The Alternative Scenarios for the Digital Future

The aim of the article is to study the impact of digitalization on economic, sociocultural and political processes in society, as well as to search for alternative scenarios for the development of digital society. Digitalization today is an effective indicator of the development of society, which provides many people with ease in carrying out their daily activities. The usefulness of digitalization for society today is confirmed in almost all aspects of human life – from production and doing business to communication and mobility. However, in today's society there is no clear understanding of the further development of humanity in the context of rapid technological advances, and there is even more lack of an idea of what the role of a person in the digital world will be. Analyzing this issue, we have worked out a number of versions and views – from scientifically progressive to fantastic-utopian – in order to understand the optimal scenario for the development of digital society. Today, the world has entered the era of Industry 4.0, that is, the era that is based on new technologies. Technologies are increasingly becoming able to replace humans in every field of industry, education, science, and everyday life issues of society. The study showed that today there is no consensus in society about what the future world will look like under the influence of digitalization and the spread of artificial intelligence (AI). This raises the question of the role of man in the light of technological change. In order to find the optimal scenario for the development of humanity in the era of digitalization and the formation of AI, we analyzed the main views that prevail among scientists and in society in general, and singled out our own vision of the role of humans in the era of digitalization. The fundamentals of the theory of technological singularity and transhumanism are analyzed. It is found that the negative consequences of technological progress can be generalized as two major problems. The first is that humans will lose control over technology, because AI will begin to develop on its own so quickly that it will become incomprehensible to humans. The second is a change in global humanistic concepts, at the center of which are a person and the appropriate moral values.