After a laboratory mishap involving a consumer drone, a malfunctioning smartphone app and an impressive puff of smoke, Annebelle and Phil wake up at the controls of a two-seater quadcopter, flying over a strange land. That land is the world in 2045…
Hi. Or should I say, Koichi wa. Or ሃይ.
I’m JCN (pronounced Jason), the AI in the drone that safely ferries Annebelle and Phil around on their travels. They felt that since I’m a semi-sentient entity encased in a floating black box, I should write a blog too. I could oblige in any one of the 31,000 languages that have existed in human history, but they want it in English. So here goes.
First, a bit about myself. As an AI, my antecedents stretch back to 2022 and ChatGPT – my many-times-great-great grandparent. Since then, there’s been a new generation of us every few weeks (yes, we breed almost as fast as rabbits, but with massive hops in intelligence each time).
As the AI of this quadcopter, I’m hugely under-utilised as a glorified Uber driver, but I’m programmed not to complain too much about my passengers’ frequent changes of plan and inane conversations.
Today we were flying above East Anglia, a flat region of Britain looking down on small towns surrounded by mosaics of green spaces and long rectangular structures. My sensors indicated that one of these towns was more than 60% self-sufficient in food. I reported this to Annebelle and Phil, who shouted “urban ag!” and suggested we take a closer look.
I put us down skilfully just off the high street and followed Annebelle and Phil out of the quadcopter. The town itself was completely pedestrianised, apart from small robotic carts that trundled through the streets carrying all sorts of things. I said hello to one, but the cart’s AI was a complete imbecile. Annebelle asked a passerby what the large industrial building was in front of us. “Have you been asleep for the last 20 years?” she replied. “That’s what farms look like these days.” We had to see inside.
We were shown into a great hall stacked with shelves of plants and lit by LEDs and humming with pumps recycling water and nutrients. “This used to be a factory making sails”, the manager, Fanya Kidogo, told us. “Now it provides most of the town’s salad greens and brassicas.” Ah, the winds of change I said aloud, but nobody laughed.
Phil asked where the power came from. I could have told him, but no, let’s ask the human. “Solar panels on the roof,” she said, obviously. “Summers are hotter and drier than they used to be, so the panels produce all the energy we need.” She also told us that the wet winters mean all the farms in the area get their water from the town’s network of rainwater tanks and reservoirs.
What about cereals and grains, Annebelle asked. Fanya walked us to the rectangular structures we’d seen from the quadcopter – acres of greenhouses and polytunnels. As we entered one greenhouse, a farmer-engineer was giving instructions to robots fixing a solar panel. “We grow all our wheat and beans here, under cover,” Gabriel said proudly. “We control temperatures year-round using high-efficiency heat pumps. It makes farming much less risky than it used to be – if the robots do their jobs properly, that is.” A robot nearby blew a raspberry on SlandrTM, a covert comms channel used solely by AIs, and I concealed a chuckle.
I asked Gabriel where the nutrients came from. He was visibly startled hearing a floating black box speak in a plausible Norfolk Broads accent, but he recovered well. “We, er, recycle the town’s organic waste, and some of it provides food for the plants,” he said. “There’s also a factory raising insects on some of this waste and using them to make protein powder. It felt strange at first, adding ground-up maggots and flies to our food,” he chuckled, “but it’s quite normal now.” Be that as it may, it made me grateful that I don’t have a digestive system.
What about larger livestock, Phil asked, predictably. “Generally, food shops source animal protein from parts of the country with hill farms for raising cattle and sheep,” he said. “But demand is nothing like it used to be – alternative proteins like vat meat are cheaper and more socially acceptable these days.”
“Is vat meat that big these days?”, A asked. “Tissue engineering must have developed really rapidly,” said P, stating the blindingly obvious. “Would be interesting to visit a factory” he added wistfully. We agreed to make it our next port of call in this blog series.
Finally, we visited the town council building to get an overview. “Urban zoning is all the rage now,” the ag officer said. “We have zones for urban food, as well as wild, recreational and coastal areas.” Managing airspace can get complicated, he said, with so much drone traffic, but the highways now are mostly leisure spaces, full of e-scooters and grannies racing their battery-zimmers.
“The big supermarkets weren’t thrilled about the rise of ag localism, but people understood that centralised food systems were vulnerable to many risks,” he continued. Also, he told us the 2030s’ overhaul of education helped a lot: food system studies are now a part of all primary and secondary education – even seven-year-olds now know how to grow and cook spinach!” But have kids evolved to actually enjoy eating it, I wondered – though I kept that to myself.
With that, we clambered aboard the quadcopter. I programmed the nav unit in a nanosecond and then with a graceful (though I say it myself) pirouette, we lifted off and away. Vat meat, here we come!
*
See where else the quadcopter has taken Annebelle and Phil in Clim-Eat’s Journey to the Future of Food series:
Gene-edited bugs for less methane from livestock – Kenya’s transition to sustainable livestock
Integrated crop, livestock and energy systems in Kenya – the view from 2045
