Imagining the future is always complicated, even more so for someone like me who was born in the 1950s and has lived in a changing world. Artificial Intelligence and its developments brought (and will bring) very significant changes to human beings regarding health, food, transport, communication, education, and commerce, among other fields. The questionnaire clearly shows how today’s world was unimaginable for my ancestors (my grandmother was born in 1900!). I have read science fiction since I was a teenager, but the world I imagined for the future will be different than the one my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live in.
This brought me two types of feelings: the first one is the sadness of not being able to live this imagined future because I won’t last forever. The second is the concern about where this might lead us. I fear humanity will lose its psychic and emotional reference when dealing with technology since I belong to a time when the face-to-face relationship was the reference.
On the one hand, the questionnaire brought some elements that present a much easier life with the presence of AI: autonomous cars, ultra-fast communication, less time wasted on household tasks with the “smart home,” changes in commercial relationships, and access to information, among others. But I can’t stop thinking that this will not be distributed equally. It would be a utopia to think this way. Humanity may be divided between those who will have easy access to that and those who will be very far from these privileges, perpetuating the existing inequality or the domination of one part of society by another. Take, for example, the image that reflected the art of the future. Google presented me with futuristic photos, but none represented what I would like to find, representing an art that was more interactive and decolonized since that is what I expect from the future. I didn’t find anything to suggest that. The images I chose to insert in the answers present a predominantly pessimistic vision of the future. The photos that caught my attention among those offered by Google Images reflect this because, in a few, there are humans, and the world appears uninhabited or, in a way, sad. Honestly, I hope I’m wrong. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn to live in this world where every day, there’s something new for me to know.
Referências
- OpenAI. 2022. Dall-e 2. Retrieved December 10, 2022 from https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
- Cátedra Oscar Sala. 2022. DecolonizAI. Retrieved December 9, 2022 from https://www.decolonizai.com/visoes-sobre-o-futuro/
- Kevin Lynch. 1960. The Image of the City. The MIT Press.
- Ebenezer Howard. 1946. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Faber and Faber.
- Vilém Flusser. 1999. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. Reaktion.
- George Loewenstein and Erik Angner. 2003. Predicting and indulging changing preferences. In Time and decision: Economic and psychological perspectives on intertemporal choice, ed. G. Loewenstein, D. Read, and R. Baumeister, 12, 351–91. Russell Sage Foundation.
- Andreas Huyssen. 2014. Culturas do passado-presente: modernismos, artes visuais, políticas da memória. Trad. Vera Ribeiro. 1. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto; Museu de Arte do Rio.
- Suely Rolnik. 2008. Desvendando futuros. ComCiência , Campinas, n. 99. Available at <http://comciencia.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1519-76542008000200007&lng=es&nrm=iso>.