For my last linking assignment, I decided to examine our last task, speculative futures. I looked through a number of my peer’s speculative futures and found that a number of our dystopian futures had some similar features: lack of resources, no autonomy, no privacy, no diversity and  punishment for not staying on task. Our class has certainly painted a grim picture of what can go wrong with AI algorithms. However, what was more interesting to me was the utopian futures that everyone imagined; these were more unique in their descriptions. 

In my personal utopian future, I imagined a world where teachers had a work-life balance. The AI worked to save time, energy and resources for the teacher. You can read my utopian future here. Upon reflection, this probably speaks to the burnout that I have felt over the last number of years teaching, working on the MET program and parenting. In my ideal life, AI is used to give me back some family and personal time to pursue my interests and hobbies. 

Comparing my utopian world to the one described in Agnes’s assignment, they are vastly different. In fact, her utopia is actually dystopian to me. Read her utopian future here. Agnes describes a world where school is not necessary. I love school; a world where students are unable to collaborate with each other and share in a learning experience sounds terrible to me. I opted for designing a school where virtual assistants can give you the basic facts, but the students are responsible for taking that learning higher on Bloom’s taxonomy: analyze, evaluate, create.  

Agnes describes a world that allows only one child per house; I actually included that in my dystopian future. She also describes a world where transportation is not necessary: no planes, trains, cars. For me the travel to a destination is one of the most exciting parts. Finally, as a food lover, when Agnes describes the same food being delivered every day, it immediately made me feel stressed. Examining these three features of Agnes’s utopian world, I’m wondering if her work or personal focus is the environment and that’s why she made these decisions? 

I really appreciated reading all of my classmates’ speculative futures. It was incredibly interesting to hypothesize why certain features were included into each person’s utopian future. I particularly liked Agnes’s multimodal format, which made it fun and engaging to hear and read.