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Julie wakes up at exactly the optimum time to maximise her sleep, wellbeing and energy, to a vibration in her neck from her embedded wellbeing monitor. Some ambient music fills the room, bathed in soft purple swirling lighting and the smell of freshly brewed coffee percolates upwards from the kitchen. These are things she chose in her psychological contract with Rover. In a few minutes, Rover, her personal robotic assistant, brings coffee, water and fruit slices to her. It is time for Julie’s early morning wellbeing session, led by her ever-faithful 24/7 digital guide, who has already ironed her underwear, run a bath, organised her bag for the day, checked her travel schedule, confirmed her appointments and so on. Rover also monitored Julie’s vital signs and adjusted her personal exercise routine around her expected physical activity during the day, to maximise her balance of mind, body and soul. Rover is, of course, a robot and makes rational decisions based on an aggregation of big data about what is best for Julie’s work, life and play. However, Rover has also integrated humanity by taking on board Julie’s own personal values within the decision-making algorithms that Rover uses.
Rover also made breakfast and collected, collated and prioritised her overnight e-mails. Rover even took two video calls during the night to gather rainfall and other data and convert this into information needed for an agricultural project Julie is working on. She is not allowed to see any of the overnight work until she has had her workout and breakfast through the agreements she made with her clients and Rover. Mindfulness and physical exercise precede brainwork and the data from her morning routine is automatically fed into Julie’s PSP. All of Julie’s home appliances are enabled for her to speak to Rover anywhere in her house while he gets on with the housework. She talks to Rover via the fridge this morning, which gives her exercise class and meditation session.
Rover then conducts a business briefing and runs through the days’ meetings and calls that Julie must make. This leaves Julie to do what she does best, although she has an agreement with Rover that she is open to challenge when her decision-making appears to be overly sentimental or not cross-checked with relevant facts. This level of structure and organisation allows Julie to be more agile and responsive to the various disruptions of business life in 2030.
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Julie’s day is different than it was in 2015. Each day is broken into thematic segments called mind, body and soul, work, family and leisure. The day begins with mind, body and soul then some family time before work begins. Work is broken into four 45-minute sessions with short physical breaks punctuating the day, then a longer period of leisure/family time. Julie’s working week is 20 hours long. Everyone agreed to work shorter hours in exchange for improvements to their lives in 2027.
Julie cycles to work along a relatively empty cycle superhighway, since it was converted from a road after cars largely became a thing of the past. Even in winter she no longer fears riding in darkness as crime is now virtually eradicated, due to improvements in facial recognition, the ability to report crime in real time and receive remote assistance within minutes from Police enforcement drones and other general improvements in community policing. This also means that self-driving car sharing is a realistic option for those people who want to make longer journeys to work and this has dramatically reduced congestion. Julie’s morning starts at 10.00 till 10.45 with a meeting and setting out her plans for the day. She then has two project activities and a wrap-up meeting to plot the course for tomorrow’s work, with three further 45-minute sessions and a one hour lunch break devoted to learning and spiritual development while also feeding the body. She chooses to travel to work for reasons of wellbeing, EQ and SQ rather than there being any real need to geolocate. Julie is able to communicate her thinking directly to others via an interface in her brain that allows people to access her thinking as and when needed. Access is on several levels: an open source region for work associates; a private region for friends and family and a personal region which contains Julie’s thoughts on love, life, etc. only accessible with express permission. She has a closed region of her mind, which is totally restricted even to her, although she can ask the interface questions about this area for the purposes of self-discovery and personal development.
Work is flexible. Julie works the hours as needed by a complex coordination of her client’s needs, her family and herself. Rover looks after all the mechanics using a set of algorithms that Julie agreed about various priorities for her work/life balance. There are no longer days when she makes a plan then to be let down by cancellations or conflicts as everyone decided to ‘choose life’ when they elected to receive a basic income in exchange for full employment, fewer hours worked and the opportunity to earn more by discretionary contribution to the collective net worth through the IGOK (International Grid of Knowledge). Julie has young children so she contributes with one-third of her time to IGOK in exchange for a set of family orientated benefits via her PSP. She has planned to store up some of her contribution for a life-changing trip to Mars in 2050 with Virgin Celestial, which offers its first commercial flights to habitable planets from 2040.
Julie works as a project manager for a sustainable farming community based in a small village. She signs in for the day using her digital tattoo, which has replaced the multiplicity of passwords, freeing her mind to focus on what matters most in her life and work. She must plan the harvesting with a series of robots that are currently assessing the crops to determine the optimum time for the harvest. The robots work in tandem with a few skilled agricultural consultants, who advise on matters that are hard for robots to sense or accommodate into their plan.
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Julie’s clothing reminds her that she has not moved actively for 20 minutes so she is prompted to take a break. She takes a 15-minute nap to recharge her batteries. Refreshed, she then moves on to do some of her work while walking, using an augmented device in her arm. This allows her to operate a computer from a series of hand movements, which more or less equate to computer mouse movements, assisted by her voice. One of the great things Julie is able to do that she could not do before she was ‘augmented’ was 3D spatial design. This means that she is able to help people visualise ideas in space by using her body as a paintbrush – ideas that she creates using this approach can be 3D printed, which has significantly improved her ability to explain new ideas to others.
At the end of Julie’s work she finds that she has a series of decisions to take in terms of her role as part of Citizen Government. She must express her views on matters ranging from the provision of community knowledge banks through to the reclamation of land in Norfolk as part of a project to address the loss of coastal areas as a relic of the industrial age now that sea levels are predicted to rise dramatically in the next 70 years. She does this by receiving a short, fact-checked briefing on each issue. She is expected to ask questions to test her understanding of the issue. She then responds using her augmented arm via a series of Likert scales in most cases rather than a simple Yes/No dynamic. This has been found to be a much better way to engage people in complex decisions due to the ability to aggregate big data and qualitative opinions into well-balanced decisions. Democracy has been reformed in the process and people’s consequent engagement in things that affect their future has improved dramatically.
Julie has elected to do some voluntary work at weekends creating new knowledge, which is shared on IGOK. This work contributes to Julie’s ROI (Return on Innovation) investment in what is effectively a collective bank of knowledge, which pays for holidays, healthcare and life’s occasional luxuries. Everyone receives a basic wage and work becomes something that takes people further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
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Julie blanks out an average of seven hours per day without computers to do human things. This includes childcare, family, leisure, sex, gardening, crafts. All the hardy perennials of being human. She also likes to have some unstructured time, which they often use to do old-school things such as go to the movies and play games together as a family. Julie’s seven hours per day away from automation works well as it is also Rover’s time to recharge (literally and metaphorically) and deal with the outfall of Julie’s day without the need to interrupt her leisure and private time. Today she decides to prepare the family meal with her children and Johnny. Although Rover likes to cook, so does Julie from time to time and it is also essential family time to build their EQ. She has delegated all the peeling and preparation jobs to Rover, leaving her with creative control of the cooking. Since food preparation consumes something like 50% of the time taken to cook, she saves about 30 minutes every day from this strategy, which she redirects into play with her children. Julie’s husband Johnny is the major childcare expert and spends much of his day looking after them, although Julie elected to continue breastfeeding her baby girl Esmeralda and her sons James and Tom.
Julie wonders what life was like before the shifts she made to an economy in which people exchange brainwork for leisure and self-actualisation . . .