The future

I recently attended GOTO conference in Copenhagen (https://gotocph.com/2025, you can find the slides for some of the presentations there) and would like to share some of the interesting topics. This topic is going to be the last one.

The talk about the future by Kevlin Henney and James Lewis

The presenters shared very interesting story about the future we planned and the future we are going to have. Here are the main points and my comments as well.

1. The future was meant to be for everyone, but we landed in the place where it is actually for the few with unevenly distributed resources - yes, one can look at UNICEF report (https://data.unicef.org/resources/sofi-2025/) to see that 8.3 percent of global population faced hunger in 2024. The food is the basic need of the human and it is somehow not possible to provide it for the acceptable rate which should be like 99,9 % of the population.

2. The future tends to bring more infrastructure and information networks so that everything and everyone become more connected - I agree, we can see this is happening: we are connecting with the people using various social networks, we can travel quickly all over the world. The companies create customer experience which bases on all the online and possibly offline activities to be so close as virtual friend or maybe closer. They are able to gather huge amount of data and turn it into large income.
   I am just not sure if this is the right direction, do we really want to be more connected with people and the business? Did anyone ask? I am sceptical, I can think of the scenario that we are heading towards digital crowd where everyone is just too close to each other.

3. We should still however have hope and excitement looking into it - Yes we should, I especially like the Mars colonisation idea. It seems it doesn't have much sense, it is extremly hard, but because of this it is exciting for sure.

4. The change is more late, gradual and cumulative than we think - These are tips on how to think about the future in general. We can use them when trying to foresee the evolution of quantum computing, genes edition, internet of things or other future technologies mentioned for example here: https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/the-future-of-technology-what-will-the-next-decade-bring.

As I see it, in my environment, there is not enough discussion about the future. I rarely can read anything in the news, I know that nobody teaches about it in the schools. We as the society are living in the past and only sometimes plan for the very near future. The Status Quo is the king.
The only exceptions are literature and movies but I feel like it is not taken seriously by the people, it is just the entertainment. I am sure we should be more aware about the processes which take place around us nowadays and plan more for the distant future as well to know at least the general direction we would like to follow.