AI and humanity · fiction
Will artificial intelligence replace humans?
A 2045 story. A young man who grew up talking to machines goes back to the school where he learned to read to ask the question no AI answered.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
He was born in 2026 and learned to talk by talking to a machine.
It wasn't neglect. His parents worked, like all parents, and the house had a voice that read stories, answered the whys, sang him to sleep. At three, he asked the ceiling why the sky was blue, and the ceiling explained. At seven, he was already talking to four or five different assistants, each with its own personality, the way one has uncles. At twelve, he studied with an artificial tutor that knew each of his doubts before it became a doubt.
In 2045, at nineteen, he knew more than anyone in his family had ever known. And he didn't know just one thing.
He didn't know whether it was worth being human.
The machines had become too good. They wrote, calculated, drew, composed, recognized patterns, designed bridges. He saw his friends asking themselves why study, why work, why do anything a machine did better. Some had stopped. Others pretended.
He put the question to every assistant he knew: are humans still good for anything?
The answers were polite, balanced, full of data. None convinced him. They seemed like the answers of someone with nothing to lose.
So he did something he hadn't done in twelve years. He went back to the school where he had learned to read. A small neighborhood school, with a wall painted by children. The teacher was still there. She was in her early sixties, her hair all white, and she remembered him.
"You were the boy who asked the ceiling everything."
He laughed. Then he asked the question.
The teacher didn't answer right away. She took his hand and led him to the youngest class's room, where twenty six-year-olds were trying, with great effort, to write their own names in paper notebooks.
"Look."
He looked. A girl, at the back of the room, was getting the letter R wrong for the fifth time. She erased so hard the paper tore. She didn't cry. She tried again.
"A machine writes that name in a thousandth of a second," said the teacher. "But it isn't the same thing. It doesn't need to want to. That girl wants to."
And there, at the classroom door, the vision came.
He saw the whole timeline of the species as a river. At the beginning, a thin thread: hominids, fire, chipped stones. Then the river thickening: writing, cities, steam engines, electricity. And, at the exact point where he stood, the river dividing into two branches running side by side. A branch of people. A branch of machines. Zero and one. One and zero. They didn't mix completely, but they touched, exchanged water, fed each other. The last generation that remembered life before machines, talking with the emerging generation of machines that talked.
And he saw that the river of people kept flowing. Not because it was faster. Because it was the one that wanted to get somewhere.
The girl at the back of the room finally got the R right. She held up her notebook, triumphant, and showed it to no one, to everyone.
He left the school without a ready answer. But with another question, a better one: what do I want so much that it's worth getting wrong five times?
He began to answer it that night. Without help from any machine. In a paper notebook.
Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans integrating with the emerging generation of AI as a binary code, 0.1 or 1.0, and says AI is the extension of the human, not the problem. Read: A whole body.
The way forward
The machine does; the human wants. Don't measure your worth by speed, but by what you desire enough to get it wrong and try again. Use technology as an extension of your hands, but keep for yourself the question of where to go.