EPILOGUE The Moral Imperative to Shape Our Future

Finding better ways of managing our personal data will be critical in the coming years and decades.

What I have described in Mindmasters is merely the tip of the iceberg. Technology is evolving at light speed. It’s not just the growing amount of data we generate but also the increasingly sophisticated ways to analyze it that should give us pause and encourage us to rethink our current approach. Soon, we might have microbots in our blood that continuously scan our bodies for any sign of irregularity or disease, smart contact lenses that capture what we see and hyper-personalize our views, and chips in our brain that not only read our thoughts but change them.

Sounds like science fiction? It isn’t. Microbots and smart lenses are already a reality waiting to go mainstream. And the chips in our brain aren’t so far off either. Neuroscientists are getting better and better at speaking the language of the brain. They have uncovered ways to project your thoughts on screens and explored different ways of altering your brain’s wiring.¹

Some of this research happens in academic institutions. But most of it is funded by powerful private entities that are just as interested in the commercialization of such technology as they are in scientific discovery. Leading the pack is Elon Musk, whose company Neuralink is tirelessly working toward this future.²

Everything I have discussed in Mindmasters pales in comparison to a world where third parties don’t need to rely on psychological inferences from digital footprints anymore but directly access them at the source in our most secretive vault.

As we enter this world, we will learn more about the human psyche than ever before. We will create new opportunities to support the health and well-being of individuals and societies. Just imagine what preventive health care could look like if the microbots in our bloodstream detect the earliest signs of cancer long before any doctor could ever diagnose the disease. How we could augment our physical world with information projected directly onto our retinas to pique our curiosity and inspire awe. Or how we could not just step into the digital shoes of someone else but recreate their actual experience of the world in our own brains.

At the same time, we will face unprecedented challenges that threaten the very foundation of what makes us human. If we let third parties project their preferred version of our reality onto our retinas, how can we sustain a common foundation of what we collectively believe about the world around us? And if we allow others direct access to our brains, how will we know where a thought originated and whether it’s truly ours? The last decade has seen growing concerns about digital ecosystems amplifying discrimination, polarization, echo chambers, and misinformation. If we continue our current trajectory, the next few decades could very well lead to the collapse of society as we know it.

Imagining the two sides of the same future creates a moral imperative to rethink the current data environment. We need a new social contract that defines what sharing our lives with others means in today’s data-driven world. But rethinking the current data environment isn’t enough. We need to recreate it. All of us. It doesn’t matter whether you manage personal data for a living, or whether you are sick of the power imbalance the digital economy has created. We all have a role to play.

As I have suggested, returning to the village could be a solution. I’m not talking about physical villages or a model of the past we have moved beyond. I’m talking about a version of a village that is far superior to anything we have seen before. Growing up in Vögisheim, I had to live with both the advantages and disadvantages of letting other people into my life. I gradually got better at amplifying the good and downplaying the bad, but I had no hope of changing the system altogether. Living in today’s digital village, we do. We have a unique opportunity to reclaim control over our lives and create a collective data infrastructure that benefits all of us.