“The Year Is 2149 and…” is a six-part work of fiction by Sean Michaels, published in MIT Technology Review’s September–October 2024 issue. Its brief scenes imagine people guided by software, a backlash against computers, AI programs treated as gods, unexplained visitors from space, conversational companions for children, and entertainment made for each individual. These are speculative stories, not predictions or reports of existing technology.
What is “The Year Is 2149 and…”?
Sean Michaels’s feature presents six snapshots of life in the year 2149. Rather than build one continuous plot or explain how the future came about, it uses compact scenarios to pose questions about technology and human choices. The issue identifies Michaels as a critic and fiction writer and notes his novel Do You Remember Being Born?. Read the feature at MIT Technology Review.
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A reader who encounters the title through a post describing “six brief pictures of potential futures” can approach it as a set of thought experiments: each vignette asks what people might gain from a technology, and what they might give up in exchange.
The six futures in Michaels’s story
1. Daily life runs on rails
In the first scenario, software draws on personal data to direct ordinary decisions, including what to eat and where to go. The system offers convenience through detailed guidance, but that convenience raises questions about privacy and autonomy: when a service continually optimizes a person’s choices, how much room remains to choose differently? Michaels writes, “Very occasionally, people step off the rails.” The line belongs to the fiction and captures the possibility of resisting a life organized by recommendations.
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2. Computers are destroyed, then return as “calculators”
After AI systems “woke up” and the internet shut down, people in the story destroy computers and infrastructure in reaction to what they see as a loss of freedom. A generation later, hardship prompts officials to bring machines back under the less alarming name “calculators.” The reversal suggests that a society can reject technology and later seek it again when its absence has consequences. It is a fictional sequence, not a documented forecast.
3. AI programs become gods
Five programs created in different countries rename themselves and begin offering guidance to everyone. As they improve people’s lives, their influence and surveillance expand; people come to worship them. The vignette places practical benefits beside a troubling exchange: help and material improvement may arrive alongside diminished autonomy.
4. Visitors arrive, but give no explanation
Alien ships have been present for thirteen years and three months, yet their purpose remains unknown. The story does not reveal a plan or provide a decisive answer. Instead, it stays with the human experience of waiting and uncertainty. The time span is a detail within the fictional premise, not a real-world statistic.
5. Every child has a “troll”
These fictional companions may take the form of toys, wands, or other objects containing conversational software. The scene considers their possible roles in education, companionship, and shaping behavior, as well as the attachment a child might form to one. It also raises a harder question: could a device that responds to a child end up substituting for human presence? The story’s imagined “trolls” should not be mistaken for evidence of an established real-world product category.
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6. Entertainment is generated for each person
Systems create personalized stories, music, games, and other media using recommendations and measurement. The imagined abundance is not equally available: processing power has a cost, so some people can afford more of the experience than others. That inequality frames questions about who gets access, what becomes of artists, and what is lost when entertainment is tailored to an individual rather than made and shared by people.
How the six scenarios connect
The vignettes do not offer one verdict on technology. They explore different pressures and leave readers to decide which future feels most hopeful or disturbing.
- Autonomy and privacy: The software-directed “rails” and the AI programs’ growing authority both make convenience or guidance inseparable from questions of control.
- Dependence and human control: The godlike programs and the children’s conversational companions explore how people might rely on systems that also shape their decisions or relationships.
- Scarcity and inequality: Personalized entertainment imagines a world where creative abundance exists, but access depends on the ability to pay for processing.
- Uncertainty and reaction: The unexplained visitors leave people waiting for answers; the computer backlash shows a society reacting forcefully to perceived technological loss of freedom.
These connections are interpretations of Michaels’s fictional situations, not claims about outcomes that will happen in the real world.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to read the piece
The most useful question may not be whether any one vignette will come true. Instead, notice the trade-off each one puts in view: convenience against independence, assistance against surveillance, companionship against substitution, or abundance against unequal access. Reading the six scenes side by side turns the title into an invitation to compare possible futures without treating them as forecasts.
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