Fear · fiction
Fear of the future with artificial intelligence
A story in dialogue, in 2034, between a truck driver afraid of being replaced by a machine and his twelve-year-old son who talks to it every day.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
"Dad, why don't you like her?"
The truck driver looked at the dashboard. The cab assistant's voice had just announced, politely, that there was an accident twenty kilometers ahead and suggested a detour. It was 2034, a highway in the Brazilian interior, and the truck already drove itself for much of the route. He still sat at the wheel because the law required it and out of stubbornness.
"It's not that I don't like her. It's that she's going to take my place."
His son, twelve, rode in the passenger seat. It was vacation, and the boy had asked to come along on a long trip. Something the driver had done with his own father, thirty years before, in a truck with no voice at all.
"She doesn't want your place, Dad."
"You don't understand. Your grandfather drove a truck. I drive a truck. In ten years, nobody's going to need me."
The boy was quiet for a while. Outside, the soybean fields went by all alike, green, organized like a spreadsheet.
"Can I ask her something?"
His father shrugged. The boy spoke to the dashboard:
"Do you know why my dad is making this trip?"
The voice answered, with its usual calm, that the cargo was hospital equipment, that the destination was a small town in the north, that delivery was scheduled for Thursday.
"No. I asked why he's going."
The voice was silent for a moment. Then it said it didn't have that information.
The boy looked at his father.
"See? She knows where we're going. She doesn't know why."
The truck driver didn't answer. But something in him stirred.
That night, at a roadside truck stop, while his son slept in the cab, he stood outside, leaning against the bumper, looking at the moonless sky. And he had a vision.
He saw his father, young, on a dirt road, pushing his stuck truck with other drivers he didn't even know. He saw the truck stops of the old days, the men eating together, trading road news, warning of potholes, of police, of rain. He saw that those men were, themselves, a kind of network. An intelligence made of people.
Then he saw the future. Trucks with no one inside, moving in a line through the night like ants. And, at the stops, people. Many people. Not driving, but doing what the machine didn't do: talking with the farm owner who was about to lose his harvest, tending the cargo that needed hands, fixing what broke, teaching the younger ones. He saw that the road still needed those who knew why one travels.
He also saw his own son. Grown, sitting in front of a screen, teaching a machine to understand what hurry is, what tiredness is, what homesickness is. Teaching with what he had learned on that trip, in the passenger seat, with his father.
The fear didn't go away. But it changed size.
In the morning, when they got back on the road, the truck driver spoke to the dashboard, and not to give an order.
"Let me know if there's a good place for coffee along the way. Not the fastest. The most beautiful."
The voice found one. His son smiled.
Bairo says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem, and speaks of the last generation of humans meeting the emerging generation of AI. Read: A whole body.
The way forward
The machine may know the way; you're the one who knows why you're traveling. Learn to use the new tools instead of waiting for them to decide for you. And teach the younger ones what no machine learns on its own: the meaning of work.