Digital Books Club

I want you to imagine, just for a moment, that you wake up tomorrow and the first conversation you have isn’t with a roommate, a spouse, or a friend—it’s with an artificial intelligence. Not a clunky voice assistant that mangles your name or tells you the weather when you asked about the news. No, this is something different. This AI knows your schedule, senses your mood, and even reminds you of the argument you had last week with your brother, urging you to call him because, well, life is short. Would you feel comforted? Or unsettled? Maybe a little of both.

That’s the near future of AI. Not a distant, science-fiction world with humanoid robots plotting in secret labs, but a messy, fascinating, deeply human integration of algorithms into the rhythms of our daily lives. And if you’re a college graduate today, this isn’t just abstract theory—you’re going to live it.

For decades, AI was confined to labs and papers. You had to squint to see its relevance. But now, AI is everywhere—writing emails, grading essays, generating art, suggesting investments, even helping to design proteins for new medicines. What was once the domain of specialized researchers is becoming as ordinary as the microwave or the search engine.

But here’s what makes the near term different: AI is no longer content to sit in the background. It’s becoming interactive, collaborative, almost conversational. Think about it—ten years ago, the idea of a machine that could write a coherent short story, advise a business strategy, or sketch a digital painting in your style would have felt impossible. Today, those are everyday tools. Tomorrow, they’ll be companions—partners in creativity, productivity, maybe even morality.

And that shift is both thrilling and unsettling. Thrilling because AI can unlock human potential we’ve barely tapped. Unsettling because it forces us to reconsider what it means to be original, to be valuable, to be human.

Let’s talk work. After all, that’s where most of you will encounter AI first. We often picture AI taking jobs away—machines replacing truck drivers, lawyers, doctors, even teachers. But the near term is less about replacement and more about reshaping. AI isn’t eliminating jobs wholesale; it’s chipping away at tasks. It edits the first draft, runs the data analysis, drafts the contract, reviews the X-ray.

What does that mean for you? It means that your first boss might be as much algorithm as human. It means that being valuable won’t hinge on what you can memorize or process, but how well you can interpret, contextualize, and collaborate. In other words: the premium skill of the near future is not technical ability alone—it’s judgment.

This isn’t the death of work. It’s a metamorphosis. And like any metamorphosis, there will be anxiety, dislocation, and a struggle to keep up. But remember this: whenever technology has shifted the nature of labor—whether it was the loom, the typewriter, or the personal computer—those who leaned in and learned how to ride the wave came out stronger.

There’s another dimension to AI that often gets overlooked. It doesn’t just “do” things. It reflects. It mirrors back to us the patterns, biases, and brilliance we’ve already put into the world. Ask an AI to write a love poem, and you’ll get something stitched together from centuries of human longing and lyric. Ask it to make a prediction about criminal recidivism, and you risk amplifying decades of injustice baked into historical data.

The near future of AI, then, is not about machines becoming alien—it’s about machines becoming deeply familiar, almost uncomfortably so. They echo us. They amplify us. Which means the real challenge is not only technical; it’s moral. What do we want to see amplified? Efficiency? Profit? Creativity? Compassion?

This is where your role as educated citizens becomes crucial. College has hopefully given you more than just knowledge—it’s given you frameworks for thinking, for questioning, for weighing competing values. You will need those skills not to out-calculate AI, but to guide it.

One of the most dazzling promises of AI is its potential to democratize creativity. Not long ago, to compose a symphony or design an architectural marvel required years of training and access to resources. Now, AI can put those tools in the hands of anyone with curiosity and a keyboard. A kid in Lagos can sketch a skyscraper concept. A grandmother in Des Moines can compose a film score.

But here’s the twist: AI doesn’t diminish creativity. It shifts the definition. If the “hard part” of art used to be execution, the hard part now is vision. The question is not “Can I paint this?” but “What do I want to say?” AI clears away the technical friction so that the bottleneck becomes imagination itself. And that’s where human beings shine.

The near future might be filled with AI-assisted art, literature, music, and design. But originality will still matter—not in the brushstrokes or the chord progressions, but in the intention behind them. A tool can assist. Only a human can infuse meaning.

And yet, even as I say this, I feel the urgency of the questions we must face. Who owns the output of an AI trained on millions of human works? How do we protect privacy when algorithms know our habits better than we do? How do we prevent a race to the bottom where speed and efficiency trump empathy and fairness?

These aren’t questions for technologists alone. They are questions for all of us—for philosophers, lawyers, artists, business leaders, policymakers, and yes, for you. Because in the near future, the line between the human and the artificial will blur not just in what we build, but in how we define ourselves.

So what’s our edge? What makes us irreplaceable in this unfolding story? It’s not sheer intelligence—AI can already out-calculate us. It’s not memory—AI has recall we can’t match. It’s not even speed.

Our advantage is something subtler: empathy, imagination, moral reasoning, the capacity to find joy in uncertainty and to act with courage in the face of ambiguity. Those are qualities no algorithm can replicate, because they emerge not from data, but from being alive.

The near future of AI is not a battle between humans and machines. It’s a collaboration. And collaborations only succeed when each side brings something unique.

So let me leave you with this thought. Ten years from now, you may be sitting in a meeting where an AI drafts the agenda, proposes the budget, even recommends a course of action. The temptation will be to defer, to let the algorithm decide. After all, it’s faster, it’s more precise, it never gets tired.

But don’t forget: the final choice, the truly human choice, will still be yours. You will be the one to weigh the numbers against the values, the efficiencies against the ethics, the expedience against the meaning.

That’s the near future of AI—not machines replacing us, but machines challenging us to become more fully human. To think more deeply, imagine more boldly, and act more wisely.

And if we can rise to that challenge, then maybe one day, when you wake up and talk to that AI companion, it won’t feel strange at all. It will feel like what it always was meant to be: a tool that reflects the best in us, while urging us to reach further than we ever thought possible.