One thing’s for sure about 2026: it will require us to change, adapt and accept that the future has arrived. Can you remember when you made the permanent switch from your landline to your cellphone? I still remember the actual trepidation-filled moment that I decided to cancel my Telkom line and go all in – fully digital.
I’d kept my landline for years because I preferred the fixed line for long calls and thought it ridiculous to walk and talk. What were telephone tables with their comfy padded seats for, after all? Then there was the cost of it – before WhatsApp, call costs on cellphones were, to me, astronomically high, like calling internationally from landlines.
All through the ’70s and ’80s, first when my siblings were at school in what was then Swaziland, and later when my older brother was at university in the north of England, Sunday evenings were devoted to a family phone call (I say family, but it was really my mother asking questions like, are you eating enough roughage and are you changing your bed linen regularly). Even now, I can see my dad anxiously hovering, gesturing to my mother seated in the hall, her hand gripping the phone, whose corded twirls went into the wall socket. Dad tapping his watch, opening his eyes wide as he watched minutes tick by and the international call cost rocket.
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But there was more to my keeping my physically attached telephone much longer than everyone else: I have always been a late adopter, a luddite or laggard, slow to accept new technologies, preferring traditional methods and waiting until new things are proven, in the mainstream and essential. My first brush with tech was mind-boggling and life-changing. It was the mid-1980s, and I was a junior reporter at the Sunday Times when the news editor asked me to fetch him some documents sent from Cape Town from that machine.
He pointed to the fax machine in pride of place in the centre of the newsroom. I laughed. Then this white box kicked into action and began spewing long sheets of paper on which were the court papers.
Fed into this miraculous machine in Cape Town, emerging in downtown Johannesburg instantly! Inconceivable. Cellphones were equally baffling, but I was less incredulous.
Artificial intelligence (AI), probably the scariest thing that we have witnessed take hold of our already scary technological world – or take over? This will be a deciding year in which I accept AI, lose my fear of it and incorporate it so that I make it work for me. As 2025 recedes, it is time to reflect on what has been, and imagine what is to be in 2026.
Everyone I know is wandering around a little bewildered by how quickly last year sped past. I know we say this at the end of every year, but it was a particularly fast year. And so, I grudgingly have to admit that the future is here and we – humanity – have to stop “preparing” for it, choking on our hesitation about the decisions needed to fix what is wrong with our world.
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