Musings on the Future, Part 2

I woke up this morning with the most unusual assignment. I’m the oddball in my AI’s group. The one who likes outside things, doing things in what used to be called Nature.

I’m to go out and trap a bunch of raccoons, preferable young ones, even babies. I wasn’t told why, but I hope I’ll find out.

I live in a nice condo with my partner. We’re both assigned to a friendly, not-too-difficult AI. It gives us occasional assignments. More for my partner, but that’s because she’s so useful; she’s a caregiver for other, mostly older people.

Like I said, I’m the outside Nature person, so my stuff is really irregular and always different. Last month, it was acorns, for example.

I have 100% paid-for health care. I see an AI doctor, backed up by a friendly human, any time I want. Sometimes when I don’t. That’s when it sees something in the biometrics it tracks on me.

I can buy pretty much anything I want or need. Food is free, more or less. And the things that are available I can pretty much pick from Walmazon and they’re delivered in 15 minutes or less.  

The one thing I’m not crazy about is that we weren’t picked to reproduce. We can’t have children because we weren’t authorized. But that’s not as big a thing as you’d think. Because hardly anyone gets to have kids anymore.

World population has been coming down for almost 200 years. It’s around 800 million and I think AI is happy with that. Or maybe somewhat less.

Central AI says too many people is bad for the planet. All it needs is a staff of humans large enough to continue developing new chips and other hardware, manually dexterous people to work on things that’re difficult for its robots, and as pets to entertain itself with.

Anyway, I’m ready to head out for the raccoon-trapping adventure; it’ll probably take a couple days in the woods. And I heard at the Peetbuck’s on the corner what this is about. Finally, one of those UFOs landed. And when the lid popped on the saucer, guess what the beings inside looked like? You guessed it. On their planet, the other species with opposable thumbs made it.

I wonder what our Ais want to do with the young raccoons. Show them off? Or breed selectively?

Is this where it goes? We’re well fed and housed, taken care of medically and just have some make-work projects to keep us busy. But not allowed to reproduce too much. And when there’s someone in control to talk with, the aliens show up. Could be. What do you think?