How the World Got Wired · Epilogue — One Last Thing

The Best of It

The decade you are growing up in is, in real ways, one of the more difficult times to be a young person that any generation has faced in a while. The political situation in many countries is uneasy. The climate is changing. The information environment is loud and often hostile. The technology this book has been about is reshaping the world in real time, and most adults — including the smart ones — are genuinely uncertain about what comes next.

It would be easy, in such a moment, to give in to the doom. Many people have. You will meet many adults who believe, sincerely, that things are getting worse and will continue to get worse.

I want you to know that this is not what I believe. Not because I am naive. Not because I have not paid attention to the things that worry the doomsayers. I have. I have spent my career thinking about some of these things directly.

I just have also seen, over and over, in field after field, the way that genuinely smart, genuinely careful, genuinely well-intentioned people produce tools that change ordinary lives for the better. I have seen, in my own lifetime, the way grandmothers learned to make video calls. I have seen the way patients survive diseases that would have killed their parents. I have seen the way children in poor countries get educational opportunities their grandparents could not have imagined. I have seen the way people with disabilities get capabilities that, in any earlier era, would have been called miraculous.

The internet that this book has been about, for all of its sins, helped do all of those things.

The AI that the last few chapters have been about will, I think, do more.

There will be adjustments. Some jobs will go away. Some industries will collapse. Some people will lose money. Some kinds of work will become things only AI does. There will be social conflict about how to handle people whose livelihoods are disrupted. There will be political conflict about how to share the benefits. There will be technical mistakes that hurt real people. There will be at least one major scandal involving an AI system that did something nobody intended. There will be Hinton’s warnings to take seriously. There will be debates that I, sitting here in 2026, cannot predict and could not resolve if I could.

But on the other side of all of that, if your generation handles it well — which I think you can — I believe there is a world that is, on net, dramatically better than the one I have spent my own life inside.

It will have, in it, more medicine that works. More science that gets done. More children who learn. More languages that everyone understands. More small businesses thriving in places no one had heard of. More grandmothers whose lives are easier in tiny daily ways. More people whose conditions, once disabling, become merely inconvenient. More art, made by more people, in more languages, reaching more eyes. More books like this one, written quickly, by people who would otherwise not have had time to write them, reaching children who would otherwise not have read them.

It will not be utopia. There is no such thing.

But it will, if we make the right choices, be a real improvement on what we have now.

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