Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society

Human by Design: Technology, Agency, and the Futures We Choose

After last year’s Forum asked how we might build abundance — more capacity, more access, and more opportunity for all — this year turns to the question abundance leaves behind: when machines can do more of what once required human effort, what becomes scarce, and what must we choose to cultivate? 

Our provocation is that the scarcest and most valuable resources of the coming decades may be those central to being human: judgement, creativity, craft, empathy, connection, and trust. As artificial intelligence and other technologies reshape everyday life, the challenge is not simply to ask what humans will still do better than machines. It is to ask what kinds of people we want to become, what kinds of communities we want to strengthen, and what kinds of institutions we need in order to live well together. There is no single future waiting to arrive. There are competing futures, shaped by different values and visions of progress. Some may deepen inequality and disconnection; others may expand agency, participation, and opportunity. Which futures become possible will depend not only on technological capability, but on the choices we make now.

This convening therefore invites a practical and moral conversation about the conditions we must now cultivate deliberately. It starts from agency rather than inevitability. The task is neither to reject technology nor to accept its trajectory as predetermined, but to ask how we can build, govern, and use it with a clearer account of what human flourishing requires.

Bringing together scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and changemakers from around the world, the Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society will examine the choices that shape technological futures — and the human capacities, relationships, and institutions needed to make those futures worth choosing.