As Marc Andreesen claims, we are being lied to. The media, politicians, left-wing woke culture types and many others claim that technology is the root of all evil. They claim it takes away our jobs, ruins the environment, threatens our health, degrades society, destroys our future and is at the root of everything that is bad in the world. From the invention of fire, humanity adopting agriculture, the invention of the wheel, the enlightenment, steam engines, the industrial revolution, the information revolution and now the AI revolution, every time a new technology is introduced, the current “powers that be” claim that this is the end and that we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket.
This is of course complete and utter bollocks. For the first 200.000 years, humanity lived in abject poverty, we lived into our thirties if we were lucky, were as likely to die at the hands of others than of old age and lived large parts of our lives with nasty parasites, viruses and bacteria invading our bodies. Many children died before the age of five, many women died during childbirth and many men were maimed or killed in tribal warfare. It is so easy to idealize the past, but in the words of Thomas Hobbes, the life of humanity was nasty, brutish and short.
It was with the adoption of agriculture, some 10.000 years ago, that humanity’s fate started to improve. Although the improvement was slow initially, it was of course enabled by technology. The plow, the draft horse or ox, the scythe all are technological innovations that our ancestors created to improve their lives.
Since that slow start, the pace of technological innovation has increased in an exponential fashion. I think it’s fair to say that all technology created in the 20th century was more than all technology developed before that going back to the beginning of humankind. And the 21st century is off to an outstanding start and we will see far more progress than in the previous century.
And this is not just opinions. The data backs it up. Virtually any metric measuring the quality of human life, including life expectancy, child mortality, the number of people living in abject poverty and so on, are all improving continuously. And it’s all driven by technological progress. Humans are tool builders that solve problems we experience by inventing tools. We are incredibly poor at predicting problems before they appear, but once it is clear that we have a problem, we are incredibly good at solving it using technology.
Of course, I am not so naive as to claim that technology has no downside whatsoever. There are plenty of examples where technology is used for bad outcomes, ranging from weapons of mass destruction to oppressing minorities using face recognition and social scoring systems. However, these are the cases that get all the attention in the media. The vast majority of technology uses is benign and positive for humankind. And the reason for this is simple: by and large, people are good and want to do good. The reason we solve problems using technology is because we don’t want our loved ones to suffer.
This is why I am so positive and excited about the future. In my view, and the data backs this up, there has never been a better time to be alive and things will only get better. So, in this series, I want to share and discuss 10 reasons why I am incredibly optimistic about the future of our species:
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning: For all the fear mongering around AI and ML, we are missing the point, which is that AI/ML is such a boon for humanity. From personal assistants to automating tasks that require human effort, AI will lead to amazing productivity improvements and freeing up humans for the things we are uniquely good at.
- Clean and free energy: Renewable energy, especially solar, is rapidly approaching a price point so low that it is almost free. We see significant progress in fusion reactors and the next generation of truly safe nuclear reactors. Energy storage, including batteries, is improving at a rate that is much higher than earlier decades thanks to major investments in research. The result will be clean and almost free energy, which is important as human well-being and energy usage are directly correlated with each other.
- Biotech and genetic engineering: We are understanding biology increasingly well and are able to engineer our genes as well as those of other species with a level of precision that will allow us to treat many more diseases. Also, it allows us to create new species or variants of species optimized for our purposes, ranging from yeasts consuming plastics to animals bred for organ transplantation.
- Space colonization: As a science fiction fanboy, the idea of space has been close to my heart for many years. However, we need to get off this rock and spread ourselves throughout the solar system and beyond if only to avoid the extinction of humanity through low-probability events such as asteroids crashing into earth. As it looks now, humanity will become an interplanetary species during this century.
- Robotics and automation: Progress in robotics and automation has been accelerating and there are quite a few startups and more established companies providing prototypes of humanoid robots as well as dedicated robots such as autonomous vehicles. Ranging from caring tasks, allowing people with limitations to live more autonomous lives, to operating in environments dangerous for humans, robots will improve the quality of our lives in ways that we can’t even imagine right now.
- Quantum computing: A technology that has been slow in delivering on its promises but that is making tangible progress in recent years is quantum computing. We are increasingly able to build reliable logical q-bits with fewer and fewer physical ones and in the coming years I expect we will see the first real applications. The computation power improvement for the right use cases is amazing and will allow us to address computation tasks, ranging from analyzing new molecules for healthcare to optimization problems, that were unfeasible to compute up to now.
- Asteroid mining: Many are concerned that earth is running out of the resources we need. The good news is that there is a lot more than earth out there and the first exploratory attempts at asteroid mining are in the design phase. Just the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has numerous asteroids that contain all kinds of useful resources. Ready for the picking!
- Flying cars: Not quite as general as the other technologies, but one of the complaints about progress over the last decades is that we were promised flying cars, but got Twitter/X and 140 characters. Flying cars are becoming real and there are quite a few companies out there providing near-production prototypes. Imagine that traffic in large cities could go three dimensional! It would solve all traffic jams!
- Immersive technologies: Ranging from augmented, extended and virtual reality to direct computer-brain interfaces, there is a constant stream of improvements concerning our ability to enrich or replace our physical reality with other, computer generated ones. This is not only fun for gaming or entertainment, but also critical in product design, medical applications and many other application areas.
- Technology progress accelerating: Ray Kurzweill wrote about the singularity being near(er), which many question, but the fact is that technology progress is accelerating. Ranging from the increasing number of researchers in the world to AI models and robots automating many parts of research and technology development, we see a significant acceleration of technology progress.
We are afraid of change as we fear that change will cause us to lose things that we now have. As the pace of change has been accelerating a lot during the last decades, we see a counter reaction where politicians are looking to slow things down by putting a plethora of laws, regulations and acts in place. In part this is a reaction to the general anti-technology trend in society. It is as if many believe that our current situation is the best it will ever be and that any new technology will only harm us and take away from what we have.
As I think you’ll understand by now, I am completely of the opposite opinion. Although life is better than it has ever been, there is still immense human and animal suffering in the world. People die from diseases we are unable to treat or live with the side-effects of harsh treatments that may deal with the disease, but have lifelong implications. People work in repetitive, mind numbing jobs that the next generation will consider to be forms of torture. Despite great progress, the majority of people on this planet still live on less than €30 per day. Numerous animals live in horrible conditions because of our desire for animal protein. There are so many problems that we still need to solve and if history has anything to offer here, it should be obvious to all of us that it is technological progress that is the most promising and rewarding avenue to deliver on solving these problems.
The ten reasons why I am excited about the future are far from complete and likely not the most impactful technologies. But it gives me at least a sense of wonder and longing for the future. I can’t imagine what all the researchers, scientists, engineers and technicians in the world can create that will make the world a better place. To reduce human and animal suffering. To find solutions for unsolvable problems and then making those solutions available to everyone. Rather than being skeptical of technology and trying to slow down its adoption in society, we should do what we can to accelerate its adoption everywhere. Rather than stepping on the breaks, we should step on the accelerator. In the end, the future is where we spend the rest of our lives, so let’s make it as good as we can!
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