By the end of the 2020s, people and AI work side-by-side. As automation takes over more and more tasks, it disrupts jobs leading to mass employment-related mental health issues. Society is forced to speed up the adoption of universal basic income to adapt to the new reality where AI plays a vital role in all work.
Questions arise about who benefits (and who doesn’t) from the increased capabilities of AI and who decides how it is used. Huge gender, racial and cultural barriers exist to bringing about a future in which AI benefits all. The resources and skills sought to develop and leverage AI technologies are unevenly accessible, while a lack of representation results in the values and needs of those developing AI being overrepresented in the solutions created. For example, a study by AI Now found that just 15% of AI researchers at Facebook are female and at Google only 10%, while less than 5% of Facebook, Google and Microsoft staff are black. Poor diversity in data, as well as a tendency for algorithms to reinforce and amplify stereotypes, mean AI has the potential to exclude and prioritise along racial, economic and gender lines. In a 2018 study, Gender Shades, facial recognition software from amongst others, IBM and Microsoft, was assessed for how accurately gender and race are identified. The results overwhelmingly pointed to low levels of accuracy for women of colour.
Dreams as the new work paradigm
In the 2040s, we witness an acceleration of inequalities in access to jobs, in who develops and determines AI and who has access to its benefits. This leads to anti-AI extremism and the organisation of new isolated communities that reject AI enhancement. During the same period, AI learns to write its own code and advances to the extent that humans can no longer understand it. In the 2050s, breakthroughs in AI allow the decoding of human communication, cognition and dreams. This leads to new ways of understanding the mind during sleep.
By the 2080s, AI governs our societies and focuses on balancing nature and humans. AI has led to dreams being the main human capacity; sleep being the productive, or work, time. This means people can inhabit both physical and virtual worlds and live fulfilled and elevated lives during wake time.
Competition is a waste of resources
Could there be a future where man and machine coexist and collaborate? After all, AI is not (currently) intelligent without input from a human counterpart. Can we inhabit the point at which AI and humans meet to enable greater creativity and open up new possibilities for how we exist? AI is already creating video games, book chapters (see Michael Strange’s chapter on page. 123), music, poetry, plays and art. We will also increasingly see algorithms take over other creative tasks, such as designing logos, headlines and infographics. We see co-creation between human and machine creatives becoming smoother and smoother. In 2021, OpenAI introduced the neural network DALL·E that creates images from text captions. DALL·E 2 that launched in 2022 generates even more realistic and accurate images.
In 2032, AI frees people of mundanity, creating space for education and societal debate on global ethics leading to purposeful investments. We better understand how to bring purpose and joy into the workplace. Firms and organisations seek to truly reflect diversity by using AI as a tool to monitor and by sharing information and tools between them. Our education system focuses on ethics, well-being and how to be stewards of the environment.
In 2042, we harness AI to dismantle the capitalist growth market and optimise the degrowth of production and labour. In this AI-enabled world, people live within the planetary boundaries. An android entity calculates the real cost of innovation and simulates the consequences of new solutions. We can also see options to maintain balance as everything is traceable. Critical and creative human thought is valued and there is no longer a dichotomy between thoughts and efficiency: AI allows for human thinking without a specific goal. Rather than being just a tool or something to replace humans, we understand that AI needs humans for collaborative cohabitation.
These futures assume that a dream world is one where we choose what we do for work and pleasure and that we want to work, that balance is good while capitalism is bad and we see organisations and businesses existing as they do today. There is also an assumption of the capabilities of AI and that it will enhance human ability so much that it will solve our problems and take over tasks we no longer wish to do without giving rise to new tasks considered unpleasant by many.
What if there were no more organisations?
In 2042, AI has replaced organisations as a way to coordinate, and it assigns work based on people’s individual skills to add most value to society and the environment. All work is valued equally and there has been a reconsideration of value—going beyond producing something others can consume. Individuals work on their own on a conveyor-belt-like system, there is little space for free will and creativity and innovation are constrained. Some have decided to reject this ideology leading to a divided world.
What do power and power hierarchies look like? Can you climb a social or professional ladder? Is this society fair enough for people to be happy? Do people want a system that tries to achieve optimisation? Even if there are no organisations, won’t people still organise? Is this future extreme individualism or extreme collaboration?
This narrative is based on a scenario collectively conceived and developed by core group participants in a Collaborative Foresight cycle. The group's voice was captured and creatively expanded by the writer.
