The little boy was still in primary school. Rubik’s Cubes bored him. Too easy to solve in just a few minutes.
“What are you doing at school?” we asked.
“Writing code,” he answered.
“What for?”
“Games, mainly.”
What did he think of supercomputers and robots coming into our world? And what might computers soon look like?
“Love them,” he said. But he would like them to have more human feelings, like us.
Horrified, we said: “But that would mean they would soon want human rights?”
“Yes, what’s wrong with that?” he answered.
“Well, they might take over and end up destroying us…”
“Nah,” said the kid, “It just means we’ll be equal because we’ll have computers in us, too.”
This little boy’s vision for our future was an augmented reality where the boundaries between human and supercomputing blurred and bled into each other, on equal footing.
A little breathless and shocked, we implored him: “Take good care of what you do with our future.”
In this brief exchange with this little boy, we got a glimpse of the future, 15 or 20 years from now, when he and his friends have come of age and they’re busy working in one of the high tech industries or labs that are bubbling away already, largely unseen, around Australia.
The conversation galvanised how poignant was our theme for our Tomorrowland event back this year on 1 December in Sydney, where we look just five…
