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Uncertain Future, Unanswered Questions
By Richard Golian25 February 2025 Castellano Slovenčina
It’s February 25, 2025. The clock shows 3:47 a.m. Central European Time. I’m lying in the dark, in a house near the Low Tatras in Slovakia. It’s quiet. Only the ticking clock reminds me that time keeps moving.
The Future World: Unprecedented Inequalities, Chaos, Uncertainty—and Beyond, I See Nothing
The more I think about the future, the more I realize how many essential questions remain unanswered. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like our imagination simply isn’t enough to grasp what lies ahead in five or ten years. A world governed by artificial intelligence, automation, robotics... and probably something else we can’t even imagine today. Technological and societal developments will likely take us to a place for which we currently have no words.
Some things, however, seem inevitable. For example, we will likely face unprecedented inequalities—access to power, wealth, information, and everything else that shapes how we live. I see a small group of those who will own and control technology, and a vast majority who will merely consume content, products, and illusions of a meaningful life.
And what will daily life look like? I imagine days reduced to consuming content recommended by AI. Algorithms will decide what should interest us, what we should watch, what we should believe. A deep divide will emerge between those who understand how the system works and those who merely follow its instructions—or have wildly different assumptions about it.
The big question remains: What will childhood and education look like? We can still imagine what the world might look like in a year or two. But what comes after that? How will we explain how the world works to our children when we aren’t even sure ourselves?
And what about our safety and freedom? What if physical control—or even elimination—carried out by AI-powered robots stops being just a sci-fi topic? I don’t want to think about that. But I know that ignoring this question won’t protect us from danger or oppression.
No matter how I look at the future, I see very few answers and far too many questions and problems. Perhaps it’s time to start asking the right questions—while we still have the chance to search for the answers and solutions.
The Decline of the Middle Class and the Collapse of the Social Contract
I’m afraid that the inequalities driven by the development of artificial intelligence will—unless we manage to reverse the trend—lead to the disappearance of the middle class. And yet it’s the purchasing power of the middle class that fuels our capitalist economy. It’s the middle class that enables growth, and it’s their education and civic engagement that help protect our democracy.
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