This guest blog is written by independent youth activists and is intended to give a platform to the voices of young people.
by Nate Simphiwe
My friends at Amnesty Kenya asked me to envision the technological future and imagine what a day in life might look like ten years from now. The question presents a challenge for me because I live by the philosophy of “living in the moment” and standing against meticulous planning, instead focusing on what’s right in front of me. Despite this, when I imagine the world in 10 years, I see a world where the AI technology that excites us today has become an integral part of our daily lives. It is not far-fetched to picture a future where AI robots have been seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. These GPT humanoids will revolutionize global labour markets as we know them. However, it will have a profoundly detrimental impact on people who are already economically marginalised and will widen the rich-poor divide.
On a more individual scale, my idea of a regular day in 2032 entails me walking up to a skyline polluted with tall, ugly buildings built by power-hungry architects content on polluting the Kenyan skyline. I don’t like this. Contemplating our technological future like this encourages me to look beyond where my eyes can see and leaves me questioning where I’ll be in my life.
I can’t say for sure what my life will look like in ten years or what life will look like. However, I believe I have a decent picture of what technology will look like simply because I use it on a day-to-day basis. I believe that our modern-day blue-collar workers will be out of jobs due to the simplicity of the labour they undertake, which will be co-opted by artificial intelligence. People will lose out daily: farmers, baristas, and waiters. Global industries will orient themselves to capital-intensive technologies, which will put millions out of a job.
Ten years from now, the gaming industry will be modernised beyond imagination, almost in perfect comparison with the likes of Ready Player One, whereby the gaming industry has managed to surpass our expectations, and virtual reality becomes a crutch for the ailments of day-to-day life. People escape reality into a virtual reality, and it eats away at their personalities. They become husks of their former identity. Society will remain more concerned with “modernising life as we know it” via technology, which, in turn, creates new problems instead of addressing existing socio-political and economic problems.
In short, I can’t say for sure what my life will look like in ten years or what life will look like. However, despite my legitimate concerns and fears, I look forward to finding out. Good things and bad things, the possibilities are endless, and I look forward to venturing into each one.
Authored by Nate Simphiwe from Brookhouse School, the views expressed in this article are purely their own.