines, which no longer link to news articles but summarize their content instead. Of course, news sites themselves use AI for personalizing which news you see and for determining when to ask you to pay or register, as well as for generating routine articles requiring no original thought, such as the thrice-daily stock market report. Retailers do the same.

Your muscles are stiff from all that sitting, so you end the day with your AI fitness trainer, which uses live feedback from your body to calibrate the best workout for you and natural language generation to keep you motivated through your sets and reps. Something hurts, but your AI healthcare bot quickly reassures you that it is nothing to worry about.

As you prepare for bed, you think about calling your friend, so your phone swiftly texts her so that you can fall asleep in your personalized temperature- and position-controlled bed. The kids still want a bedtime story and you share your memory of a pre-AI world. It sounds like a distant history lesson – a bit like the world pre-mobile phones.

Tell us: How much of this do you think is pure fantasy and what is actually not that far from reality?