The following is an edited transcript of my keynote presentation at The Futurists X Summit held in Dubai in September 2025.
Humanity can flourish in the age of AI and robots: I believe that through them we will gain new degrees of freedom, and it will enable us to decide and design our future.
My view is that we are all time travelers. We are going toward the future together at a speed of one minute per minute. And since this journey is unstoppable, we should make sure that when we get to that future, it’s a place we like, a place that we enjoy.
And how can we do that? We are lucky. We are different from the other animals. Species and entire ecosystems thrived but then went extinct. They didn’t have the characteristics that we have: the ability to use the power of our rational minds. To build metaphorical telescopes exploring the future, but also physical telescopes, to not only look into the cosmos but to look at asteroids that could hit Earth.
We are eager to understand: are these dangers we see real? We represent them in various ways, and we like to get frightened by stories. And sometimes those stories become, luckily, self-defeating, self-preventing prophecies. Because the stories that we tell define the world — a world that is nothing but dreams before we turn them into reality. That is why our narrative matters so much.
Surrounding ourselves with an optimistic, positive belief in the future means we can create a future that follows that optimism. If we believe that everything will be worth nothing, that our efforts won’t amount to the solutions we need, then that is what will emerge at the other end.
So let me start by telling you just two little stories about possible futures.
Imagine a young woman turning around, talking to an uncle or an aunt, and asking, confused, while looking at some photos of cars from the past: “Those cars always parked on the street… they were broken, right?”
Because this young woman grew up in a world of self-driving cars that are always in motion, always useful. In many families, the biggest purchase is the home, and the second biggest purchase is the car: and still 90% of the time, the car is doing nothing! This is a glimpse of a different future.
Here is another glimpse of the future we may design and implement if we want. A teenage son incredulously asks his father, “What are you talking about? We have our robots. We tell them what to do, and the robots do the things. I’d never dare to give an order to my friends, my teachers, or other humans.” And the father insists, “I’m telling you, we gave them orders, and they did what we told them to do. We called them employees!”
Now, we don’t know if these particular visions of the future will be the ones that we decide to turn into reality. A lot depends on what we think together, what our collective consciousness allows us to design and implement.
Timing matters, and sometimes we can be very early, too early. Leonardo was 500 years early when he dreamed and designed the helicopter. For 500 years, those dreams couldn’t be realized. Karl Čapek gave us the word “robot.” A hundred years ago, he wrote a novel and a theatrical piece entitled R.U.R., and we all adopted that word to mean “mechanical man.” He was a hundred years early.
But since then, the world around us has accelerated, mainly thanks to what we call Moore’s Law, that reliably, for the past five decades, doubled the power of our computers and phones every couple of years. And engineers all around the world have worked hard to make sure this keeps happening.
However, after Moore’s Law, the world now operates on a different basis. Rather than the power of artificial intelligence doubling at a constant rate every couple of years, we are seeing it double at an increasing rate: the doubling time is shrinking.
We don’t know if this can continue for the next 50 years, but this acceleration of acceleration is shaping the world and bringing closer things that even experts expected to happen 20 or 30 years in the future. Instead, they now say, “I didn’t expect it, but it happened now, not later.”
I published a paper this past July with a mathematical framework calling it the Jolting Technologies Hypothesis, and two weeks later, the research group METR came out with new results showing that AI agents’ abilities, which had been doubling every seven months, are now doubling every four.
This is important because we need these advanced capabilities: self-driving cars so we can stop road deaths killing a million people a year. We need smart objects so that when a suicidal pilot gives an order to crash into a mountain, the plane can say, “Sorry, I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to kill everyone else on the plane either.”
Our most dangerous enemies are not smart machines, but dumb machines. And as we build this future — this new layer of intelligence permeating our world — it’s important to remember that.
Even when someone says, “Oh, I don’t know if I can trust AI, because it is not perfect” well, then it’s just a question of how much better than a human it needs to be. Is it 5% better OK? If that’s not enough, then let’s deliver a solution that’s ten times better. There will be a moment when you’ll say, “Okay, now I can trust AI. I can trust robots,” because they will deliver what we want reliably. Even if they are not perfect.
I collected data and ran a survey about AI, and people are very correctly worried. Their conclusions are paradoxical: the longer they use AI, the more they believe it will benefit them personally, yet they also believe it may have a negative impact on society. You can read the detailed results on the AI Paradox Report. The paradox, of course, is that we are a community, a society. If each of us benefits individually, then society must benefit as well, as long as we want it to.
The account “AI Safety Memes” on X posted a genius line highlighting the fallact of the common ditty “Don’t worry, AI is not going to replace you. Someone using AI will replace you.”, with another way to express our anxiety: “A car won’t take your job; another horse driving a car will.” Signed, Horse Influencer, 1910.
A hundred years later, we know that didn’t happen. None of our cars are driven by horses. But we are not horses. We have to try to see and understand the future, even if it’s complex. We have to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions. For example, who will be the organ donors when young people stop dying in car accidents, and old people still need replacement hearts and kidneys?
The complexity of the world being born requires AI to be managed. We won’t be able to do it alone. This will represent a complete phase transformation.
When we have robots in our homes — maybe they’ll water the plants, empty the dishwasher, or walk the dog — but probably not, or at least that will be a small, silly set of what they will do. We’ll look back at them the way people once imagined the adoption of early technologies, like automobiles that looked like horseless carriages.
But we can start thinking about how the future will actually work. A video posted recently shows a robot making a mistake executing an acrobatic move, and recovering instantly, unfazed — a kind of superhuman reaction that biological humans couldn’t emulate. It’s a tiny example of how a world full of humanoid robots will be different from today.
It’s important to understand we are not in a zero-sum economy. Everyone who talks about jobs disappearing misunderstands this. Everyone who says billionaires must be taxed out of existence doesn’t understand that if we destroy our dreams, we destroy the aspirations not only of billionaires but of billions of people who want to create new realities, who dream about the future.
We know that the human component in the smartest organizations — in business, in society — is crucial. It’s what gives value. The nature of work always changes. Isn’t it amazing that 1% of people today can feed 100%, and another 1% extracts the raw materials we all need?
Now, before it’s too late, we must start a broad conversation about what shape society will take as we introduce these radical new technologies. I believe the nature of work will profoundly change. Too many people are labeled “without value” because they don’t have a job. That will disappear. We’ll recognize the value of human aspiration, and many of us will be able to turn back and ask if our individual choices were right — or make new ones.
Who knows how we’ll design our lives? What kind of choices, supported by the new infrastructure of AI and robots, will we be able to make? Will we become rock stars in our 60s or 70s, having never imagined it before? Will we go to space?
Too many today live lives that are almost zombie-like, unthinking. One of the biggest possibilities these new degrees of freedom give us is to become the opposite — what I call luminaries — promoting human purpose and designing lives that are worth living.
Just as the internet increased a thousandfold our ability to make mistakes and survive them, we will increase our rate of experimentation even further. We’ll make mistakes by the million and learn from them. Today we have very powerful technologies that let us go from ideas to actions with instantaneous execution. What this gives us is a world of unbounded opportunities.
After all of this, the only question that remains is: can you be part of this? Can you experiment, explore the limits of your adaptability, and — after touching those limits — overcome them and, by overcoming them, build a new world?
PS: If you watch the video you’ll see the superwide screen that supported this keynote, of the aspect ratio that the images also appearing here have. It was fun adapting my presentation to it. The link above allows you to download it in a more customary widescreen version. And if you notice the movements in the video? Yes, all AI generated, as we are together updating our toolsets, for presentations, and other tasks, constantly.