A Letter To My Future Daughter: Please Teach Me How To Operate Your Car

#futurechallenge

This is a submission for the Future Writing Challenge: How Technology Is Changing Things.

Dear Future Daughter,

As I sit here in 2025, I find myself imagining the world you will grow up in. Right now, you don’t exist yet, you are just a dream of the future, but one day, you’ll be 20 years old in the year 2050, living in a world that will feel as distant to me as my own childhood does now.

Today, I drive a car with a steering wheel, pedals, and a manual override for every movement I make. I press the accelerator to move forward, the brake to slow down, and I steer my way through streets filled with other human drivers making decisions in real time. You won’t know this world.

By the time you are my age, driver’s licenses may not even exist. Instead, you will have a certification: not to drive, but to operate and override autonomous machines. You won’t learn to parallel park or check your blind spots; instead, you’ll learn coding, programming, and system overrides to interact with the AI in your self-driving car.

In my world, knowing a programming language is optional. In yours, it will be as essential as knowing how to read and write. Today, we speak in words, slang, and cultural references. By 2050, slang may be derivatives of code, evolving constantly, shaping not only how people communicate but also how technology adapts to human creativity.

Your car will look nothing like mine. It won’t have:
🚗 A clutch (which is already becoming obsolete).
🚗 A brake pedal.
🚗 An accelerator.
🚗 A handbrake.
🚗 A steering wheel.

Instead, the control system might resemble a gaming console, where your inputs are no longer about physical maneuvering but about intelligent interfacing with the AI that guides your vehicle.

In my world, only the wealthy or the most traditional drivers own high-performance manual cars. By your time, the super-rich and the super-poor may be the only ones left with traditional vehicles—the rich as collectors of rare, outdated technology, and the poor as those who lack access to automation.

I wonder what it will feel like to watch you step into this future, one that feels both thrilling and unfamiliar. I wonder what I will struggle to understand about your world, just as my parents struggled to grasp how I could store thousands of books on a single device or talk to someone across the world in an instant.

But I do know this—whatever your world looks like, it will be built by your generation, your knowledge, your creativity. And no matter how much changes, one thing will remain the same: I will always be proud of you.

PS: I hope you have the time to teach me how to drive your car, I might continue driving my current Automatic, and carry my Driver’s Licence.

You’re not even born yet, and I already feel ancient.
Anyways, I love you.
Your Future Mom
Ntombizakhona ❤️