Today, we exist in the future we always dreamt of, full of electric cars, 3D printing and extended reality – not to mention Apple’s latest wheeze, VR goggles. But now it’s here, we don’t seem to be enjoying it very much. We’re paralysed by the fear of a Black Mirror planet.

The documentarian Mr Adam Curtis has argued that we exist in a “fake world”, built from the 1970s onwards by corporations, governments and financiers, and that the future has been “cancelled” because those in power no longer have any idea for what’s next. Worse, that they know that we know that that’s the case.

Ms Naomi Klein recently wrote a weapons-grade takedown of AI and its Big Tech architects. “It was always to profit off mass immiseration, which, under capitalism, is the glaring and logical consequence of replacing human functions with bots.” Then, in May, the British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Dr Geoffrey Hinton announced his resignation from Google. He said that he regretted his pioneering work on chatbots and stating that they pose a threat to humanity.

Grim stuff. But does it have to be? Or is there a way we might instead look forward to the future again – you know, like we used to when we were kids?

“We’ve always feared change, but I think what’s scary for people is the pace that it has come on,” says Mr Andy Crysell, founder and CEO of the cultural insight agency Crowd DNA. “AI was a pretty niche conversation as recently as Christmas. Now it’s a big topic for our clients, and ourselves as a business. You can put into ChatGPT, ‘Develop a cultural strategy for a new rum brand’ and it doesn’t come up with a bad answer. I’ve seen worse.”

While worries abound that an era of unregulated AI systems will create misinformation, cybersecurity threats, job loss and political bias, Crysell is more sanguine. “There’s loads of positives people can’t quite focus on because of the dystopian aspects,” he says. “But the amount of things AI can impact on in terms of people not having to do some of the grinding work they currently do, to freeing up time to personalising healthcare treatments, drugs, education, safer transport and sustainability. There’s so much potential.”

Focusing on how new tech typically ends up bringing us closer together is one way we can avoid worrying about the machines taking over, as the journalist and historian Mr Andy Beckett explains. “Think about all the networks of interest tech has created,” he says. “I go to a music venue in Dalston [in London], which has all kinds of esoteric music. I might go and see some elderly Japanese jazz musician and it will be completely packed with people of all ages. If that concert had been proposed in the 1980s, it would have been impossible to get 20 people there. To me, that’s a massive improvement.”

Beckett recalls being at boarding school and constantly reading bands in the NME namechecking The Velvet Underground, but having no way of hearing what they sounded like – until The South Bank Show did an episode on them and he and his friends snuck into the TV room late one evening to find out.

“There’s such a liberation and freedom now,” Beckett says. “When my son was getting into hip-hop, I could immediately go on YouTube and show him: there’s Public Enemy, there’s Eric B & Rakim – all kinds of obscure TV footage, which people have uploaded for other enthusiasts. There’s no monetary gain for them to do so. And there’s a real generosity of spirit in that.”

Another area of interest for Beckett is micromobility – e-bikes, electric scooters and so on. “That’s something that people were imagining would happen from the 1940s and 1950s – that there would be these tiny forms of mobility whizzing around the city, right? That’s kind of astonishing. I’ve got a car, my neighbours have cars, but we hardly ever use them because driving is difficult. And somewhat discouraged. I really like that. And that’s a massive change to our cityscape.”

Mr David Baker is a broadcaster, speaker and coach who teaches at The School of Life, with a particular interest in the future of work and the effect of technology on human beings. He’ll sometimes start his talks with a piece of contemporary classical music, which people seem to enjoy. Right up until the point he tells them it was written at The University of Málaga by a computer.

“And they get really offended,” he says. “Because we’re proud of being humans. So, when we find out that computers can produce art that gives us the same feeling… then, actually, that undermines our love of humans.”

Baker is circumspect on a future of artificial intelligence. He cites the revolutionary medical benefits, as illustrated by Google’s AI offshoot DeepMind solving one of biology’s grandest challenges – taking just 18 months to work out the structure of almost every protein known to science, something that will radically accelerate drug development.

“That’s a huge breakthrough for humanity because it means drugs will be custom made to each individual. It will be like having a Savile Row of treatments. What we’re understanding now is that when we say ‘lung cancer’, we’re really talking about 50 different diseases. At the moment, we’re treating them all with one treatment and seeing how that works.”

But Baker forecasts a period of turbulence when it comes to work. The Luddites thought machines would destroy jobs. They were half-right. They also created new ones – eventually.

“The psychologist Daniel Pink has written a lot about jobs,” Baker says. “And he came up with three ingredients for being motivated in work. Autonomy – how much or how little do I decide what to do? Mastery – how many medium-sized challenges do I face every day? And purpose – how much does the end product match what I’m on Earth to do?”

Applying Pink’s rules, Baker foresees a future where work becomes “an amazing place” where AI eliminates the “drudgery” and frees us up “to do the stuff AI will never do, which is having bright ideas, care for each other and understand the human aspects of the process”. To get there, we’ll just have to ensure we use AI as a tool and not become tools ourselves. Being scared and excited is all part of the process.

He brings up the elevator analogy. “When they were invented, people were terrified of elevators,” he says. “They had person inside who had to operate them, right? After a while, we invented buttons and the confidence to step in and press ‘five’ and go all by ourselves. Now in modern buildings, there aren’t even any buttons. You say, ‘I want to go to five’ and the AI – that’s a big way of putting it, but it’s a computer – works out which lift is most handy.

“And I think that stages like that will help us feel more comfortable about it.”