Futurist Richard Campbell came to speak with Inquiry Hub students today. He’s presented here a few times. I wrote about his visit in 2022, and what I really enjoyed about his presentation is that while I often think of the dystopian possibilities of the future, Richard’s message was that ‘The future holds promise‘. To start his presentation today, he quoted William Gibson, “The future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed“.

There are a lot of things Richard discussed that I might elaborate on in the coming days, but this quote immediately started to churn in my mind. I’d heard the quote before. I’ve even used the quote before, but often in reference the uneven distribution of change… which is often connected to new technology that will be fully adopted in the future. What got me really thinking about this, hearing the quote today, is my suspicion that this is more exaggerated now than it ever has been.

Zoom out of your everyday life and take a look around the globe and you’ll see a very uneven distribution of technological advances. I recently heard about a live stream of a robot doing package sorting for days on end, comparing this activity to the same being done by a human.

This sort of manual labour is something that will be replacing humans sooner rather than later. That said, it is going to be distributed very unevenly. It’s already happening in China where their one child policy was leading them to a shortage in the labour market. China is winning the robotics race and we are going to see a lot of progress and development from China.

Here is my wonder: Will there be a massive divide of have and have-not states? Will the distribution of future technology be even more unevenly distributed, or will we see the costs go down and the technology spread even more evenly in the decades to come? I think Richard and I would disagree on this topic, although I hope he’s more right than me.