Technology in the next 30 years: will it save humanity or kill us?

Artificial intelligence has the potential to make the difference between a dystopian and livable future in the face of the catastrophic effects of climate change. Futurism is a mug's game: If you are correct, it appears routine; If you're wrong, you sound like Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, who said in 1943 that the world has room for "maybe five computers."

When David Adams wrote about the future of technology in the Guardian in 2004 and cited the same prediction as an example of how they can go wrong, he was aware of these risks. Adams certainly performed better than Watson from our perspective in 2020. He avoided many of the pitfalls of technology prediction when he looked ahead to today: There are no assurances regarding flying automobiles or futuristic technologies like teleportation or travel faster than light.

However, the predictions were overly pessimistic in some ways. In the last 16 years, technology has really advanced a lot, and AI is a perfect example. 'Brains of artificial intelligence simply cannot cope with change and unpredictability,' Adams wrote, explaining why it is unlikely that robots will ever interact with humans.

Paul Newman, a robotics expert at Oxford University at the time, stated to Adams, "Fundamentally, it's just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and a real tree." Adams concurred. Fortunately, Newman demonstrated that his own pessimism was unfounded: He co-founded Oxbotica in 2014, which produces and sells driverless car technology to automobile manufacturers worldwide, presumably solving the issue he mentioned.

The 2020 predictions fall apart at two key points if we move past our concern with specifics: one on technology, and the other on society.

Adams penned, "Gadget lovers could use a single keypad to operate their phone, PDA [tablet], and MP3 music player" or "combine the output of their watch, pager, and radio into a single speaker." Adams wrote about gadget lovers. The concept of personal electronics becoming more connected and convergent was correct. However, there was a particular flaw in this prediction: the mobile phone. It was hard to imagine how all-encompassing a single device could be after 50 years of consumer electronics with only one purpose. However, just three years after Adams published his article, the iPhone came out and changed everything. Don't bother with a separate MP3 player; Even in the real 2020, people won't have separate wallets, cameras, or car keys.

An oversight regarding technological advancement is failing to anticipate the smartphone. The second thing that is missing is how society would react to the shifting forces. Fundamentally, the predictions for 2004 are optimistic. In his writing, Adams discusses the transmission of biometric healthcare data to your doctor's computer; about washing machines that use your "electronic organizer" to automatically schedule maintenance based on what's available; and about radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on your clothes that, depending on where you are, trigger individualized advertisements or program your phone. A sense of trust pervades all of it: The businesses making these changes have good intentions, and they will be beneficial.

China's automated production line demonstrates that robots are here to stay.

China's automated production line demonstrates that robots are here to stay. Photograph: One of Adams' interviewees admitted, when describing technology in 2020, that "there is a loss of privacy that is going to be very difficult for people and we haven't figured out how to deal with that." China News Service/VCG via Getty Images However, people will accept the trade-off if you explain what it does, how much information it provides, and where it goes, and that the trade-off is that you won't have to wait as long in line at the supermarket. In point of fact, over the course of the past ten and a half years, the majority of people simply never had the opportunity to reject the trade-off, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that many of them never would have done so if they had been aware of the dangers.

How can we possibly do better today, looking ten times further ahead, if the Guardian missed the smartphone's introduction despite writing just three years prior to the iPhone's launch? Even though we can safely assume that people will still generally have two arms, two legs, and an unpleasant odor if they do not wash for long periods of time, the world in 2050 will be completely different in many ways.

However, there are forces in our favor. The internet is much more ingrained now than it was in 2004; despite the fact that its chaotic impact on our lives has not diminished, it is at least predictable. In a similar vein, smartphone penetration in the West appears to be at an all-time high. It won't be because more Brits or Americans get phones that the world changes over the next 30 years.

Following trendlines to their logical conclusion can be a straightforward way to make other predictions. At least in developed nations, as well as in developing nations like China that are beginning to place a higher value on air quality than cheap mechanization, the transition to electric vehicles will largely be complete by the year 2050.

The "next billion" will be online, mostly through low-cost smartphones with more and more cellular connections everywhere. However, it is more difficult to guess what they do online. There are two opposing trends taking place in 2020: On the one hand, businesses, particularly Facebook, have been attempting to use subsidised deals to encourage newly connected nations to adopt simplified internet versions. Many of the advantages of the internet will be stolen from entire nations if they achieve scale, reducing them to passive participants in Facebook and a few local media and payment companies.

However, opposition from competing internet service providers and national regulators in countries like India could steer the new nations toward the actual internet. Unless, that is, national regulators move in a different direction, following in the footsteps of China, Iran, and Russia and creating a solely nationalistic internet to keep Facebook out. They argue that requiring your citizens to use locally produced services is a better way to ensure that the benefits of the internet are distributed domestically. Additionally, if it facilitates censorship, that is yet another advantage.

The disturbing novel New Dark Age, written by James Bridle, makes the point that the discussion cannot ignore the identity of the next billion people. He states, "We’re only talking about hardening borders, rather than preparing – politically, socially, technologically – for this reality." "I keep thinking about the way the tech industry talks about ‘the next billion users’ without acknowledging that those people are going to be hot, wet, and pissed off."

Because there is an additional fact that we must acknowledge if we are to make predictions regarding the future based solely on trend lines: the weather. This piece is not concerned with the specifics of what will change, but the human response is.

Plan A is one possible option: When it comes to emissions, humanity eventually reaches net zero. In that scenario, we will live in a world where people eat more plant-based proteins on a daily basis instead of meat, where electrically powered, networked mass transit reaches into the suburbs and beyond, where business flights are gradually being replaced by video conferencing and remote attendance, and where British homes are insulated. Now, not everything has to be high-tech.)

Plan B is a world in which massive injections of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere turn the heavens a milky-white color and a whole generation never sees a clear blue sky in order to reflect more of the sun's rays and stop the greenhouse effect. If plan A fails, there is a chance we will turn to plan B. It is one in which enormous processing facilities are activated, pumping carbon dioxide underground into abandoned oil wells and doing nothing else. It is one in which people move out of entire cities and avoid the worst effects we can't prevent.

According to Holly Jean Buck, the author of After Geoengineering, Plan B—geoengineering—is neither optimistic nor pessimistic regarding the human race's prospects for the foreseeable future. The worst thing that could happen is if we fail both plan A and plan B. I believe that [some form of geoengineering] will be tried over the next ten years. It's been toned down right now, I believe because people don't want to talk about it. We lack the body of knowledge, and it would take us 20 to 30 years to build it. A turning point will occur around midcentury: Changes in the climate will be very obvious.

However, the distinctions that really matter are not necessarily the technology for Bridle or Buck. Social attitudes and changes are at the heart of the decisions regarding whether we live in a livable or dystopian future.

We are currently in a period of "stopgaps." In the past, society could plan for the long term: People planned further out and constructed long-term infrastructure. That is not the case right now: We settle for quick fixes. To enable more deliberate decision-making, we require a cultural shift in values.

Another possibility exists: that technology does, in fact, provide some degree of relief. According to Publicis Sapient's chief experience officer John Maeda, "computational machines will have surpassed the processing power of all the living human brains on Earth" by 2050. The many brains that have passed away on Earth will have also been absorbed by the cloud, and in order to survive, we must all cooperate. Therefore, I predict that the human race and the computational machines of the future will work together for a long time.

The singularity is a term for this way of thinking: the idea that thinking machines' capabilities will eventually surpass those of their creators, possibly at a single moment in time, and that progress will accelerate with startling results.

According to Tom Chivers, the author of The AI Does Not Hate You, "if you interview AI researchers about when general AI – a machine that can do everything a human can do – will arrive, they think it will be about 50/50 whether it will be before 2050."

They also believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "can be hugely transformative." In 2015, many of them signed an open letter stating that "eradication of disease and poverty" might be possible. However, "on average they think there is about a 15% to 20% chance of a ‘very bad outcome [existential catastrophe]', which means everyone dead," he adds, citing a 2013 field survey.

Concentrating on the 50% chance that AGI will occur may be pointless. If it does, then every other prediction we could have made is meaningless, and this story—perhaps even humanity as we know it—will be lost to history. And if we live our lives in accordance with our presumption that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won't be around to save or destroy us, the worst that could happen is that we build a better world for nothing.

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Technology in the next 30 years: will it save humanity or kill us?

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