Driverless cars and trucks rule the road, while robots "man" the factories. Super-smartphones hail Uber helicopters or even planes to fly their owners across mushrooming urban areas. Machines use algorithms to teach themselves cognitive tasks that once required human intelligence, wiping out millions of managerial, as well as industrial, jobs.
These are visions of a world remade — for the most part, in the next five to 10 years — by technological advances that form a fourth industrial revolution. You catch glimpses of the same visions today not only in Silicon Valley but also in Paris thinktanks, Chinese electric-car factories or even at the edge of the Sahara.
Technological disruption in the 21st century is different. Societies had years to adapt to change driven by the steam engine, electricity and the computer. Today, change is instant and ubiquitous. It arrives digitally across the globe all at once.
Governments at all levels on all continents are suddenly waking up to how social media and other forms of algorithms and artificial intelligence have raced beyond their control or even awareness. (See the Trump campaign and Russia, 2016, for one example.) This realisation that lives are on the cusp of technological disruptions even more sweeping than those of the past decade was driven home to me by being part of a research project on technology and governance at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University this year. "Autonomous" (ie, driverless) cars, the cloud, and swarming drones that deliver goods to your doorstep or transform naval and ground war-fighting strategy are well known concepts. But the reality that they are breathing down my — and your — neck came as something of a surprise.
So did the startling visions of change outlined in the cosy confines of Silicon Valley that were also on the agenda on Africa's Atlantic shoulder when France's Institute of International Relations held its annual World Policy Conference this month.