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Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today
By Kara Platoni | MIT Technology Review | August 15, 2024
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With a bit of luck and the right genes, the babies born today (referred as you in this article) might see the next 125 years. How will this generation and the next generation of machines grow up together? MIT asked more than a dozen experts to imagine this joint future. The following are key insights from their reflections.
Just about all of them agreed on how to frame the past: Computing shrank from giant shared industrial mainframes to personal desktop devices to electronic shrapnel so small it’s ambient in the environment. Previously controlled at arm’s length through punch card, keyboard, or mouse, computing became wearable, moving onto—and very recently into—the body. In our time, eye or brain implants are only for medical aid; in your time, who knows?
Present day to 2034 | Age 0 to 10 | When you were born, your family surrounded you with “smart” things: rockers, monitors, lamps that play lullabies. But not a single expert name-checked those as your first exposure to technology. Instead, they mentioned your parents’ phone or smart watch. It helps introduce you to a world of animate objects. You are the child of millennials and Gen Z—digital natives, the first influencers. So as you grow, cameras are ubiquitous. You see yourself onscreen and learn to smile or wave to the people on the other side. Your grandparents read to you on FaceTime; you photobomb Zoom meetings. As you get older, you’ll realize that images of yourself are a kind of social currency. Your primary school will certainly have computers, though we’re not sure how educators will balance real-world and onscreen instruction, a pedagogical debate today. But baby, school is where our experts think you will meet your first intelligent agent, in the form of a tutor or coach. Your AI tutor might guide you through activities that combine physical tasks with augmented-reality instruction—a sort of middle ground. Learning will be increasingly self-directed. Technologies that isolate kids worries the experts.
2040 | Age 16 | By the time you turn 16, you’ll likely still live in a world shaped by cars: highways, suburbs, climate change. But some parts of car culture may be changing. Electric chargers might be supplanting gas stations. And just as an intelligent agent assisted in your schooling, now one will drive with you—and probably for you. Experts imagine it being integrated with other kinds of agents—the future versions of Alexa or Google Home. And when your car dies, the digital agent inside the car does not. You can actually take the soul of it from vehicle to vehicle. So as you upgrade, it’s not like you cut off that relationship. It moves with you. Because it’s grown with you.
2049 | Age 25 | By your mid-20s, the agents in your life know an awful lot about you. Maybe they are, indeed, a single entity that follows you across devices and offers help where you need it. At this point, the place where you need the most help is your social life. AI could be a dating coach. You agree to meet up with a (real) person online, and “you have the AI in a corner saying ‘Hey, maybe you should say this,’ or ‘Don’t forget this.’ Almost like a little nudge.” Virtual first dates might solve one of our present-day conundrums: Apps make searching for matches easier, but you get sparse—and perhaps inaccurate—info about those people. How do you know who’s worth meeting in real life? Building virtual dating into the app could be “an appealing feature for a lot of daters who want to meet people but aren’t sure about a large initial time investment.”
2059 | Age 35 | By now, you’ve probably settled into domestic life—but it might not look much like the home you grew up in. We shouldn’t imagine a home of the future. Rather we would call it a room of the future, because it will be the place for everything—work, school, play. This trend was hastened by the covid pandemic. Your place will probably be small if you live in a big city. The uncertainties of climate change and transportation costs mean we can’t build cities infinitely outward. The home will finally be a machine for living in.
2074 | Age 50 | Now you are at the peak of your career. For professions heading toward AI automation, you may be the “human in the loop” who oversees a machine doing its tasks. In our time, augmented reality is slowly catching on as a tool for workers whose jobs require physical presence and tangible objects. But experts worry that once the last baby boomers retire, their technical expertise will go with them. Perhaps they can leave behind a legacy of training simulations. 9-to-5 workday, which is crumbling in our time, might be totally atomized into work-from-home fluidity or earn-as-you-go gig work.
2099 | Age 75 | By the time you retire, families may be smaller, with more older people living solo. Well, sort of. Chaiwoo Lee, a research scientist at the MIT AgeLab, thinks that in 75 years, your home will be a kind of roommate—“someone who cohabitates that space with you,” she says. “It reacts to your feelings, maybe understands you.”
2149 | Age 125 | We hope that your final years will not be lonely or painful. Faraway loved ones can visit by digital double, or send love through smart textiles: imagine a scarf that glows or warms when someone is thinking of you, or an on-skin device that simulates the touch of their hand. If you are very ill, you can escape into a soothing virtual world. There is perhaps one last thing to try. It’s another AI. You curate this one yourself, using a lifetime of digital ephemera: your videos, texts, social media posts. It’s a hologram, and it hangs out with your loved ones to comfort them when you’re gone. Perhaps it even serves as your burial marker. “It is a little cool to think of cemeteries in the future that are literally haunted by motion-activated holograms.
2 key takeaways from the article
- With a bit of luck and the right genes, the babies born today might see the next 125 years. How will this generation and the next generation of machines grow up together? MIT asked more than a dozen experts to imagine this joint future.
- Some of the key insights from their reflections are: As a baby, as you get older, you’ll realize that images of yourself are a kind of social currency. Your AI tutor at school might guide you through activities that combine physical tasks with augmented-reality instruction—a sort of middle ground. By the age 16, an intelligent agent will drive with you—and probably for you. And when your car dies, the digital agent inside the car does not. You can actually take the soul of it from vehicle to vehicle. By your mid-20s, AI could be a dating coach. As you age 35, we could have a room of the future, because it will be the place for everything—work, school, play. In the age of 50, for professions heading toward AI automation, you may be the “human in the loop” who oversees a machine doing its tasks. In 75 years, your home will be a kind of roommate—“someone who cohabitates that space with you. “It reacts to your feelings, maybe understands you.” Age 125, faraway loved ones can visit by digital double, or send love through smart textiles.
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Topics: Technology and Humans, Future, Artificial Intelligence
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