 Technology is evolving at lightning speed. The metaverse is expanding. Artificial intelligence is getting smarter and algorithms are now inextricably tangled with our lives. The way human beings live, work and relate to each other is transforming faster than we can keep up. With the ever-increasing rate and scale of innovation, it can feel like we're in the passenger seat of a fast-moving car, uncertain of what's ahead or how we're getting there. It's really easy to have a moment of feeling hopeless in the face of an entire suite of technologies that feel very alienating. They feel they'd separate us from, in some ways, ourselves. One of the challenges we find ourselves at is this moment where the temptation is to be really reductive, to say, this is good, this is bad, we should do this, we shouldn't do this. And I think the reality is we need to be having much harder conversations. It's easy to fall into the narratives that tech will either solve the biggest problems of our time like the climate crisis or create more problems by exacerbating existing inequalities and driving humans apart. Instead of this binary, Professor Bell invites us to explore all the possibilities in between. One of the great joys is to be able to look at a technology and know that it isn't stable and certain, but that in fact that it is messy and ambiguous and that in all those spaces there's possibility and potential to make things different. I don't think it's about being pessimistic or optimistic about the future, I think it's about deciding you're going to build the future you want to live in. So what kind of world are we building with technology? Futurist Genevieve Bell explains. One of my favourite futurists is someone named William Gibson and a really long time ago Gibson said the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. There is no singular future. Factors like gender, geography, economic status and education mean the present and the future look different for everyone. Just look at internet access, something many of us take for granted. 37% of the world population still did not have access in 2021. The future's not some destination we're going to arrive at, I think we have two jobs. One job is to tell stories about the future that are more hopeful, more optimistic, more just, more sustainable, but we can't just tell stories right because we have this second job and that second job is that we actually have to actively disrupt the present. Whether it's a consumer or a creator, we're constantly looking ahead for shiny new gadgets in the latest inventions. But in order to actively disrupt the present, Professor Bell says we must first turn to the past. I think one of the seductions of Silicon Valley is this notion that technologies turn up, pristine and fully formed. And the reality is all technologies have histories, all technologies have backstories, all technologies have contested biographies and multiple people doing things in the background. No machine or system was created in a vacuum or fell out of the sky into our hands. Behind each was a human creator with values, assumptions and aspirations, all of which influence its purpose, use, even its impact, intentional or not. But most of the histories of large technical systems also tell us that technologies have a remarkable propensity to re-inscribe inequities about race, gender, class, national status, geography. Telegraphy was the first global technology. It's the first time that things went from being physical to electronic. And it's the first time that information and data separated from transportation and physical objects. The invention of the telegraph transformed long-distance communication, opening gates to new international markets and enabling European countries to tighten their reign on overseas colonies. It also created new divisions of labour and brought women into the workforce. And one of the things that comes really clear when you look at the history of telegraphy was in the 1860s and 70s, people didn't necessarily know that building a world technology would change relationships about gender, relationships about space and place. In 2023 you don't have that same excuse, but the reason of wanting to persistently pay attention to the history of technology is not because it should give us answers, not even because it should give us better questions, but because a whole lot of the challenges we're facing now have been faced before. And people made the kind of choices then that we shouldn't make again. You have to be willing to both look for and lean into productive discomfort. You have to be willing to find the conversations that aren't the ones you're expecting. And you have to make room for competing opinions and different ideas and be willing to say can we just stop for a minute and talk a little bit about what the world we think we're building here is and who's going to benefit from that world and who isn't in this conversation. Those conversations whilst time consuming I think are hugely important to have at the beginning of building out new technologies, new applications because we make better choices all the way through the development of the system. And there's something about not rushing into it just because one person thinks it's a good idea. We have the power to build the world we'd like to live in. Technology is just one facet of the story, but a crucial one. I get why people feel helpless in the face of the technologies that we have in our world and I get that and it's not irrational. And I also think we need to look around and look at the remarkable things that are being done by all kinds of people who are taking that same portfolio and bundle of technologies and building new things. And I look at all of that and I think somewhere in all of that space there is a future for all of us and that feels like a conversation worth investing in. What is the world we think we are making and why?