The movie The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly is showing on the movie circuit at the moment.

Alongside its themes of the devastation of homophobia and of autism, it is the story of Alan Turing, the great Cambridge mathematician and Christopher, the computer he designed to break the German Enigma code system in the Second World War – the machine that would perform the task of decryption millions and millions of times faster than any number of humans could.
The real name of Christopher is Bombe and it was built in 1939. It filled a small room. Wars seem to be periods of intense innovation able to spur on great – and often destructive – discoveries. The importance of Turing’s work is that it laid the foundations for computer science.
Zen is a Japanese term for meditation. But the Zen in our family is a five-year old digital native. He is our eldest grandchild and lives with his parents in Johannesburg – at least physically. In a more general sense, this little boy lives in a complex, connected digital world into which he is being configured. This world will shape him and he will shape the world through digital agency. Many millions do today through their engagement with different forms of digital technologies – especially through the various social media platforms.
Zen will simultaneously live a life that is both intensely local and intensely global. In his short five years, he has migrated through Lion King, Toy Story, Ben 10 and Cars. He now watches Star Wars and Harry Potter. I can’t wait for him to begin watching Star Trek – we’ll watch Mr Spock together.
The point about this is not so much that there is a progression in complexity in his movie tastes but that, with his parents, he finds stuff on the web that supplement his tastes. In particular, he finds others who are also watching Star Wars and Harry Potter, who make comments and suggestions. He asks us to print pictures of his heroes and heroines he discovers on the web which he can colour in. He finds paper models he can make. e-Games based on these movies and series are often available and they are usually very cheap and readily available. This enriches his watching experience. There is a kind of integration going on which is happening as a matter of fact. These are all learning opportunities and learning is suddenly fun.
And when we are away in New York, we often hear the Star Trek-type signature ringtone of a Skype call – and it is Zen. He does this himself now. He has yet to discover the meaning of time zones and so sometimes these calls get us up in the middle of the night.
And recently I discovered a stream of photographs of Zen’s face each with a different pose – tongue out to the left, tongue out to the right, left eye shut, right eye shut, both eyes shut, etc. He used my phone to take photos of himself. Narcissism begins early. This is The World According to Zen.
So what will The World According to Zen be like when he is 20? That is so hard to predict but foundations have been set for some profound changes.
For one the world of work will be hugely different. Algorithms that allow machines to learn from large amounts of data must give us pause to stop and think about the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on the nature of human work. Will there be work for people to do?
It has been nearly 20 years since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, one of the world’s greatest human chess players. The real competition now involves machines playing against machines.
Machine learning drives the design of machines that will do a lot of the work currently done by humans – especially the kind of work that requires repetitive human action and which requires the analysis of data. Machines will do a significant amount of human work.
Zen, in his lifetime, will see the arrival of driverless cars. They exist already and their commercialisation is just a matter of time.
And in 20 years there will probably be medical care without doctors in their usual role. Algorithms are being designed that would teach machines to listen to symptoms, order tests, make diagnoses and prescribe medicines. The global shortage of medical doctors is much too large to be rectified by the usual production of doctors by our medical schools. Machines will be the solution. We’ll still need doctors but they will play vastly different roles.
In The World According to Zen we may have to take heed of Stephen Hawking’s warning that artificial intelligence  “…would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded”.”
Not everybody agrees with Hawking and we are already seeing how machine learning supports the learning of web-search engines like Google. Are you surprised how Google often comes up with exactly what you are looking for? That’s because it learns.
In The World According to Zen, young people will be literate in different ways. Will it be important whether they are literate in the usual way or not? I have been told languages have existed for about 100,000 years but literacy dates back just 5,000 years. My very expert linguistic friend tells me writing and reading are still unstable and may give way to other forms of literacy – kinds that will be new to us.
I can’t tell this story. The World According to Zen will have to be described by him and his friends. We can only speculate. What we can be sure of is that it will be a very different world.

– Professor Ahmed Bawa

*This article was published in the Dolphin Coast Mail and East Coast Mail
Professor Ahmed Bawa is Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Durban University of Technology. He is a theoretical physicist. He is convinced of the importance of knowledge and technology in giving effect to positive change. He has initiated several far reaching ICT related projects at DUT such as the e-skills unit and a large embracing e-learning enterprise.