Here is an easy way to look at the future.

It may feel that technology is driving us, in reality we are driving the
technology!
For instance, when automobiles came into the market, every one embraced it. It became an instant success and drove the world. This auto evolution looks as though technology took hold of us. But in reality it is the customers who decided to go for it. What if people in those days were just happy with horses and bullock carts? What if they didn’t want this change in their lifestyle. Automobiles would have vanished into thin air. Instead we bought them
because they improved our lives immeasurably. It is our desire to lead a better life that led to the success of this technology and same argument holds good for any technology for that matter. Humans always wants to lead a life
better than yesterday. This desire for a better life is a motivation factor for
researchers to do research and come up with better technologies and in turn are
responsible for technological evolution.

Although, the human desire is the fundamental force that is responsible for the technological evolution, we are adapting a very innovative way to achieve this. We innovate and improve technology to lead a better life by moving away from human or eco dependency or from old out-dated technology itself. I would like to call this strategy as “DEPENDENCY SHIFT.”

For instance, if you look at our own past history of agriculture, we see this strategy. We moved out of rain based agriculture to reservoir based irrigation systems to move away from rain dependency. "Drip irrigation" is yet another effort to reduce dependency on rain. Recent research and usage of genetic modifications is pulling us much further away from eco dependency, be it tissue based agriculture or tissue based meat growth.
What about the industrial revolution that we all witnessed during last century? It is nothing but our continuous effort to move away from manual labor to machine world. Every human being embraced it by being part of either production or consumption. It catapulted our living standards to newer heights. It never stopped there. In fact industrial revolution was the beginning of an accelerated dependency shift. We used this strategy in every facet our lives.
What about recent development in NANO technology that helps us filter water instantly? This is a great leap forward away from eco dependency.
How many of us think that the rain water that falls on our head is the same water that we threw in the bathroom? Our dependency on our eco system is enormous. The movement we wash our hands, the dirty water begins its long journey from drainage to river to ocean and evaporates and come back as rain. This whole journey is fully dependent on eco system. This whole dependency will eventually go away as dependency shift advances.
The “dependency shift” strategy is not very obvious unless we make a conscientious effort to identify it. Identifying and understanding this strategy is the first step towards envisioning the future.

This dependency shift is what is making our desires come true. In the process we are becoming more dependent on technology.