Future 2050: The tech odyssey

SYSTRA’s Head of Innovation Llewelyn Morgan considers a future world where technology is front and centre stage

Future 2050 was a bold new one-day conference, designed to challenge conventional wisdom and inspire imaginative, future-focused solutions for transport planning and mobility in the UK. In partnership with SYSTRA, it brought together leading thinkers, policymakers, and innovators to explore how transport systems can help drive a sustainable, equitable, and thriving society by 2050. In the first of three related articles, we asked SYSTRA’s Head of Innovation Llewelyn Morgan to consider a future world where technology is front and centre stage.

What feels like freedom is the result of infinitely subtle manipulations. What is sold as liberty becomes a form of ultimate social control driven ever more by the impenetrable motivations of an artificial intelligence that thinks with a speed and complexity beyond anything any human mind can imagine

Just three years ago, ChatGPT was launched onto a largely unsuspecting public. In the brief intervening period between then and now, generative AI has grown in stature from a joke to a curiosity, to a central feature of every debate about public policy.

Daily realities

Things that seemed like tired science fiction cliches the day before yesterday are now daily realities for millions of people. The speed with which artificial intelligence has grown in power, the way it has defied every limit, has left many of us dazed and confused. That is in three short years. How far can it go given another 25?

For over two decades, the imminent arrival of the tech revolution has haunted planners and policy makers like a spectre. And yet, now that it has finally begun to show its true power, we find ourselves unprepared.

The technological frontier has often been described as a wild west, but the west was only a land of freedom for the few who were tough enough to settle it. For a long and bruising time the biggest guns took the greatest share. We have all been watching – fascinated or appalled – the seemingly inexorable rise into political power of a few individuals whose grasp of the potential of technology and AI has catapulted them into unimaginable wealth and, now, political power.

Warnings that once may have seemed a little febrile and paranoid about the weakness of democratic institutions in the face of billionaire ambitions suddenly seem a lot more pressing.

An optimistic vision?

The optimistic version of this future, so restlessly promoted by those with the most to gain, is easy to imagine. By 2050 autonomous travel will have reached its apogee and become the norm for almost all purposes. In this world, places are designed around and in response to this new way of moving.

We are free, finally, from the tyranny of hydrocarbons. But the robot car of the future is not just an extension of the present. The private autonomous motorist (except as a diversion of the very rich) will disappear altogether because the human will not be able to integrate with the system. That means that all travel, by every mode, free from direct human communication, can be coordinated and structured to maximise efficiency.

This is likely to be a world where quantum computing has massively increased computational power, in fact pushed it beyond any level that we could possibly exhaust. Drone technology has jumped ahead, cutting  delivery times for online shopping to hours or minutes and lifting a huge amount of freight from the roads to the skies.  Drone taxis flit almost noiselessly through city streets adding a whole new dimension to urban life. 

At the same time, the reach of augmented reality will have grown exponentially. Wearable devices, neural inserts and virtual working environments mean that we can be online all the time. We will need to travel less to meet friends and colleagues because their virtual avatars are available to us in the new virtual spaces.

In this world, planners are able to design places with extraordinary efficiency, both because of the availability of enormous, powerfully predictive data sets and because the level of online connectivity of the average citizen is almost total. For many people it will feel like freedom – freedom from traffic congestion, freedom from pollution and noise – but it comes with an invisible cost: every life is captured as a data point that is plotted at each moment of every day.

What feels like freedom is the result of infinitely subtle manipulations. What is sold as liberty becomes a form of ultimate social control driven ever more by the impenetrable motivations of an artificial intelligence that thinks with a speed and complexity beyond anything any human mind can imagine.

Human creativity

What room is there for human creativity in this utopia? Music, art and culture – the things that give our lives much of their meaning – have historically been driven by human organisation that resists planned social pre-conditions and authority.

This is a conflict that is implicit in any project of social planning, of course, but the sort of ‘total planning’ made possible by artificial intelligence was never available before.

Will the citizens of a world designed so subtly to satisfy their immediate needs and deliver the dopamine jolts of virtual stimulation even know what it is that they no longer have as they navigate their virtual and physical spaces guided, prompted and manipulated at every step? 

And what happens when the forces that lie behind the power are less benign than our best-case scenario? Dark warnings about the danger of artificial intelligence turning malign have been made over and again by the most brilliant minds in the field. But we don’t even have to imagine Hal2000 turning his beady red eye on us.

There are enough human bad actors to worry about, who would be powerfully motivated to exert their control over such a deeply and widely interconnected system, instantly achieving a power beyond the fever dreams of any Bond villain.

The technological future is going to happen, is already happening, and has great potential for human benefit. But it forces us to ask questions that we have neglected. We have to ask them now: what do we ultimately want to achieve when we plan our world?

What values are our places designed to serve? What is it to be human? The power that is being put into our hands – and which may not stay in our hands for long – represents a  jump forward as dramatic and impactful as the first mastery of fire by the earliest humans, that first technological breakthrough that ultimately empowered our species to build the greatest of civilisations, full of marvels. And then to burn them down. 

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