A World Without Humans

    I don't know why humans want to get rid of humans so badly. 

   A question that came up in school yesterday was "will we ever be replaced by AI?" our teacher says that we've been asking that question for more than a century, and people still debate it constantly. I didn't really think about it that much, all that was needed was a paper about how AI has made our lives better and gotten rid of jobs no one wanted in the first place. 

   I suppose I like AI more than most. My mother works on building AIs, my sister's a computer genius, and I've lived among citizens my entire life. Even with my poor school record, I'm set for life. Most of the other kids at my school live in public housing, their parents can't find work, they have no way of making life better for themselves. Still, Jeanine is working on becoming a citizen, and she says that she'll make it, so I don't know why they hate me so much.

    One thing that bothers me is the citizens keep wanting to make it harder to become a citizen. Until last year, if you were a child of a citizen you were automatically granted access, but now that's no longer true. My mother keeps pushing me to get good enough grades to enter private school again, because she's forgotten that grades aren't why I had to leave in the first place. She doesn't want to remember that the private schools are haunted by the spirits of those who couldn't make it in society. 

    I wish I could make it as a citizen, but I'm beginning to think I'll have to move to public housing. I see ghosts everywhere the citizens are. It didn't used to be that bad, but it's gotten worse as I get older. What happened to the world where you could be a failure and still be happy? 

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." 

The ArtBot

     I wish I could be a paid artist. Really, I wish that I could be a paid anything. That's not going to happen, unless you're one of the people working on high value AIs, you don't get paid to do anything these days, you just get enough money to allow the government to pretend we have something close to an economy. Or so my father tells me. 

     Art jobs were the first to go. I'm told that back in the twenty-first century, the last time everybody was able to find work, everyone thought that Art Jobs would be the last jobs to go. First would be manual labor, then the skilled jobs, then the artists. It turns out that Artist aren't as original as they thought they were, and the AIs of the time learned how to mimic them flawlessly. By the '30s, no artist could find meaningful employment, not when so many "Bots", as they were called, could do a better job for free. 

   Not that they didn't try. They innovated, spoke out, tried to get politicians to regulate things so they could do what they loved. Nobody listened to them. "Get A Job." was the only response they got. That worked until stores started replacing workers with robots. Then everyone knew they were in trouble. 

     All mainstream art is produced by AIs. It's good enough, but I personally feel like it's lacking in soul. I prefer the art that people post on the KarmOs art service. None of it is good, but all of it is real. At least, it's made by real people. My favorite art is art based on the art attempts of twenty-first century AI, before the days when art AI was made with the idea that people expected art to change. It looks horribly outdated, but people use it to try and express how it feels to live in a world where humans no longer have a place, because they need food and water and shelter. So many of these pieces are built off the question, "What are we going to do now?"

    I know that I can't be a paid artist, but that won't stop me from making art. Maybe it's just because we all have money from the government these days, but I'm not sure why the people of the twenty-first century thought that artists would just stop working if they couldn't make money. KarmOs history states that there's never been a time when art could be counted on as a source of income, but people made art anyway, even before they were able to sell it to anyone. I won't deny that I wish there were better ways to feel useful then just posting doodles on KarmOs and hoping that someone, anyone, will see them, but I'm told that's how the internet always was, and plenty of people in the twenty-first century felt just as hopeless as we do today, but they had jobs. Maybe it's not work that makes you happy, maybe it's believing that people want you.

A Man Made Utopia

      When we first tried to create a Utopia, we ran into a small problem; no two people could agree on what a Utopia would look like. Some people wanted a world where everybody worked. Others wanted a world where nobody worked at all. Some people wanted jobs assigned to everyone when they came of age. Others believed you should be allowed to choose the job you should work at. Then there was the question of what virtues society should embody; beauty, kindness, joy, deference to authority. It was so overwhelming that for many the answers was to simply let people languish in misery in a society they were growing deeply disillusioned with. 

   Over time, two things became apparent. Firstly, life seemed to have been built on the premise that perfection should be unattainable, so that the world would always change. In this way, any society that was to last needed to be built on the idea that change was inevitable and should be as painless as possible. Secondly, all societies were doomed to become stagnant unless measures were taken to keep power in the hands of as many people as possible. Unfortunately, there were a great many things that everybody needed access too, but were best when provided by the fewest people possible. Things like public transit, computer operating system software, internet access, public utilities, delivery service, and many, many other things. How, then, did one go about keeping society from falling into stagnation? 

   In 2083, after a major power struggle in America's government, a solution was proposed. AI had become so advanced and was in so much of our lives that it was basically god, so why not let AI run society? Since it wasn't human, it wouldn't make power grabs, unless programmed into its software, and if it got out of hand then it could be simply shut off without harming anyone. Nearly ten years later, the DEA AI was finished, and it was placed in power instantly. 

   It's not been without issue of course. While it learns the way humans do, it first needed to be programmed by people and is thus not without biases. Having an AI in power also doesn't fix the many problems we were facing before DEA was created. While the human population is less than half of what it was at the beginning of the last century, there simply aren't enough jobs for everyone. Global warming did a number on our food supply, we don’t have a lot of natural resources left, and the economy hasn't grown for more than fifty years now. It's been suggested we could remedy some of our issues by going into space, but that's so risky no one wants to do that. 

    Our biggest issue, something that I don't think anyone expected to be a problem at the turn of the last century, is the fragmentation of the world's religions. Our scholars claim that once our scientific knowledge was high enough, it became clear that most of what was written by the religious was nonsense. In time, even saying that you believed in a god was grounds for massive ridicule. Some of the old gods remain, including, despite increasing ridicule, Christianity. 

    The fall of religion made something apparent, something no one had wanted to be true. Without a common belief system, there was very little holding the people of the world together. 

   Still, despite all our problems, things are finally starting to get better after a century of horror. We know more than we ever have, most of us use renewables to meet our needs, and we have taken charge of our societies. Every day things are getting better, nothing can stop us from reaching the stars.