What do you think is the future of AI?
by Amara Whitfield, age 11, Riverside District
Ms. Delgado said one page, no copying, and she would know. So here is mine.
Saturday my mom had a double shift at the medical centre, so I went to Gram’s on Minerva Street like always. Gram doesn’t have a computer but she has a phone that my uncle set up with the voice on it, and the voice talks too slow, like it’s reading a bedtime story to a baby, so Gram mostly just yells at it and does the thing herself. She says, “I been finding my own weather since 1961.”
Anyway I had to write this and I couldn’t think, so I walked down the greenway to clear my head. It was cold finally. The creek was high from Thursday’s rain and brown like it gets, and there was a heron standing in it being a heron, not caring about anything. When I came back Gram was cutting up an apple and I said, “Gram, what do you think the future of AI is?” and she said, “You’re asking the wrong one, I still use a checkbook.”
Here is what I actually think.
I think AI is going to be like Minerva Creek. Because when I did my project on the mills I found out the creek used to turn the wheels at Minerva Mills and it made all that cloth and it was the whole reason people came here, and then it stopped being good for that, and for a long time it was just the thing that flooded people’s basements, and now there’s a trail with signs on it and I walk my dog there. Same water all the time. Different job.
So probably it’s not going to be a robot that does your homework or a robot that takes over and rules everything, which is what Marcus said in class and he’s eleven so he doesn’t know either. It’s going to be a normal thing that’s just around, like the creek, and we’ll forget it’s even a big deal, and the question is what we point it at. If we point it at medicine, my mom gets home earlier. If we point it at making fake videos of people, that’s just a flood. Nobody’s asking me about the flood but it’s the same question.
I tested one. I asked it where Riverside is and it told me some stuff about “vibrant culture” and “historic character” and it did not know about the 1968 unrest or that my gram’s church Mount Olive has been on that corner since 1889 and has the good choir. So it was like talking to somebody who read one article. It was not wrong exactly. It was just flat, like a picture of a cake.
That’s what I want to say about the future of AI: it can know a lot and still not know my street.
Gram says the future is whichever thing you hand a person’s business to. She said when the mills closed in the seventies it wasn’t because cloth got worse, it was because the people with the money pointed the money somewhere else. So when people say “AI might take jobs” I think they mean that. Not the machine being mean. People deciding.
So my answer is: I think it’ll be useful and I think it’ll be everywhere and I think the important part is boring – keeping a person nearby who can say no, that’s wrong, that’s my street.
Also it should be free, because if only the rich get the good one then it’s just the creek again, and the people downhill get the basement.
That took more than a page. Sorry Ms. Delgado.
Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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