“May the odds be ever in your favor”: Technology and an optimistic future
Humanity’s fascination with the future
Take a moment to imagine how the future is depicted in the entertainment we consume today. In the past 20 years we’ve read books and watched movies and television shows about the bleakness of inequality (The Hunger Games series); how climate change might impact humanity (Interstellar, The Day After Tomorrow); the perils of relying on technology to solve our problems (Minority Report, I, Robot); and how pandemics might lead to zombies—lots of zombies (28 Days/Weeks/Years Later, The Last of Us). While fictional and entertaining, these dystopian examples reflect how we feel about our world today and our fears for the future. The future might seem pretty bleak to your students, and considering the reception that some recent commencement speakers received after mentioning AI, they might also be worried about how technology will impact their lives. Predicting our future can be both exciting and terrifying, especially when it seems like technology is developing faster than humans can keep up, but there’s also a lot to be optimistic about. Let’s do a little thought experiment—one you can also use in your classroom—to break down the positives and negatives of potential future technologies.
The good: humans harness the power of technology to improve life
Imagine a future where AI reads through all the medical research we have in a few hours and recommends innovative therapies to treat or cure conditions such as depression, anxiety, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ALS. AI could help predict potential difficulties with these therapies and reduce times for human trials and government-approved treatments. Or what if we could do away with human trials altogether by swallowing a capsule that helps regulate multiple functions in our bodies and recommends individualized treatment based on real-time needs. This potential future doesn’t seem that far off considering the medical breakthroughs we’ve achieved in recent decades such as drug therapies, cancer treatments, tests for diagnosing Alzheimer’s, and medical implants that help us hear or regulate our hearts.
Medical breakthroughs won’t be the only area in which AI might have a sizeable impact. We already ask AI to help us with grocery lists, recipes, travel itineraries, and lesson plans. And yes, our students even ask AI to write their papers and do their homework. But AI has the potential to transform the entire workforce, increasing productivity and making us more efficient. New jobs that we haven’t even imagined might be created as our reliance on AI grows.
Living longer, healthier, more-efficient lives would be fantastic, but medical breakthroughs and AI productivity won’t be of much use if we don’t have a healthy planet on which to live. There are two ways that technology might solve this problem: we innovate our way out of the climate crisis, or we figure out a way to move to another planet. Think about recent innovations that help either reduce our use of fossil fuels or adapt to weather-related events. From long-life batteries to advances in electric vehicles to genetically modified crops that resist droughts, we’ve already created innovations to help us mitigate and adapt to climate change. New technologies such as nuclear fusion might significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and decrease greenhouse gases. We might also improve technologies that allow us to do more than a drive-by of the Moon. NASA has a goal of establishing a base on the Moon in the next couple of years, but we could eventually build colonies on the Moon or Mars or maybe even an exoplanet orbiting a star light-years away. As more private companies and governments bank on space as the new frontier for travel, settlements, and the extraction of resources, this future might not be that far off.
The bad and the ugly: humans wreck their lives with technology
Technology might help us hack our bodies and make old age a thing of the past, but what about the potential problems associated with becoming immortal(ish). In this scenario, all these older, healthier people become a strain on the Earth. As the global population skyrockets, food and housing become scarce. Wars increase as nations lay claim to necessary resources to power our lives. Wealth inequality increases as those who can afford food, housing, and new medical breakthroughs benefit while those who can’t become increasingly desperate to survive. Basically, we begin living in a real-life Hunger Games movie.
Increasing our reliance on AI also raises some causes for concern. Although AI is transforming the ways in which we work and is creating new jobs, many jobs that people do today will become obsolete. If the pace of training people for new jobs lags behind our transition to AI, unemployment rates will increase dramatically.
Training AI using incorrect or outdated information might lead to conflicts between nations, cultures, or faiths. Overreliance on AI might also lead to a surveillance state in which we trust the AI agent more than other humans—or even ourselves. Then, of course, there’s the question about whether AI might become sentient and decide that it no longer needs humans at all.
But what about finding more resources and creating new jobs on a different home planet? Moving off-planet might help some, particularly those who have the money and resources to leave, but colonizing space and extracting resources from other planets detracts from the problems humans face on Earth. And if we deplete Earth’s resources trying to get to far-off planets, those who are left on this planet will experience a dystopian future.
How do we help students balance these potential positive and negative scenarios?
Our students think about the future a lot. But often they focus on the very near future of their individual lives: what car they might get once they pass their driving test, or what college they’ll go to after graduation. If they do think about the more distant future, their vision tends to align more with the bad and ugly scenario. As teachers, the challenge is to help students look to the future optimistically while also grounding them in history and equipping them with tools to analyze information critically. So how do we get them to think optimistically about technology while also helping them prepare for how to overcome the negative aspects of it?
A lesson plan to inspire optimistic future thinking
This quick lesson will help your students envision a technological innovation that might change the world in the future. Think of it as a mash-up of the Big History Invent a Species and Visions of the Future: Tech activities, but this time they’ll be predicting and inventing a technological breakthrough.
- Start by sharing “The bad and the ugly” scenario with your students and ask them why humans tend to focus on the negative. You can share the research on this behavior, which indicates this trait is linked to our species’ evolution—it’s a survival adaptation, a way or protecting ourselves from danger.1
- Now, ask students to predict what the positive aspects of this scenario might be.
- Then, have them think about how technology might change in the future, and based on that, predict a future innovation that might be discovered. Their technology, however, must be grounded in reality. In other words, they should base their ideas on innovations of the past or present.
- Have them write a couple of paragraphs that answer this question: How will that future tech impact the world (or the Universe) 100 years and 1,000 years from today?
- Their first paragraph must describe how their technology will change the world in a positive way across these two timeframes.
- In the second paragraph, they must anticipate the potential—and inevitable—negatives of their technology, and come up with solutions to overcome them.
Teaching students to think about the future optimistically can be challenging. But we’ll need this positivity to overcome some of our current issues, and technology will certainly play an outsized role in ensuring we’re able to fulfill the positive scenarios we’ve laid out—and to avoid the negative ones.
For more future thinking, check out OER Project’s Big History and Climate courses, where we ask students to think far beyond their own lives to what the future might hold for humanity, Earth, and the Universe.
1 See A. Vaish, T. Grossman, and A. Woodward. “Not All Emotions Are Created Equal: The Negativity Bias in Social-Emotional Development,” Psychological Bulletin 134/3 (2008): 383–403, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/. Catherine J. Norris, “The Negativity Bias, Revisited: Evidence from Neuroscience Measures and an Individual Differences Approach,” Social Neuroscience 16 (2021): 68–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2019.1696225. For a student-friendly version, see “Managing Negativity,” American Brain Foundation, July 8, 2025, https://www.americanbrainfoundation.org/managing-negativity/.