For as long as people have used technology, some have used it for oppression. The written word enabled the priestly classes, math made powerful merchants, copper and bronze facilitated warfare on new scales, iron and steel made empires, gunpowder unmade them, sail caused the mass extinction of small cultures, industrialization gave rise to the superpowers, economies of scale gave rise to the Asian Tigers, mass manufacturing is giving China the leg up on the USA, AI is giving a small edge to America for the time being... then as now, it's a double-edged sword.
The other side of it is that now we have running water, vaccines, diabetes drugs, electricity so cheap and readily available it's almost free (we can produce lightning from sunshine, how cool is that), less violence than ever before (even though it's more widely reported), a sharp drop in infant mortality (or really, mortality of any kind except adults dying from old age... because they've lived so long), free video chat with great-grandma across the sea, high-speed internet in the middle of deserts and atop mountains, trivial transatlantic travel, pocket encyclopedias, watches that help you exercise, rectangles of sand and glass that tell you who might want to sleep with you, and more entertainment than all the kings and queens of the past millennia ever had -- combined.
That doesn't mean we're not headed into a dystopia. It just means our species has always lived in, survived, adapted to, and perhaps even thrived in dystopias. Adversity breeds resilience, and IMO, it is only in the shadow of a looming crisis that we are able to perform optimally. Our species evolved, like most, in an environment defined by scarcity and violence. There was never enough of X to go around, a bunch of Ys trying to eat you in the middle of the night, all while your neighbors Z were trying to rape your spouse and enslave your kids. For hundreds of thousands of years, this was the only norm that our brains, genes, tribes, books, histories, and cultures knew. Only in the last 100 or so did this meaningfully change -- suddenly our species were no longer limited by production or physical danger, but by questions of distribution and politics. That applied not just to material goods and services but to the most basic unit of currency imaginable: information. Knowledge. Education. Stories of hope and despair.
In the 90s, we often talked about the "information superhigherway". That's so long ago now the term almost seems quaint. But I feel we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what it really means. At scale, information (and disinformation) has proven to be more powerful than empires. Who would've thought a multiplayer blog built by a college kid could bring history's greatest superpower to its knees within a single election cycle? Who would've thought we'd go from rotating CAPTCHAs to computers writing novels in less than a generation? We're just getting into the realm of legislation (finally) trying to regulate algorithms. What about when algorithms can (finally) regulate legislations and legislators?
We're no longer limited to evolution by genomes and cultures. We can make and unmake worlds, in the virtual, in the flesh, and in between. Already we are all cyborg-like in a way; most of us has access to more information and knowledge than the sum total of all the humans who have lived before 1900, combined. The generations that grew up developing this system (gen-X and millennials) or consuming it (gen Zs) haven't really had the time to make sea cultural changes based on it yet -- and I don't mean just digitizing the Department of Motor Vehicles or whatever, but fundamentally transforming power economies from inherited priesthoods of capital into distributed efficiencies of knowledge.
That sort of transition may take decades or centuries, it's hard to say, but it's coming (and scaring a lot of the old guard along the way). It will seem dystopian. Change always does! But we've always lived in dystopia, and there has never been a Golden Age of Humanity, but only now, in our seeming twilight years, is that dream even imaginable. For the first time in our history, we have the tools -- if not the wisdom -- to produce more than enough for all of us, to potentially subvert enshrined of hierarchies of wealth and violence in favor of actual meritocracies, to supplement the human genome, to better our minds with electronic aids, to repair our bodies and improve our cultures, to reach not just for the stars but for the very fabric of consciousness.
The basic unit of life is information reproduction, and by that metric, our world is teeming with a diversity no longer limited to DNA or the periodic table. Maybe it will mean replacing humans with the Borg. Maybe Earth's biodiversity will wane as information diversity increases. But the information replication can continue, and some species or another will probably eventually pick up where we left off. Maybe the remaining humans will fit in to that new world order, maybe we'll all just be happy endorphin-addled slaves, maybe we'll be gone altogether... but so what? Life will find new paths and move on. It always does.
There will be a lot of ads along the way, for sure, and you and I might not live to see the silver lining a century or millennium later, and the dolphins are probably going to be gone by then... but this is the universe doing what it always has, blowing things up to make new, shinier things. Life evolved once. It gave us Gandhi and Angry Birds. No reason to think it'll stop there.
I guess that's my longwinded way of saying it's always darkest before the dawn. We may not have the enhanced photoreceptors to witness the next dawn, but it'll come, someday, somewhere, somehow...