The Future looks great

Are you excited about the future or are you worried? Are you expecting good things or more misery? These days, it seems like all around us, the future is getting bleaker and bleaker. Netflix and Hollywood are telling us about dystopian scenarios. The news is showing more reels of climate change disasters, economic issues, clueless CEOs and politicians. And of course, in the end, the robots will take our jobs, and then they’re going to harvest our bodies for energy.

But despite all of that noise, I am here to tell you that the future is better than we think. I believe that human ingenuity, our science and technology can and will solve most of our long-standing problems. I also believe that human kindness and the ability to collaborate will prevail. But we’re running out of time because the future is arriving faster than we think. Actually, the future is already here, we just haven’t paid enough attention.

Gerd Leonhard is the founder and CEO of The Futures Agency. He is based in Zurich. His new book, Technology vs. Humanity, is out now published by Fast Future Publishing.

_{Gerd Leonhard}

Whether it’s enhancing humans, designing chimeras or robots going to war: What will happen during the next ten years will sweep away most of our notions about gradual progress and upend our views about how technological innovation usually and maybe even inadvertently furthers the common good.

Technology is morally neutral until we use it.

_{William Gibson}

In my speeches, I have recently started talking about what I call “the good future” – a utopia (or better yet, a protopia) as opposed to a dystopia. As hard as it may be for all of us to agree on what a “good” future would look like, we must submit to the hard work of creating such a definition. Because, if we don’t reach some kind of consensus, there may be no future at all – at least not for us humans. One thing we know for certain is that the Good Future is not likely to come about with good old-fashioned “greed capitalism”, and neither will it be ushered in by technology. Rather, it will be a question of ethics and values – and the policies we craft from them.

Now is the time to think about and act on “civilising” – maybe a better word would be “rehumanising” our technology. Yes, this will mean regulating (but not strangulating) the global tech giants, because in this age of advanced exponential change, today’s amazing breakthroughs may well turn out to be major problems not too far down the road.

It’s time to stop asking “what will the future bring” – it can, quite literally, bring almost anything we can imagine. Instead, we need to ask: “what kind of future do we want?

It is a basic truth that technology can serve opposite purposes, good or bad. And as William Gibson famously said, it remains morally neutral until we use it. “Too much of a good thing” describes this conundrum very well: something quite useful can quickly become something deeply harmful and corrosive to society – as recently evidenced with social media, which suffers from excessive monetisation obsession and utter lack of accountability.

We are at a fork in the road: The future is our choice, by action or by inaction. And time is of the essence. We have at most ten short years to debate, agree on and implement new, global (or at least territorial) frameworks and rules as far as governing exponential technologies are concerned. Call me an optimist or a utopian, but I am convinced that we can still define and shape a “good future” for all of mankind – as well as for our planet.

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