CONCLUSION

So Will It Be Star Trek or Mad Max?

If, after reading this book, you complain that I have taken you on a roller coaster ride, getting you really excited about the amazing future in one paragraph and then scaring the crap out of you in the next, I will not be surprised. That is the path that technology is on: with amazing possibilities to uplift humankind, yet with really dark downsides too. There is no clear outcome: the future hasn’t happened yet; it will be what we make it. As I have been arguing, it is the choices that we all make that will determine whether we build the utopian Star Trek future or end up in the Mad Max dystopia.

The oldest technology of all is probably fire, even older than the stone tools that our ancestors invented. It could cook meat and provide warmth; and it could burn down forests. Every technology since this has had the same bright and dark sides. Technology is a tool; it is how we use it that makes it good or bad.

I showed you a broad range of technologies and asked you to view them through a lens or filter to assess their value to society and humankind. I asked you to consider whether they had the potential to benefit everyone equally, what the risks and the rewards were, and whether the technology more strongly promotes autonomy or dependence. It is fairness and equality that are at the heart of these questions. Industry disruption is going to happen; tens of millions of jobs are going to disappear; our lives will change for the better and for the worse. If we manage it equitably and ease the transition and pain for the people who are most affected and least prepared, we can get to Star Trek: we can be living in an era in which every one of us has food, shelter, education, and light, and is connected to all. We will have better lives if we can adapt quickly enough—psychologically, socially, ethically, and legally—and adjust to a world that changes literally before our eyes, every day, every minute.

At the end of the day, I believe that you will figure this out and we, as a collective race, will figure this out. Despite my fears, I know that humanity will rise to the occasion and uplift itself because it always has. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if we did not have it in us to rise to great occasions.

Of the Star Trek: The Next Generation future, Captain Picard once said: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” That is the future that we must build together.