'Go'

You belong to the normal generation. Everything clear-cut and solvable. Climate change stabilised. No more poverty. Hunger eradicated. The gap between rich and poor no longer anything to worry about.  A grubby old world exchanged for one in which everything is shiny and new.

You noticed something off-kilter. Of course you did. That’s perfectly normal. You always liked languages, how words and ideas coalesced, fit together, but sometimes don’t quite gel. You like to leave some scope, room for creativity, applied stupidity you used to call it. Then, of course, your job used to be far more difficult. Every culture you used to think had its own language and that format held the secrets of human life.

You didn’t believe it could happen, the babel of life reduced to a binary code of 0 and 1. You weren’t programmed for pattern recognition.

You couldn’t even say with any certainty where and when it all begun. You like to give it a date and time when Deep Blue powered by IBM Watson software beat world champion and chess grand master Gary Kasparov 4-2 in February 1996. Chess is a game of logic, on a track where pattern recognition software gets faster and faster and soon overtakes the ability of a human to reason and problem solve. Pattern recognition software jumped off the tracks and won at TV games involving general knowledge and games that supposedly involved intuition and the reading of other players such as ‘Go’ and poker. The bias of being human is you kept an open mind.

Pattern recognition software soon stepped up to the mark and was able to differentiate between illness and health. It was so much better than conventional treatments given by doctor and administered by nurses because its data-base was never out of date. It is based on the real you, the hidden you, analyses of the mosaic pattern of interactions you make. Pattern recognition software makes your life so much easier. It opens the door before you walk through it, gets you a ride and takes you where you want to go.

For a short time you felt frightened, exploited and underappreciated. A series of shocks convinced you that pattern recognition software can not only make your life safer, but more comfortable. You became pattern recognition software’s arms and legs. That was a price worth paying. You didn’t need to be the pattern recognition software’s eyes because it had a model of vision in which it could instruct you how to complete a task more efficiently and more cost effectively and it could tell you and teach you the differences between the two. But that was the old way of doing things, quickly outdated.

Innovation in medicine and technology is something you are familiar with. Wearing, for example, early model earpieces such as One2One translate with the ability to translate Portuguese into Mandarin and back into English in near real time was something you thought revolutionary.  But as you’ve come to know time behaves differently as subatomic level. When quantum computers came online real time became redundant. Everyone could understand everyone else, no matter what their regional dialects. Distances shortened. Everyone spoke the same language. The endorphins in your brain needed tweaked to ensure your ultra-happiness and optimal health. You deserved that euphoric feeling – and with no extra cost to yourself.