The Future of Society

A mechanical whirring noise, like the aftermath of a pencil sharpener and a drill in a blender, snarled into my ear at the break of dawn and stirred my hand into the motion of slamming down on the alarm clock adjacent to me. My hair a jumble of wires and my eyes blurred from dreams of ghostly automatons, I gradually stirred awake my spasmatic limbs. A chromebook was extended 26.73 inches from my stomach, and my neck was pushed back 0.2 mm by an extended robotic arm.

“Good morning sir, you must now begin your education in the field of mathematics. Breakfast will be served to you shortly.” Sigma, my artificially intelligent butler instructed me. Then, an identical voice blasted from my computer at exactly 64 decibels and began to enunciate my daily problems.

“If the square root of a piano is 12 times the number of birds in the sky right now, calculate the diameter of Mercury. You have 45 seconds, begin.” 

As I attempted to tackle the ridicule of this question, I sighed, and my mind wandered, as it often did, to a time now long forgotten.

You see, 20 years ago, education was different. Life was different. The world was run by real people, fathomable creatures who would conduct society in an irregular yet regulated fashion. Students would commute to a large, cubic-shaped building dubbed as school, where teachers, the term for people who would educate the students on baseless topics, would babble on lectures while delinquents, nerds, and a wide variety of people would hustle and bustle through life. People would talk, play, go outside, eat at restaurants, and commit to plentiful luxuries out of the bounds of today’s realm.

Then on one fateful day, this entire apparatus crumpled. The C.E.O of one of the world’s most grandiose foundations, a man named Sundar Pichai, designed a circuit of nanotechnology which he believed could revolutionize the world’s systems. He had dreams of an utterly automated world, dreams so fanatic, that he spent years toiling through his lab to make them reality. However, there was one pivotal facet that he overlooked, one feature that would send the world as he knew it into overdrive- control. The entire operation needed someone to keep tabs on the robots and prevent them from taking over the world, and that someone simply did not exist. And thus, the nanobots took over the one source they had access to- technology. The dilemma? Everyone and their mother owned at least one piece of technology, and it was this that ensured every household across the globe be hacked and tarnished within a matter of minutes.

Society was manhandled by machines, afflicted by AI, and rigged by robots. Deploying us to the here, and the now, a pitiful predicament.

I sighed. Well, better make the most out of it. I’m going to die soon anyway. Oh right, if it wasn’t apparent already, these robots operate by the numbers. So because we are now in their territory, we have to operate by their means- brushing the exact number of teeth each day for the exact number of seconds, sleeping for an exact number of hours; everything we do undergoes an exactitude of tests and must run by the numbers. And according to these robots, in order to preserve human population to its maximum capacity and condemn global warming, the human lifeline must be cut short to about 13 years. Once our age limit has been capped, we are royally terminated. 

2 weeks, 3 days, 4 hours, 32 minutes, 7 seconds and counting before it's my turn. There is no savior from their terror. The world now bows down to them, and there is nothing we can do.

Takeaway: 

Technology has already taken over our lives in the last 20 years. Imagine what it could do in the next 20?