Seeing the Future Through the Lens of the Past
Embracing curiosity, using our imagination, and exercising our agency will help us to create the technological future we want in light of the lessons of history
It’s the year 2000. You’ve just avoided the projected computer-induced apocalypse of Y2K. High-speed broadband internet at home is still rare, limiting you to good ol’ 56 kbps dial-up internet connections. The smartphone is still ten years from becoming ubiquitous with the introduction of the first iPhone still nearly a decade in the future. The closest substitute is the PalmPilot, offering a preview of the future of handheld portable computing.1
Sitting in 2023, this vision feels as old as a black and white movie. I can still remember the sound of the dial-tone internet connection, but it feels so distant from the world where I’m sitting right now typing this on my iPad connected wirelessly to my wireless router which in turn is connected to the other computers on the internet via tiny threads of glass with bits and bytes being transmitted all across the world at millions of bits per second.
Move forward by looking back
In our current world of technology, 20 years is a lifetime. If you asked me in the year 2000 to predict where we would be today I can’t imagine I would have even had the language to begin describe it. Metaverse? Virtual Reality? Cryptocurrency? Generative Artificial Intelligence? These ideas were the stuff of science fiction only a short while ago.
Now imagine that you’re twenty years in the future, living in the year 2043. What does the world look like now? Are we all sitting at home pulling in our monthly universal basic income checks while our AI systems take care of producing what we need to survive? Do we travel anymore for work or leisure or has the metaverse so completely enveloped our world that we just stay piped in to our immersive environments from the comfort of our living rooms?
The difference between the daily experience of the Western world between the year 2000 and today is immense. It doesn’t require a massive leap of faith to imagine that the world will be similarly unrecognizable 20 years from now.
Given the rapid and ever-accelerating pace of technology development, what are the questions we should be asking now to make sure that we are where we want to be in 2043?
Today I want to consider several major areas of technology that are part of our conversation for the future and map them onto developments of the past twenty years. While the specific technologies are different, they encompass many of the same themes that are always at the center of technology use and development: being, intelligence, power, and relationship.
A framework for analyzing technology
Broadly speaking there are several areas where technology and human flourishing intersect. Each category can be focused around a central question.
Being: Who are we?
Intelligence: What do we know?
Power: What can we do?
Relationship: How do we live with ourselves and others?
As we think of particular instances or classes of technology, these categories are helpful guides for our analysis. Every technology is embedded with a thesis statement and an orientation toward a certain vision of the good life. Unfortunately, these purposes are often hidden below the surface. If we are to be wise users of technology, we must embrace our curiosity and learn to ask questions that can help us understand these underlying implicit aims.
Pulling on the technological threads
If we are to have a robust philosophy of technology, something that I’ve argued is critical for us to develop, the questions that we ask should translate across the various areas of the technological enterprise. They should be robust enough to help us analyze and critique technology and to identify the ways that a given technology is in support of or in opposition to human flourishing.
If we think about the areas of technological development that are likely to have the most significant influence on the world we will all be living in twenty years from now here are four that rise to the top of the heap in my mind. For each, let’s get a taste of how the categories of being, intelligence, power, and relationship will help us to see the common threads that connect them.
1. Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy
AI is bound to have a significant impact on our future even if you are somewhat pessimistic about the continuing pace of innovation and advancement. I appreciate the way that Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin frame the approach to AI. They argue that we’ve already had our first contact with A.I. and lost.
Social media was the first contact between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. First contact has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content but to curate user-generated content. The A.I. behind our news feeds is still choosing which words, sounds and images reach our retinas and eardrums, based on selecting those that will get the most virality, the most reaction and the most engagement.
We’ve seen the way that algorithms designed to maximize the time your eyeballs are glued to the screen can end up molding us in ways that are difficult to argue are in our best interests. The greatest and most terrifying promise of AI is that it will give us superpowers. As the co-founder of A.I. powerhouse Deep Mind and former VP of AI Products and AI Policy at Google Mustafa Suleyman put it in his recent conversation with Sam Harris, we’re paying too much attention to what these large language models can say and not enough attention to what they can do in the real world (e.g., by interacting with application programming interfaces on the web or by convincing humans to carry out their bidding in the real world).
This is not to mention how AI challenges our conceptions of what it means to be human. What separates an AI from a human? Is it possible that future AIs will be considered conscious? What might be the moral implications of such a discovery?
2. Genetic Engineering
It feels like distant history because most of it happened before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it wasn’t all that long ago that we were discussing the ethical implications of the CRISPR/Cas9 system and its use on humans. Genetic engineering is another area with deep moral questions related to how we responsibly use our power and what it means to be human.
Here we quickly run up against challenging questions about the way we should use these technologies. What is the level of safety that we need to achieve in order to consider not using these tools if they might be able to cure diseases that we have no other known ways to treat or cure? What are the implications of editing the heritable human genome with the litany of unknown potential consequences that may ripple through time?
Here again, we must ask about how these technologies are applied in the context of a society too. As with almost all new technologies, there will likely be some period of time during which these technologies remain inaccessible to the developing world and less-privilieged communities. In what ways might unequal access exacerbate existing inequalities? On the flip side, in what ways might an overly cautious approach slow down our progress and ultimately cause more human suffering because of the failure to develop potentially life-changing therapies as quickly as possible?
3. The Metaverse
The Metaverse quickly gets philosophical. What does it mean to be human? What is the value of physical presence? If we can develop technology that can create a digital representation of a person that is indistinguishable from their actual physical presence do we lose anything?
I quipped this past week that maybe a Star Trek transporter is closer to reality than we think. The promise of the metaverse is that we can transport ourselves anywhere we wish without the questions about whether we can really disassemble and then reassemble all of “us” when we hop into the transporter and ask Scotty to start beaming us all over the last frontier.
While it seems that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have cooled on the metaverse slightly over the past year or so, I think that this is mainly a change in marketing rather than an overall change in mission. Just this last week Lex Fridman held an interview with Zuckerberg in the metaverse using virtual avatars. Whatever you think of the overall concept of the metaverse, it’s hard to come away from interview without some level of awe at the technological marvel. While we won’t all be wearing these headsets next year, I wonder if with a little imagination we might see these technologies becoming more widespread a decade from now, especially considering the increasing popularity of remote and hybrid work.
4. Sustainability and Renewable Energy
It’s hard to put together a list of the most important areas of technological development without including the sectors of sustainability and renewable energy. Our reliance on fossil fuels is ultimately unsustainable. The question is not if we need to transition to more sustainable sources of energy but how. It’s likely that we’re still likely to see things get worse before they get better, despite the push to develop and deploy these technologies as quickly as possible.
Sustainability also gets complicated when we consider that this is a global problem and thus requires social coordination to be successful. In many ways, the technical problems are trivial compared to the political and social problems.
Here again, we see the way that technology shapes the way that we live not only as individuals but together in community. Whether we’re talking about how governments should use taxpayer money to subsidize more sustainable energy choices or how the developed world should subsidize the developing world in their energy transition, the questions are challenging. They require us to think deeply about how we ought to live with each other and what it really looks like to pursue human flourishing not just for ourselves and our immediate friends and family but for our neighbors across the country and world.
Three Prototypes: Curiosity, Imagination, and Agency
If you’re anything like me, sitting with these big questions is both exciting and terrifying. It’s exciting to imagine the ways in which technology can be used to help reduce suffering and create opportunities for human flourishing across the globe. It’s worth considering that we often fail to recognize how fortunate we are to live today given the scope of human history and the suffering that was part and parcel of daily life for many of our ancestors. And yet, there are also so many ways that we can see things going wrong and exacerbating the issues that divide us today.
In the tension of excitement and concern, how should we move forward? I’d like to make three suggestions:
Embrace your curiosity to see the story that technology is telling and how it is shaping your world
Use your imagination to project what the future may look like for you and your neighbor
Exercise your agency to cultivate the environment that will help you and those around you to flourish.
1. Embrace your curiosity to see the story that technology is telling and how it is shaping your world
When we create something we put ourselves into it. Our personal stories not only tell us about the reasons we are working on a particular project, but the narratives that inspire us are a big part of the way we create artifacts to shape the world around us.
It’s instructive to think about this in the context of the CEOs of some of the big technology companies of Silicon Valley and how many of them are inspired by specific stories from science fiction. It doesn’t take any wild leaps in logic to see how the stories that inspire them end up guiding their work and the goals of their technology. This note from
puts it well.Can you see the connections?
In Ender’s Game children are trained via simulated war games. At Khan Academy children learn from educational videos and now via AI assistants.
In the dystopian future of Ready Player One, humans escape their dismal surroundings by immersing themselves in a virtual world and search to find answers that come with real-world riches. In the Metaverse, we’ll find connection via hyperrealistic avatars, blending the virtual and real worlds and enabling us to connect with other absent the limitations of our physical bodies.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the earth is destroyed and the lone survivor is searching for his place in the universe. Much of the underlying purpose behind Musk’s inspiration for his work is creating the technology needed to explore, and perhaps move to other planets if our own pale blue dot is no longer habitable in the future.
The point here is that we are narrative creatures and stories are a core part of who we are. Because they are core to our identity, they make their way, in both conscious and unconscious ways into the work that we do. If we ignore this fact, we’re liable to be distracted by the technological wonder of the latest gadgets while missing the vision of the future that is embedded within it. To judge with wisdom, we need to embrace our curiosity and ask questions not only about what technology will do for us but how it will shape us, our world, and our future together.
2. Use your imagination to project what the future may look like for you and your neighbor
But even if we can ask curious questions to see the vision behind the technology being built today, we need to go beyond this to imagine the world that these technologies will create. It’s instructive that many of the ideas that were pure science fiction less than a generation ago are now part of our everyday lives.
In order to better understand where we’re headed, we need to stimulate our imaginations and put ourselves in the future. What might life look like in 2043? What will our day-to-day lives at work and home consist of? What new exciting experiences will be made possible by technology? What new sacrifices might we have made in the name of efficiency, productivity, and the promise of a life of leisure?
Knowing that the technology being developed around us is motivated by underlying narratives, what does the world look like if those stories come true? Spending some time to suspend our disbelief and put ourselves in the future can be a helpful lens for us to understand the right questions to ask today.
Knowing where we are today, what questions might we have wished we asked in 2000?
Would we have wanted to fund the Internet on the back of advertising and sell our attention rather than embracing a subscription model with more financial obligations but less addictive side effects?
Would we have thought more carefully about sustainability and the tradeoffs embedded in our dependence on ever-increasing energy consumption?
Would we have been more thoughtful about the digital technologies of the smartphone and social media which are intentionally designed to keep us hooked?
Even if the development of the technology itself remained unchanged, asking the right questions and imagining the world these technologies might create would help us to better prepare our own approaches to them. If we are to avoid a future in which we are corrupted and controlled by our tools, we would be wise to spend some time imagining what that future looks like and in what ways it will support and hinder our flourishing as communities and individuals.
3. Exercise your agency to cultivate the environment that will help you and those around you to flourish
Whether you approach the future with an optimistic or pessimistic outlook, it’s important to realize that you have agency in the way that you respond to the changes in the world around you. Some problems can be addressed as an individual. The two ideas above are good examples. You can ask curious questions and imagine what the future looks like by yourself. But ultimately creating change, both in your own life and in the world around you requires that you do it in community.
The challenges that face us are many:
What will our world look like in the face of a changing climate?
How will the increasing capabilities and availability of AI impact our individual work, the work of our friends, and the broader foundations of our economy?
What will advances in genetic engineering mean for the way we think about what it means to be human and the rights attendant to it?
Moving forward in wisdom together
Of course we need to be mindful that we embrace each of these prototypes with the right operating definitions. We need to engage our curiosity to explore new things without being unwise in our experimentation, explore our imagination without withdrawing from the real world and shirking action, and exercise our agency with care for those around us instead of arrogantly dictating our way or the highway. As we engage in these prototypes, we need to be constantly aware of the ways that they help or hinder us in our goal to move forward with wisdom. Here, as is the case with many good quests, is where doing this as part of a team of like-minded individuals is extremely valuable.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the scale of these questions. The challenges are great. But loving our neighbor means being courageous enough to ask questions, imagine the future, and then take action to move in directions that will support a world that flourishes, for ourselves and our neighbors.
The Book Nook
This week I finally started reading Teaching Machines by
. This one has been on my reading list for some time now but it finally got onto my Kindle which is the first step to it actually getting read amidst my web of work and family responsibilities. I’m only a few pages in so far but I can tell that there is going to be lots of thought-provoking stuff in here about both the past and future of technology in education. A few quotes from the introduction that resonated with me.One telling dismissal of the value of history that is all too often an attitude of technology developers.
“The only thing that matters is the future,” one entrepreneur commented. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened does’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”
On the realization that all technology is developed in context—and how easily this context is lost or ignored.
Too often, the context is stripped from the stories written about education technology, and all that seems to matter is the technology itself. Its history is simply a list of technological developments with no recognition that other events occurred, that other forces—cultural, institutional, political, economic, and so on—were at play.
The main thesis of Audrey’s book resonates with one of the main points I hoped to make in the essay today: in order to plot a wise path for the future, we need to understand the past properly.
I’m looking forward to engaging with the remainder of the book. If you’re interested in exploring more of Audrey’s work (a fellow admirer of Ursula Franklin, by the way!), here’s a post from earlier this summer where she shares her favorite educational technology: the window.
The Professor Is In
I’m excited to be giving a talk at Caltech this weekend in conversation with my friend Kurt Keilhacker. We’ll be asking questions about the ways that technology can support and undermine human flourishing. I’m looking forward to engaging with the Caltech audience and exploring these ideas together as users and designers.
Leisure Line
My favorite band NEEDTOBREATHE came out with a new album a few weeks ago and it’s been on almost constant repeat of late. Of all the songs on the record, my favorite is “When You Forgive Someone.” A few lines that resonate:
I couldn't see I was the only hostage
To the bitterness I can't let go
Maybe now it's time to cut my losses
Move on, move on, move on
Oh, I can't believe how long it's lasted
I can feel it coming up these bones
There's a part of me that can't get past it
I know, I know, I know
'Cause when you forgive someone
You set yourself free
Oh, when you forgive someone
You set yourself free
Still Life
This cranberry walnut bread from Costco is a perennial favorite. So good!
I still remember having one of these as a kid. I think it was a Palm III but I can’t quite remember. Many happy memories of playing Space Trader.
i just reread part of what we owe the future and a lot of what was said reflects the tension described here between accelerating AI so that we don't have technological stagnation & preventing AI development so we have more time to think about our technological philosophy.