Reimagining Technology for the Future - A Question for the Smartest Minds

Friday - November 3 2023, 17:27 UTC - 1 year ago

This article takes a look at the role of technology both in helping and hindering the human race, and the potential role that technology could play in the future. It calls upon some of the smartest minds in technology to answer some of the biggest problems that are not getting enough attention at the moment.

For all of history we’ve turned to technology, again and again, to help us solve our hardest problems. Technology gave us warmth and light when it was cold and dark. It helped us pull fish from the sea and crops from the earth so we would not be hungry. It enabled us to cross over the oceans and fly through the skies, shrinking vast distances down to routine travel. It’s given us vaccines and treatments and cures. It has made virtually every fact and all of human knowledge available to us instantly on demand. We can speak to each other in entirely different languages and be understood using nothing more than a slim slab of glass and metals in our pocket.

Sometimes technology can seem like a miracle. Of course, it is nothing more than human achievement. Yet like all things human, our creations can be deeply flawed. As a result, we have also used tech to unleash horrors on ourselves, intentionally and by accident. We have employed it to broadcast hateful rhetoric and divisive ideologies. We have fine-tuned our machines to kill each other in ever greater numbers and with ever more efficiency. It is our technology that took the carbon from out of the ground and put it in the sky. Our technology that poisoned the water and the air, that made deserts out of forests, and that wiped entire species off the planet.

Technology is an engine for problems, for solving them and for creating entirely new ones—and then we perversely turn to even newer technologies to try to solve those. In this issue, we step back from this cycle. We explore big questions and hard problems and ask: What role can—and should—technology play going forward? And finally, we asked some of the smartest minds out there what they consider the biggest problems that aren’t getting enough attention right now. You’ll find their responses, and many more online at techreview.com/hardproblems.

Thanks for reading, .

Mat Honan .