What does the collision of creativity, media and tech mean for humans?
That’s the overall subject for a series of events, Tug Life IV, being run from 12-15 June by Tug, Shoreditch-based digital marketing agency.
As the ‘IV’ in the name suggests, it’s the fourth year such a series of events have been held – each time, as part of the annual London Tech Week.
I was one of the speakers last year – at Tug Life III – when my topic was “What happens to humans as machines become more embedded in our lives?”
I enjoyed that session so much that I’ve agreed to be one of the speakers in the opening session of Tug Life IV this year. It’s taking place on the morning of Tuesday 12th June, on the topic “What are we doing with technology? Is it good for us? What should we do about it? As individuals? As businesses? As government?”
Other speakers for this session will include representatives from TalkToUs.AI, Microsoft, and Book of the Future. To register to attend, click here. Note that, depending on the availability of tickets, you can sign up for as many – or as few – of the Tug Life IV events as best match your own areas of interest and concern.
Ahead of the event, I answered some questions from Tug’s Olivia Lazenby about the content of the event. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:
Q: What will you be talking about at Tug Life IV?
I’ll be addressing the questions, “Is technology good for us? And what should we do about it?”
I’ll be outlining three types of scenarios for the impact of technology on us, over the next 10-25 years:
- The first is business as usual: technology has, broadly, been good for us in the past, and will, broadly, continue to be good for us in the future.
- The second is: social collapse: technology will get out of hand, and provoke a set of unintended adverse consequences, resulting in humanitarian tragedy.
- The third is sustainable abundance for all, in which technology enables a huge positive leap for society and humanity.
In my talk, I’ll be sharing my assessment of the probabilities for these three families of scenario, namely, 10%, 30%, and 60%, respectively.
Q: Would you agree that the conversation around the future of technology has become increasingly polarised and sensationalised?
It’s good that the subject is receiving more airtime than before. But much of the coverage remains, sadly, at a primitive level.
Some of the coverage is playing for shock value – clickbait etc.
Other coverage is motivated by ideologies which are, frankly, well past their sell-by date – ideologies such as biological exceptionalism.
Finally, another distortion is that quite a few of the large mainstream consultancies are seeking to pass on blandly reassuring messages to their clients, in order to bolster their “business as usual” business models. I view much of that advice as irresponsible – similar to how tobacco industry spokespeople used to argue that we don’t know for sure that smoking causes cancer, so let’s keep calm and carry on.
Q: How can we move past the hysteria and begin to truly understand – and prepare for – how technology might shape our lives in the future?
We need to raise step by step the calibre of the conversation about the future. Two keys here are agile futurism and collaborative futurism. There are too many variables involved for any one person – or any one discipline – to be able to figure things out by themselves. The model of Wikipedia is a good one on which to build, but it’s only a start. I’m encouraging people to cooperate in the development of something I call H+Pedia.
My call to action is for people to engage more with the communities of futurists, transhumanists, and singularitarians, who are, thankfully, advancing a collaborative discussion that is progressing objective evaluations of the credibility, desirability, and actionability of key future scenarios. Let’s put aside the distractions of the present in order to more fully appreciate the huge opportunities and huge threats technology is about to unleash.
dw2 
Leave a Reply