The very first episode of Future Tense was titled The Internet President.

It aired on ABC RN just after the inauguration of Barack Obama and examined high hopes that a tech-savvy POTUS would usher forth a new age of political accountability and direct public engagement.

A decade on, we have Donald Trump, Twitter and an angry, polarised electorate.

There are two lessons: be careful what you wish for; and always remember that technology has no agency — it is what we program it to be.

It reflects both the positives and negatives of our mindset and behaviour.

Over the past decade at Future Tense we've trudged through hectares of hype.

Some of it turned out to be justified — the iPhone, cloud computing, the dominance of Facebook — while some, like Google Glass and e-government, turned out to be little more than marketing.

We often found our approach criticised for being too measured. Didn't we realise that every new technology was "revolutionary"?

But times have changed. People have increasingly come to realise that technology can create as many problems as it does solutions; that "free" doesn't necessarily mean free. If you're not paying for a social media app, that's because you're the product.

We're also realising that a better future doesn't just happen, it has to be created — by us. It requires management and regulation.

Here are some of the things I've learned over the past 10-plus years …

'The future' is a loaded term

Firstly, we need to stop talking about the future as if it were another world — a far-off destination. The future is simply an extension of the present.

And there is no linear sense of progress — the future for someone born in Syria in the early 1990s turned out to be bloody, not bountiful.

In China, not so long ago, many believed that the explosion in social media usage would inexorably lead to a future of greater freedom.

But China today is arguably the world's largest and most effective surveillance state.

Recourse to the future also often leads to a bias toward the new.

But not everything that is new is good, and not everything from the past is bad or in need of replacement.

Which is why cinema didn't die away as predicted and why Paris, with its 19th-century buildings, is still regarded by many as the most beautiful city in the world.

The future is full of the furniture of the past

Modern technologies, like smart cars, will still navigate the well-worn streets of Europe. ( Getty: Imre Cikajlo )

This tip came from the design theorist Tony Fry. When we envisage the future, he wisely told me, we have a tendency to imagine it as a clean slate.

But change, of course, is iterative, it happens over time.

Ten years at Future Tense taught me a lot. ( Supplied )

Our cities still carry the architecture, technologies and practices of past decades, millennia even.

Designing for the future means thinking not only about better systems, but how they will integrate with existing infrastructure.

In inner-city Europe, for example, the smartest AI-powered car of the future will still need to navigate the narrow, winding laneways of a bygone time.

Technology doesn't change underlying instincts and prejudices

As neuroscientists will tell you, the brain is not a computer, and our computers don't really operate like a brain. The analogy is wrong, no matter how many times it's repeated.

Despite our best attempts artificial intelligence has biases. ( Getty: Christian Lagerek )

Artificial intelligence does not create itself, it has to be created by humans.

And humans, even well-intentioned ones, have biases.

As the Australian National University's Ellen Broad so eloquently put it in her insightful 2018 book Made by Humans: The AI Condition:

"The pristine sheen of AI can mask the human fingerprints underneath. Some of those fingerprints are faint and hard to spot, unless you know where to look. Some have been deliberately hidden."

Revolutions devour their own

Revolutions come in many forms and there's plenty to learn from them. ( Getty: Picture Alliance )

The Russian Revolution was not instigated by the Bolsheviks, they co-opted the revolt for their own designs and the original revolutionaries soon ended up either sidelined or dead.

The technology revolution of the late 20th century was no different. What began with anti-establishment, countercultural tones quickly gave way to a new industrial revolution dominated by monopolistic capitalism.

Silicon Valley today has more in common with Gordon Gekko's Wall Street than Haight-Ashbury.

We should stop being surprised that technology companies behave badly. And we should be sceptical of their claims to altruism.

People aren't resistant to change, they embody it

Human beings are change. If you think about it, it's what we do. For better or worse, it's why we now inhabit every region on Earth. Every continent and every climate.

Human beings not only love change, they thrive on it.

What they don't like is being conned. What they don't like is change that hasn't been correctly explained to them, or change that makes things worse, not better.

Understand the difference between lies and bullshit — it matters

People are demanding decisions based on fact. ( Getty: NurPhoto )

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously drew a distinction between lies and what he termed "bullshit".

A lie is an untruth, but it is still tied to a fact. It is the corruption of the fact. Bullshit is speech with no basis in fact, in truth. Many of us think we live in an age of lies, when in fact we live in an age of bullshit.

Bullshit is like belief, its embrace affords no room for questioning.

Frankfurt's notion of bullshit can help us better understand the nature of modern politics, advertising, news and even science (think climate change denial or anti-vaxxers).

It's important for the future because it underpins the futility of trying to convince people with facts alone, because if you're persuaded by bullshit, facts don't matter.

Design should always follow purpose, except it doesn't always work that way

Time and again our love-affair with technology leads us to put the cart before the horse. Which is why so many start-ups fail and so much research time and money is wasted — technologists design clever things that nobody wants to use.

Henry Ford saw the potential to build cars for the masses before they knew they wanted them. ( Getty: Jeff Kowalsky )

Or, worse still, they design systems and devices that just make a process or task more complicated and tiresome.

In education, this has been a particular problem. Educational theorists and practitioners increasingly warn of the need for pedagogical imperatives to inform the adoption of new technologies within the classroom. Not the reverse.

So, making stuff that people actually want and need is a sensible rule of thumb.

But there is an exception. Sometimes we don't know what we need until it suddenly appears — the iPhone being the classic example.

As Henry Ford supposedly declared: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

There isn't always a tech solution

Perhaps the silliest thing I've encountered was an app to teach children how to write with a pencil.

Not everything is better for being digitised or computerised.

This camera sends updates about the temperature and contents of the fridge to an app on a mobile phone. ( Getty: Jason Ogulnik )

Logic magazine's Ben Tarnoff warns of the environmental consequences of ubiquitous connectivity. Attempts to make every object in our lives "smart" can only come at a cost.

Cisco estimates there will be more than 28 billion networked devices by 2022 — everything from fridges, to tyres to street lights. The cost of powering all of those objects will be staggering, warns Tarnoff.

Data centres, he says, currently consume 200 terawatt hours of electricity per year, and that figure is most likely to increase.

We should never forget the Jevons Paradox: when technology increases the efficiency with which a resource is created or produced, demand increases and so too does consumption.

In other words, striving for technological efficiency often makes matters worse.

Quality matters, except when it doesn't

The ranks of the unemployed are full of people — journalists, artisans, tailors, shop-assistants and the like — who once believed that the quality of their work was somehow an insurance for the future.

We all talk highly of quality, but over and again we demonstrate that it matters far less to us in real terms than price and convenience. Discount airlines realised this in the 1970s.

Even in fashion, we expect quality only to a point. What we really value is disposability. Many of us frown on the throw-away society, but consumerism runs our world.

We all talk highly of quality, but it doesn't matter as much as price. ( ABC News: Giulio Saggin )

And even those companies that seemingly aspire to quality — that make a marketing virtue of it — value its limits.

Which is why technologists can build a device as sophisticated and stylish as a smartphone, but not one that lasts more than a couple of years.

Its limitations are part of the design. The industrial term for it is "built-in obsolescence".

Let scepticism be your watchword

This is a bugbear for me — scepticism is not a synonym for cynicism. They should not be confused.

Cynicism is negative and corrosive. By contrast, scepticism is forward-looking and discerning.

The sceptic is someone who's open to ideas, who is questioning, at times suspicious, but always happy to be convinced.

In our current age, public relations professionals far outnumber professional journalists. Add to that legions of media advisers, marketers, advertisers and lobbyists and I would argue we need more sceptics than ever before.

PR professionals outnumber journalists, so we need sceptics more than ever. ( Getty: Stevica Mrdja )

IMHO it should be taught in schools.

In his recent book On Us, the former managing director of the ABC, Mark Scott, reflected on his experiences at the head of the ABC. His 10-year tenure began just before the arrival of the iPhone.

"I have been taken in by new things, big promises and the hope of a wonderful future," he wrote.

"Now I can see that in many ways over the past decade, I took all that was on offer at face value, believing in the promises and the vision, asking few questions as I dived in."

In this age of "bullshit" we should never take spin for granted. We should all be proud to call ourselves sceptics.

The takeaway

Our journey into the future will be determined by the many choices we make today.

We have agency, even if it sometimes doesn't feel like it.

In other words, the future is not pre-determined, pre-destined, it can be shaped — we have that power as societies and individuals should we choose to exercise it.