Artificial Intelligence, I Probably Would

¶ … Artificial Intelligence, I probably would have had a totally different idea in mind about how cities would look like in the future. And yes, because I have seen the movie (and others pertaining a technological development), my idea of a future city is strongly connected to new technological developments and, who knows, perhaps a decrease of humanity and good emotions. The idea takes me to something I heard someone say a while ago that we may be progressing technologically but we are definitely regressing as humanity.

Now I don't share that person's statement so strongly, meaning that I do think some shred of what makes us human will remain in each of us, or at least we may take confort in the idea that some super hero will save humanity from destruction. I also have another idea about how a city in the future might look like and, this time also, a movie pops into my head but the vision is completely different.

The movie is called La Belle Verte and it's about a group of alien "people" who volunteer to come to Earth and share a message about self-actualization and harmony with nature. Now, Earth in the movie is just like Earth looked like in 1996 when the movie came out, but I sort of liked how those aliens shared everything like one big happy family right in the middle of nature and no egocentric needs were fulfilled because there was no need to.

They just ate dried fruits and whatever else nature had to offer them and lived in harmony with each other. All things considered, that's not such a bad prospect for a city of the future. Now, if we could combine Artificial Intelligence and La Belle Verte for a scenario of how a city years and years from now would look like and how people would still be people in the next decades (maybe hundreds of years), then I could rest easily.

But with companies being concerned with building sky cities to deal with the so called increase in population over the next years, chances are we might be "looking down or up" at each other according to each individual's "pocket money." Furthemore, it seems to me that what is "green" today is only accessible to those who earn big money and can afford to eat healthy and to live sustainable.

I cannot help but wonder if that is not going to lead in the future to extreme poverty and excessive luxury over what all people should have access to. But we live in a capitalist world and capitalism is not going anywhere.

So I guess my vision of a future city does not necessarily include dozens of skyscrapers and bridges one over another in a tower of Babel sort of way (the higher you get, the closer to power), but is rather "coloured" by a series of concerns which seem so vivid nowadays that I don't even want to think about what they would develop into in the future.

That is not to say that I undermine the presence of such constructions, in fact, I do think we will resort to such things and cities would probably compete for who owns the higher "bits" and all, but if we start building all over the place on the premises that Earth would no longer be able to support so many earthlings, where would we be able to get our air from? Where would we be able to go if we suddenly feel the urge to "leave the city behind" and take a break from everything? To the Moon? That's another possibility, except there's nothing green there.

We should also stop thinking so much about our own material needs and start sympathizing with other inhabitants who will most likely suffer because of all the development of technology and the massive exploitations, or else, we might be looking.