In our quest to make technological advancements, we have done just that – we’ve created phenomenal breakthroughs in AI, biotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering, and so on. All this progress also has its responsibilities – we’re at an unprecedented stage where technology is making living more accessible than ever before. But we could also, if we don’t want to, create a dystopian world where we allow technology to take over us.

Let’s examine the potential harms of the next wave of technological innovation and how they might change the future path.

Loss of Privacy

Expanding preventive transparency will increasingly regulate our private lives, extending the surveillance society into the domestic sphere. We leave a digital artifact of our social movements on Facebook and Instagram, and our private conversations are logged on many smart devices. Unless we take action, we will see the emergence of a total surveillance world emptied of the concept of privacy and dominated by private corporations or the state.

Artificial Intelligence Dominance

It has the potential to disrupt whole industries. It will quickly reach a stage where, even if we could understand what it was doing, it would be going beyond human cognition, learning and adapting to tasks faster than we could understand. We are moving into an era where super-intelligent AI could rapidly become surplus to human requirements, leading to a scenario where systems are released into the world that might be beyond human control.

Biotechnological Manipulation

With the advent of human gene editing techniques such as CRISPR, we are also gaining the power to alter the very codes of life—power that could help us eliminate many diseases but might also trigger catastrophes, such as genetic inequality or the world of designer babies, where the genetic haves and have-nots begin to diverge into separate, unequal species.

Economic Disruption

If automation and AI proceed as they are likely to proceed—with no significant changes to our economic system—technological progress will lead to immense economic polarisation, with large swathes of the middle class being laid off and millions of workers in poverty despite their jobs.

Cybernetic Dependence

But our increasing reliance on wearable tech, implanted devices, and prosthetics could erode the distinction between man and machine, causing us to lose touch with what it means to be human and, in the worst case, create a world fit only for the augmented.

Environmental Destruction

Sophisticated technologies could be more destructive to our planet than beneficial. If industrialization and resource exploitation are not restrained, and robots and AI allow that to happen without human input and interference, our environmental situation could escalate to a point where no technological innovation could reverse it. The problem of climate change could rapidly get out of hand if environmental and ethical considerations do not guide technological innovation.

Social Control Through Technology

Powerful governments and corporations might use such technology to ‘nudge’ and coerce populations, manipulate information, and suppress dissent. New forms of big data collection—such as facial recognition, social scoring, and AI-driven predictive policing—could mean that we end up living in highly scripted, surveilled worlds.

Bionics and Human Obsolescence

As technology becomes more sophisticated and practical, the bionic man becomes a real possibility. The potential benefits—enhancing humans with machines—could create a new kind of inequality. Those who have the money to upgrade themselves could leave others behind.

Loss of Free Will

Our choices are already coerced—from the films we watch to the wine we buy. It will only get worse if we don’t act to protect ourselves. Maybe we’ll all end up like Bartleby, an enslaved person in a virtual prison where the key has been revoked.