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Tomorrow belongs to us?

Endpiece
The beginning of the year is a good time for summaries and forecasts. I’m looking to the future because I want to find answers to some questions that bother me. The most optimistic forecasts are that we will live better and longer in the years to come. However, the more pessimistic scenario is that technological progress will come back to bite us, making us victims of the digital revolution

Our favourite music wakes us up in the morning. When we get up, the morning news is displayed on the bathroom mirror. The fridge welcomes us into the kitchen and suggests a well-balanced breakfast. It also informs us about the day’s meetings and reminds us to restock it with the food it has already ordered for us. As we leave for work, we can set our home to the ideal temperature with an app and switch our home robots into cleaning mode. When we come back, the window blinds automatically open and our favourite music welcomes us as soon as we enter the home.

Is this a picture of the future? No, this is actually how things are today. Technology that seemed like futuristic fantasies until very recently has now become available. We hear about new technological innovations almost every day. So we have to accept the fact that the world is moving forward rapidly and in the next few years we will have to face changes that will make even the most far-fetched science fiction movies seem tame.

According to Vito Di Bari, a lecturer at Bocconi University in Milan, our pupils will soon be our main form of ID and plastic surgery will become as commonplace as brushing our teeth. The digital revolution is set to gradually spread across the world. The ‘Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software & Society’ report prepared by the World Economic Forum predicts that the first mobile phone implanted in the human body will appear by 2025. The device will be capable of monitoring its user’s health. The report also predicts that a large percentage of the world’s population will soon be carrying pocket supercomputers around and that from 2025 it will be normal practice for corporations to use AI to do their audits. Our work model will also be transformed as the boundary between work and leisure gradually blurs. Employing people or groups for specific projects will become the norm and professions will emerge unheard of today. Polish futurologist Natalia Hatalska predicts that almost 65 pct of children born after 2007 will work in professions that have yet to come into being. The ‘Inspired Minds Careers 2030’ report by the Canadian Scholarship Trust lists the 89 professions that will be in the greatest demand in around ten to fifteen years. These include such mysterious vocations as rubbish designer and digital memory curator. One profession of the future will even be a bot trainer.

On the flip side, others predict that some will be left behind: the less affluent and the digitally illiterate will be driven out and their unfortunate lot will be to live lives excluded from the technological elite.

How likely are these visions to come to pass? Around 120 years ago similar predictions were published in the Ladies Home Journal by John Elfreth Watkins. His forecasts in the article ‘What Could Happen in the Next Hundred Years’ turned out to be astonishingly accurate. He even foresaw digital photography. In December 1900, he wrote that a hundred years hence photos would ‘reflect all the colours of nature’, they would be ‘telegraphically transmitted at any distance’, and photography of an event in China would appear in world newspapers an hour after it was taken. He also predicted live TV and cordless telephones.

According to some experts, artificial intelligence will turn into a destabilising factor in the labour market. South Korea has even gone so far as to tax industrial robots to discourage businesses from further automation. A report by the International Federation of Robotics in South Korea shows that there are already 631 robots per 10,000 jobs. By comparison, in Poland there were almost 42 per 10,000 employees in 2018.

Many futurologists are also afraid that artificial intelligence could eventually turn on its creators, thus realising the dystopian visions typical in science fiction movies. Such a nightmare vision has been depicted by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy in his article ‘The Future Does Not Need Us’, in which he suggests that in the future humans will become superfluous and subjugated by machines. The price, for the march of digitisation will be the loss of freedom and privacy. Sadly, everything has a price but will the price of technological progress be too high? Fortunately, one feature of predictions is that they don’t always come true – and life is often much stranger than fiction.

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