Quotes About Future

When the nuclear age erupted in the 1940s, many forecasts were made about the future nuclear world of the year 2000. When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people would be living in space colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet.

Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms.

When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn't upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.

Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.

Unless you are happy to entrust the future of life to the mercy of quarterly revenue reports, you need a clear idea what life is all about.

Yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies.

in the long run no job will remain absolutely safe from automation.

What will happen to this view of life as we increasingly rely on AI to make decisions for us?

technology. Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm. After all, what's the advantage of

In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

But the single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that precise second, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. From that point onward, humankind had the capability not only to change the course of history, but to end it.

If I don't update my body's anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

Throughout this book, I often use the first person to speak about the future of humankind. I talk about what 'we' need to do about 'our' problems. But maybe there are no 'we'. Maybe one of 'our' biggest problems is that different human groups have completely different futures. Maybe in some parts of the world you should teach your children to write computer codes, while in others you had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight.

it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms, and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens.

threat of job losses does not result merely from the rise of infotech. It results from the confluence of infotech with biotech.

Yuval Noah Harari

At the end of the day, humankind won't abandon the liberal story, because it doesn't have any alternative. People may give the system an angry kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.

After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs.

But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done.

The most important economic resource is trust in the future, and this resource is constantly threatened by thieves and charlatans.

Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real question facing us is not 'what do we want to be come?' but 'what do we want to want?

ask these politicians four questions: If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?