You get up.
You open your laptop and voice command “create a spreadsheet to forecast next year’s spend”. Your internet of things will have inferred you opening your laptop means you urgently need a coffee and so will fire up the barista machine to instantly produce your espresso, just how you like it.
Your customer emails will have already been auto-replied to, in a personalised format, mentioning things only that particular customer would get, in a spooky but socially awkward way.
You pause to lament that all those kids who never learned to touch-type made an evolutionary jump. They never needed to. Now if auto correct hasn’t jumped in to save their soul, they can command changes by voice instead. VoIP (voice over internet) has pervaded past our home and touchingly basic “Alexa lights on” requests are relics from a dim and distant past. Now when you do venture out to shop in the zone-controlled cities, digital profiling ads re-present themselves to you, as your wearable tech syncs out of home and lets you talk back to send info or place orders.
Your grandkids tease you that your language is dated.
They snigger slightly when you still say “google it”, much like how your parents used to say they’d “taped” their favourite Sky programme, or “hoovered” their floor… Google moved over for Bing, powered by language based AI some time ago now.
You’ve lost count of which iteration we’re up to for ChatGPT these days, but you’re not meant to notice because your computer keeps score. It’s like late in the last century, when they used to advertise the Intel chip being inside a PC - as long as it worked, did anyone ever really care?
Lately you’ve become increasingly preoccupied that you’re missing something. You think you’re making the right prompts, but it’s so hard to tell. Your nutrition and genes are good to go though, your DNA bio sequencing scored its clearance health check just fine. You’re edging up the leaderboard on your brain training app so your synapses must be firing adequately. These days you have software to keep track of the SaaS and SaaS to keep track of your life. Wait - didn’t you see that on a promo-shirt, or - was it a meme? You took a mandatory info overload awareness course a while back and now know the signs to look out for. You were never intended to follow all those thought leaders after all.
You’re over the moon you’ve met the criteria to receive a rare license which qualifies you to publish one definitive piece of original work this quarter. With the internet sanctioned on zero carbon and rationed for intellectual provenance this means you’re finally getting somewhere.
You’ve got an “old school” experience coming up soon. You booked onto a marketing conference which promises the real deal. There should be lanyards with badges, check-in sheets and real people to greet you, along with goodie bags to carry home rather than being prime-shipped to your door. You’re really looking forward to it, although you’re not even allowed to cyber-stalk the speakers in advance, you had to sign a paper (!) disclaimer and you’ve heard rumours that the stage itself is sparsely lit, with only one screen - and that the presenters themselves had to submit a vintage slide deck in Keynote effect. Man will that bring back some memories! It’s going to be cool!
On reflection, it was so great that those self-elected few - who engineered how our whole world of machine learning, internet of things and the new way of infiltrated AI interface™ computers would work - knew in advance what we needed without even asking. Afterall, without their vision, who knows where we could have ended up?
You really have seen progress in your lifetime. It’s like what made sense to those very early technicians has been mapped out so that now everyone thinks just like them, in exactly the same direction. You learned early on that you kinda always had to ask the right questions in the right way, in order to get the answers you were looking for.
Life hasn’t really turned out as you’d expected, but c’est la vie!
You’re a creative spirit and tech has just helped you get there so. much. faster.
Satirically yours,
