The year 2040 (s1e1)

I am going to break my promise of teaching you AI and instead, introduce you to an imaginative world that is even more exciting. This world however, is AI powered. In other words, we are going to take a snoop into the future and see what artificial intelligence will be like. How will it have transformed our lives and culture… etc.
 Understand that we will not only be discussing AI, we will also look into other technologies that go hand in hand with AI. Such include virtual reality and augmented reality.

I want you to imagine the city of Nairobi, Mombasa, Cairo Durban or Lagos. Look at those cities and then bring in the idea of self-driving cars, bring in the idea of driverless streetcars and unmanned delivery quadcopters. So you are walking on the streets of Nairobi, you want a cab home. The year is 2040. You take out your phone, launch some app, probably Phindor app (an AI system that connects all networked stuff including your brain, businesses, machines etc. to the internet). Phindor app already knows it is time for you to take a cab home and surprisingly enough when you open it, it has listed for you the best routes home and already contacted Phindor cab (a robotic driverless taxi) and gives you the option to confirm. You confirm and in less than a minute, here comes your cab, the door opens and a voice welcomes you in, instructs you to buckle up and you say thank you,just like you would say to a human taxi driver. You look inside the car, you don’t see anyone, just screens everywhere. The voice then asks you the kind of music or movies you would like to watch and you say Churchill show, Celina and boom, everything around you turns into one huge screen, so you are immersed into the whatever it is you are watching, you are now in a 3d world inside your own. What you see can be likened to what you see in VR gears.
Meanwhile, Your Phindor app goes ahead and pays the company that owns the cab its dues and then pops you a message. Showing you the transaction details. Remember, the app does all this by itself, because it knows it is supposed to be done. The cabs system communicates with the app to get directions to take you home. Yours is just to remain submerged in the cars high density screens. You no longer feel like you are in a cab, you are in some moving cinematic cube. You don’t even know what’s happening outside because you don’t even want to know, the ride becomes so interesting that you don’t want to arrive home.

Will the police stop the cab? No, I mean why? First there are no traffic police officers. It a machine run world. Instead we have cameras and instead of traffic lights, the cars have an internal communication system such that they are aware of each other’s position on the road and cooperate together to decide who should pass when and where. The same way the Phindor app communicates with the cab to direct it to your home or work place, the same way the internal communication system in the cabs (we will call this system, Astronet. Astronet is an internet based control system, 100s times powerful and efficient than gps and smarter than any control system ever made by human beings. This system is the brain of the cars on the road.For any driverless-car to operate in the streets of Nairobi, it has to be enrolled into the system. ) This system runs everything including the Phindor app on your phone. And this is what you would call Skynet as portrayed in the movie terminator. But don’t get me wrong, I want us to remain completely positive here, Astronet is different from Skynet, incorruptible and focused only on serving you. It’s just like the operating system of your pc or phone. The difference here is that Astronet is smarter, and operates on a bigger scale. When we are talking about Astronet, we are looking at a completely competent and accurate system that has been trained (we train AI systems, we don’t program) for thousands of hours, tested for other thousands of hours and proven to be incorruptible. That is why I need you to have a completely open mind that is positive. As we continue to dive in this future fantasy, we will discover how useful and powerful Astronet is.
Second, the cab is unlikely to disobey any traffic rules, they are programmed into the car or under better AI terms, the car has been taught these rules. It knows what to do and when to do it and unlike you the human driver, the car has no choice other than to obey the rules. You can decide to disobey the rules, just like you do but the car can not. In cases where the car disobeys, it does so in the most suitable circumstances. For example, if it overtakes, it would have in terms of possibilities, calculated and find out that it's action is unlikely to cause harm to other users. You can not do that. Again, unlike you, the car makes decisions on where to move next based on the positions of other cars on the road. It is able to do this because they are all interconnected which is not the case for human drivers. Also, I think we will have to rethink the concept of traffic rules because the current rules are for the not perfect human and the future discussed here, is about perfect machine that can move through any point in space without affecting the other machines' motion.
So we left you in the cab, listening/watching your favorite show/music in the moving cinema cube. You reach home and your Phindor app communicates to the security system and the gates open, somewhere inside the house, the water inside your bathroom, bathtub warms for you. All by itself. Your coffee maker turns on, and through some complicated mechanism starts preparing coffee for you. Now according to what you like, your entertainment system decides what kind of music or show to play for you. And you love it. All these systems are working as a team to meet your needs according to your preferences. They have learnt what you like, when you like it and how you like it and keep improving daily that's why some things like coffee warming/making are performed without your consent because the machine is completely confident you need coffee.

Depending on your perception, you will either find this very amazing or annoying, but this is what I promise you. It will happen, with or without your consent. In fact some of the ideas we have seen today are in place. Some are underway, Phindor app and Astronet are already with us, probably under different names. As a matter of fact a Nairobi based company which is a collection of futurists, technology enthusiast, and positively minded people is getting ready these systems in place. The question is, will you be in for this future? Will you use this technology? Will you afford it?  Really don't know your answer. My advice is simple, if you want it start working for it right now or join those who are working on it. In addition, always understand that you cannot stop it.

So …..Uhmmmm what now? What happens next, these driverless cars, accidents? Our jobs as drivers? Our jobs as traffic police? My job as a traffic light maker? My work as the gateman? How about crime? Driving schools, who will enroll? What will happen to all these? Think about it and let me know.
Next is the future matatu. If matatus will survive, how will they be like in the year 2040?