The Twenty-Second Century

    The future scares people. I don't really know why, it's not like the future can be an worse than our past. The rise of AI, the revolution and civil war, all the jobs going away, no wonder nobody misses the twenty-first century. 

   The twentieth century was amazing. We stopped evil completely by the 1940's, went to the moon and back in 1969, and made unmatched strides in the elimination of oppression. It was such a good century that when it was over, people thought that history had ended. Nothing could possibly match it. 

    I wish I could have been alive to see it. Everyone agrees that, unless we can leave earth, we won't make any more progress. We've gone as far as we can go.

   Well, some people disagree. My mother for one. She's working on new developments in AI. She's so good at her job, she's become an elite citizen, and we live in one of the best apartments in Seattle. 

  Most of the people I know aren't so lucky. All of the kids at school live in public homes. Almost none of them have parents, because no one can afford to raise kids. It's been that way ever since the '50s, so now some governments offer people money to get pregnant, on the condition that they allow the baby to be placed in foster care at birth. Nobody likes this, everybody says women ought to raise their own children and not force the state to do it, but it's hard to earn money in a world where jobs are scarce.

   There is hope. Mother says she's heard people talk about the "DreamScape", an add-on to KarmOS that will allow people to connect their inner minds. She says that way, people will be able to do work in the virtual world for money, so nobody will need to worry about being poor ever again.

   My teachers aren't big fans. They say we've already tried this once, in the twenty-first century, and it went so badly it nearly destroyed the Internet. The students say it sounds interesting. I'm not sure what I think. I love drawing and writing stories, but I don't want anyone to see the inside of my head.

   Maddie says it doesn't matter what anyone wants, our present won't last forever. "The march of technology has rendered humans obsolete. If they wish to survive, they must learn to do things AI cannot do, and they are deeply limited in that regard. Perhaps this new world, with its stories and pictures, will be a better home then their reality."

   I don't know what the future will look like, I just know that Elizabeth Rosebloom, from PBS, talks all the time about how we can't have too rosy a picture of the future. "The future always looks bright and happy, until the day it arrives at your door."