In this future, when natural resources such as land, water, food and shelter are scarce and nomadic living is the new norm, priorities will change, predicts Sterry. “Values will change, particularly around ideas of acquisition. People will aspire to the acquisition of less stuff, but the nature of at least some of that stuff will change, and with it so too will industries and the jobs that populate them.”

In the still-industrial wealthy societies that Armstrong envisions, there will be “cultures of leisure that are enabled by robots. There will also be an under culture that service the robots, machinery and information systems that enable this lifestyle,” she says. “Business classes will travel around the world via hyperloop – perhaps even continually – and take hormones like melatonin to synchronise their sleeping patterns. Some will even have blood transfusions from the young to give them more vigour.”

There’ll be no such privileges for manual workers, says Armstrong, who may risk their lives mining rare resources on the Moon and asteroids. “Owing to the long distances they will see their families very little but will nonetheless sacrifice their freedoms to make sure their children are nourished and safe,” says Armstrong. “Already the relationship between people and work is changing as some decide to live off-grid. In this context, ‘work’ becomes the activities of daily life that restores a person’s relationship with the provisions of the land. These kinds of lifestyles will only be possible where there is peace. Where there is displacement, ‘work’ will incorporate the very act of staying alive.”

When it comes to production as survival, Sterry believes the fundamentals of what’s to come are already, to some extent, evident. “Look, for example, to some of the world’s most plight-ridden places and you will find human invention at its best,” says Sterry.

The cyberpunk visions that Gibson offered up are in action today, evident in the third world microbusinesses communities, where ingenuity and creativity are used to turn western ‘waste’ into new products. “These citizens are doing what our forebears did time and again, throughout countless major environmental shifts of the past,” says Sterry. “These people embody the very essence of what it means to be human. For we are, lest we forget, a species that is reliant on ‘technology’ – a thing that is shaped not by our preferences and predilections but by our environmental parameters.”

“As is, technology is exceedingly fragile,” points out Sterry, “as evidenced by the numerous e-waste dumps about the world, where items that only a few years ago were considered state-of-the-art now pile up, their material components leaching into surrounding land and water tables.” The message, says Armstrong is clear to those who are open to seeing it. “We're at a tipping point, where if we don't address the gaping inequalities around the world, flying cars and smart cities won't mean a thing to anyone but the very few. We need a kinder world. If that happens, then extraordinary things could take place.”