September 17, 2024
Let me paint you a picture of 2035.
Here's how mornings work now: no alarm clock. A gentle hum that matches your brainwaves, easing you out of sleep like a friend nudging you awake. Your dreams? Tracked. Analyzed. Turned into insights about what your mind needs for the day ahead. Strange at first. You stop questioning it after the first week.
Your home knows you. I mean really knows you. Not just that you like the room at 72 degrees. It reads your mood. If you're anxious, the walls soften. The light shifts. A faint soundscape settles around you. Your space isn't a bunch of smart gadgets anymore. It's something that breathes with you.
And those AR lenses? They don't show you news. They drop you into it. Climate breakthrough? You're walking through the future city it enables. You're there. Not reading about change. Experiencing it.
Work looks nothing like it did. Your job isn't a single thing anymore. This morning, you signed up for a cognitive boost, a few hours of amplified creative thinking. For a while, you're not just brainstorming. You're something else entirely, accessing thought patterns that feel borrowed from somewhere beyond your own mind.
The line between you and the machine? It doesn't exist. AI doesn't assist anymore. It collaborates. It fills gaps you didn't know you had.
By afternoon, your system nudges you toward collaboration. Suddenly you're in a workspace with people from São Paulo, Tokyo, Berlin, avatars, sure, but present in a way that feels almost too real. You pass ideas back and forth like physical objects. They're tangible. Floating between you.
And then, between calls, your space reminds you. A Van Gogh brushstroke you loved two months ago drifts into your peripheral vision. A poet you adore fills the room with ambient sound. Work and art and life, all the same thing now.
Walking down the street is different too. Sidewalks lead to portals. Forests. Fantasy worlds. Curated for you, based on what your mind craves.
The stranger next to you? You see more than their face. Their story floats nearby, visual cues, emotional signals, glimpses of who they are. Trauma. Joy. Passion. Instant empathy. No small talk needed.
But some people walk unplugged. Raw. Unaugmented. It's become a kind of rebellion, choosing to be just human. The question haunts us: how much do we merge before connection stops feeling real?
By evening, you make music. Except make isn't the right word anymore. You draw from your past, childhood memories, voices of people gone now. The AI weaves them into something alive. Your music breathes. Sad, then joyful. Responding to your heartbeat.
Who owns this? You? The algorithm? Does it matter? Creation is a partnership now. Human feeling plus machine precision. Neither alone could do this.
Here's what gets me: AI isn't just a tool anymore. It's part of your story. It knows what you want before you do. At what point does assistance become extension? When does it stop being it and start being you?
People argue about this in chat rooms at 2 AM. Are we still ourselves when our dreams are co-created with code? Are we evolving into something new?
Some days I wander through parks that exist in both dimensions. Past versions of myself appear, memories given form. Future selves too. All of it coexisting in my mind like ghosts sharing the same dream.
The future isn't AI taking over. It's blending. Fusing. Until we can't tell where we end and it begins.
2035 isn't about new gadgets. It's about what happens inside us. AI holds up a mirror, and what we see is ourselves, more clearly than we've ever dared to look.
Maybe that's the whole point. Not smarter machines. A more self-aware us.