With the way everything is changing on a daily basis, it is quite difficult to truly ascertain what this world would be like soon, but as I stood with my face to my window and my gaze across the landscape of Port Harcourt city where I had traveled for the weekend, I couldn't help but imagine.
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Everything seemed vain to me. The fact that the model cars that were cruising down the street would soon become old fashioned or probably non-existent, the tiny people I saw running along the streets would be burly men or curvy women, and I, I would be a graying woman, just set the sail of my thoughts high.
The latest invention that was fast taking over the world is this artificial intelligence. With the way it is fast proving to be a better replacement for almost all the important jobs; menial and virtual, I could only imagine people on the streets of this Port Harcourt for instance, in synthetic skin, walking around on the streets carrying carts or tools for cleaning, replacing those dark-skinned men who were usually found digging up dirt from the gutters or the ones who pushed dirt trucks from house to house.
It seemed surreal but there was a high tendency that artificial intelligence was going to be on the streets soon, especially in the near future.
I didn't know if it was just my imagination getting the better of me so I rubbed my eyes and walked away from the window, completely lost in thoughts that I didn't hear my sister's husband walk into the house.
He was one of the few people who had an issue with me writing, he said it made me live in a small cubicle inside my head. I smiled when I turned around and saw him.
“I believe you're no longer in our world at the moment, right?” He asked, nodding to the quick greeting I said to him when our eyes met.
“Strangely, I am. I've been standing at this window and the strangest of thoughts just hit me” I turned away from him and looked outside the window one more time, “I'm wondering what it would be like in the world in the next thirty years”
He laughed and dropped the bag of groceries he was holding, then dragged me along with him to the kitchen so we could start the preparations for the surprise dinner he told me he wanted to make for his wife.
“Tee, nobody can know the world. We can only speculate, and wonder, but we cannot truly know what will be or what won't”
I pondered on those words for some time, “Is it possible that nothing changes?” He raised a brow at me, “I'm just wondering”
“That's what you want, isn't it?” I shrugged,
“We’re already used to the present chaos going on in the world, We don't need more bad else everything would just go haywire”
My brother-in-law laughed again before handing me a knife and a bulb of onion to me. I got slicing.
“Things will definitely become better, and worse. It cannot just be one side of the coin”
I was going to ask him to explain himself because I couldn't see how there would be positive and negative changes side by side but he already had plans to explain, saving me the trouble of asking.
“I mean that things will get relatively better through the introduction of certain technology. You know these folks never stop producing or reproducing something. Then those same things they've produced may turn out to have a side effect or something completely different, like a disease, pounces on the economy from nowhere. I know everyone is focusing on AI alone…”
“Okay, I am guilty of that one”
“But have you thought about electric cars and renewable energy sources? Have you thought about the way medications would be more advanced? Have you thought about how jobs would be even more effective and virtual? How that transportation would be even easier than before?”
I sighed heavily. Even as sweet as those words sounded to the ears, it was almost no consolation seeing as the world would be completely different from all that I knew, all that I could see, and all that would be left of it would be stories.
“But I kind of like the world the way it is,” he took another look at me and laughed.
“Change is constant, Treasure. That is enough to send everything you know packing. But trust me, I'm sure it would be more fun then than how it is now”
I nodded. I didn't doubt it for once and if anything, I was looking forward to it, at least to meet with my first artificial intelligent person and add it to the list of my achievements.