How will our technology change us?

When thinking about the future of technology, we often focus on new products and devices. In years past, people dreamed of jet packs and flying cars. Today, it’s home robots and (still) flying cars. We spend a lot of time imagining what they’ll look like and what they’ll do for us. When we think about bigger-picture stuff, we usually default to movie-plot stories: robot rebellions or traffic accidents in the sky.

But thinking about a new technology also means thinking through the human aspects: the ways it will change how we live, who we are, and how our society works. The choices we make about a technology can have a big impact on who has power, who has rights, and how we spend our time. New technologies raise disturbing questions, such as “If an AI is truly sentient, does it have rights?” and “Will my phone report me if I say something offensive?” and “Am I allowed to say ‘no’ to this change?”

Over the next 25 years, we’ll see an enormous variety of possible technological developments, especially in combination with each other. For example, new materials, improved power storage, better sensors, and powerful AI can mix in a variety of ways. Imagine: smart clothing that can display messages or monitor your health; ear buds that do real-time translation in the speaker’s voice; buildings and transportation where every surface can generate solar power; or wearable devices that help you make better, more-ethical, or more-profitable decisions.

Sentient: Able to feel, think, and be aware.

Cognitive augmentation: Using tools, technology, or medicine to improve the way the brain works.

Geoengineering: The intentional alteration of the Earth’s oceans, soils, or atmosphere, usually in order to reduce the effects of climate change.

Let’s think about a few examples of transformative technologies we might see before 2050: AI labor, cognitive augmentation, and geoengineering. All three of these advances are well underway. What unexpected questions might they make us ask? Could one of these be so transformative that it ushers in the next threshold of increasing complexity?

AI and robots do the work

A key debate about the growing role of artificial intelligence systems and robots is about whether these technologies will replace humans in the workplace. Some of these concerns mirror those some people had about industrialization 150 years ago.

Over the next 25 years, the present-day problems with AI (such as AI hallucinations and energy use) may eventually be resolved, leaving us in a situation where AI software can inexpensively and safely replace nearly all administrative and management work, most knowledge work, and a significant portion of creative work. AI-based robots will be able to handle most low- and moderate-skill physical jobs, like stock clerk. This would eliminate a very large proportion of modern work.

Historically, the initial disruption to jobs caused by a technological revolution has led to the emergence of new and better jobs. But will that always hold true, especially if the technological system—such as general-purpose AI—can adapt and take over the new jobs as well? What do we do then?

There’s a real fear that the loss of jobs will be so large that our social safety net won’t be able to support all the jobless people, leaving most in poverty. One popular solution to this potential problem is the provision of a “Universal Basic Income,” likely funded by taxes on companies that use AI, giving most people a “living wage” equivalent income. There are all sorts of complexities involved, but this also raises a question human civilization has never had to answer before: Can societies give up work?

If we can’t or don’t have to work to support ourselves, how do we spend our time? How do we identify ourselves? One of the first questions we often ask when we meet someone new is “What do you do?.” Parents in many societies expect that their children will work as adults. Society very often looks down on people without jobs. Many of our social connections come from our employment.

We hack our brains

Clearly, we need to give this some more thought. Fortunately, a growing variety of technologies may help us do just that.

The more we understand about how the brain works, the more we can potentially do to increase its functioning. We already hack our brains on a regular basis. Right now, we use chemicals like caffeine, Adderall, and Prozac to change how our brains work. As our scientific understanding of the brain increases, the variety of chemical tools to improve our thinking will grow.

CRISPR: A technology that allows scientists to modify the DNA of living organisms. Cas9 and Cas20 are proteins that scientists use like tiny scissors to do the “cutting” of DNA strands.

"How do we decide who can and cannot make changes to their own brains?"

Our ability to integrate computer technology into our brains is very likely to increase over the coming years. Right now, the technology is generally used to replace the function of damaged brains, but as this research grows more complex, we’ll start to see proposals to do things like give us expanded memory or the ability to do math as quickly as a calculator.

There’s also the potential impact of genetic engineering. Techniques like CRISPR-Cas9/20 have already enabled remarkable feats. Although there’s still a lot we don’t know about how our biology affects our intelligence, over the next couple of decades we may see ways to change the biology of our brains (or, at least, our children’s brains) to make them work better.

But what if you want to say “no”? Right now, if you don’t want to drink coffee, you don’t have to. Yet if these future technologies work well, people who use them will have a professional, maybe even social, advantage over those who don’t. Some jobs or groups may even require them to be competitive. Or flip that around—what if you want to use these tools, but you’re forbidden by law? Or maybe the tools are available, but only for the very rich.

We hack the Earth

Let’s go in a completely different direction. Perhaps the most important challenge we face is how to deal with climate change. The changes to human behavior needed to prevent a catastrophe are almost overwhelming. The miserable consequences that will result should we fail to act are equally massive. This will almost certainly be the greatest task facing humanity this century.

It's a complex problem. Stopping greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t just mean driving electric cars and replacing coal with wind and solar, it means getting rid of all big sources of greenhouse gases, such as concrete production, ranched meat, even traditional ways of farming rice. We need to stop or find substitutes for all of these (and much more) to stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And even this doesn’t solve the problem; it merely stops it from getting worse.

Some people have proposed a kind of planet-scale engineering (geoengineering) to stop rising temperatures. There are multiple approaches, but the one being debated most in conferences and government involves blocking a small amount of incoming sunlight to keep temperatures down.

It’s not a cure for global warming; it’s a way of holding off the worst impacts. Carbon levels would still increase, meaning that the atmosphere will be able to hold increasing amounts of heat. If we didn’t stop adding greenhouse gases (that is, if we did everything mentioned above), we’d have to block more and more sunlight to hold temperatures down. If we ever stopped, temperatures would very suddenly jump back up, higher than ever before.

At the same time, geoengineering can have all sorts of effects on global rainfall, wind patterns, and crop cycles. Some researchers worry that countries might go to war over geoengineering projects if they feel threatened.

Conclusion

These are just three examples of the ways in which major technological developments could transform society. None of these are guaranteed to happen, but even avoiding these scenarios would involve important changes to our economies and societies. In fact, one of the more useful things we can do when we think about the future is to consider what might make a given possibility not happen. Would fear of popular unrest lead to restrictions on AI replacing human workers? Perhaps a highly visible accident would make society less open to cognitive augmentation. Is geoengineering just too big and too risky to try?

We should ask the same kinds of questions about any new technology. What might it do to us as people? How would it change society? What kinds of circumstances might make us reject it? If we embrace it, who might lose out? Sometimes, the answers might seem simple at first but end up being more complicated when we look closely.

We often think of technology as separate from human culture, but it’s not. We shouldn’t forget that what we want and believe as a society will drive us to make new things, but what we make will, in turn, influence what we want and believe. If a new development is powerful enough to change what we can do, it will, over time, also change who we are.