Are we headed to a grand and glorious technological future? In this talk, Andrew Willard Jones expects the opposite: "The Future is Always Worse Than You Think It Will Be." As he explains, there are two paths with the development on new technologies: one which leads to an extension of the humane world into greater areas, and another, the technocratic, which closes and mines the world from within.

This talk was given at the 2024 New Polity Conference "Should We, Therefore, Destroy the Servers?" Registration is open now for New Polity's 2025 conference "Our Kind of People." The early bird price ends on January 31st. Register today at https://newpolity.com/events