Star Trek Or Ready Player One: A Poverty Informed Future

When I was in 4th grade, my math teacher was Mrs. Brueggen. I was good at the math she taught, which was a lot of multiplication tables if memory serves. I often felt a little superior because I could do the work without the thing Mrs. Brueggen hated above all else… the calculator. She assured us not everyone would have access to those infernal machines, and we must use our minds alone to do our math. If you could only do it with a calculator, you were basically a failure. I look at my smartphone today and laugh at how wrong she was. We have always done better when technology is integrated, and we have always failed when we tried to block progress. As I get more and more familiar with today’s artificial intelligence tools, I think we are at a similar crossroads, but with bigger questions than multiplication tables.

A large part of my career was in technical education, where we spent a lot of time talking about the future of work, as if it were a technical problem or a workforce pipeline issue. But the future of work, at its core, is a human question: What kind of world do we want to live in? It is an adaptive challenge. On my optimistic days, I think these new tools will bring us to a world that looks like my favorite TV show from my youth, Star Trek. I was sharing my vision with my wife this weekend, and she said something that really stuck: “It feels like we’re choosing between Star Trek and Ready Player One.”

She nailed it.

In Star Trek, people aren’t driven by survival. Technology has taken care of the basics like food, housing, and healthcare. People still work, but they do it because they want to contribute, explore, create. They work for meaning, not money.

In Ready Player One, the opposite has happened. Inequality has run wild. The real world is broken, and people escape into a digital one. The technology is incredible, but it doesn’t fix anything. It just numbs the pain, while the few get rich and most barely hang on.

And here’s the wild part: both of those futures begin with the same challenge... powerful technology. What separates these two disparate futures is how we use it, and who we center in the process.

The Future of Work Isn’t Just About Jobs

I’ve worked in education and philanthropy. I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where we talk about workforce development, automation, skills gaps, and talent pipelines. But rarely do we talk about the stress, shame, and trauma that come with just trying to survive in systems that weren’t built with everyone in mind.

That’s why I talk about Poverty-Informed Practice.

It starts from a simple truth: people are not broken, systems are. When we design for dignity, everything changes. It’s not about charity. It’s about justice. When we bring a poverty-informed mindset to conversations about the future of work, the priorities shift. Instead of asking, “How do we train people for jobs that AI won’t take?” We ask, “How do we build systems that make people matter, no matter what AI can do?”

That shift is everything.

What a Poverty-Informed Star Trek Future Looks Like

If we want a future where people have options, where dignity isn’t tied to a paycheck, and where tech serves people, then we have to get intentional. That kind of future doesn’t happen by accident.

Here’s what it might look like:

• Guaranteed income or basic income programs that provide stability so people can pursue purpose instead of survival.

• Education that evolves, focusing less on memorizing content and more on curiosity, empathy, and adaptability.

• Public investment in mental health, housing, and healthcare, because people can’t thrive at work or in life when those foundations are missing.

• Accessible technology and open AI tools, so that innovation isn’t locked behind corporate paywalls.

• Decision-making that includes people with lived experience, because the best solutions come from the people who know the stakes.

That’s the poverty-informed path toward Star Trek.

The Danger of Drift

Honestly, Ready Player One doesn’t require evil. It just requires drift. If we keep going the way we are, where we let markets decide who wins, let technology outpace ethics, and ignore the people who fall through the cracks, we will end up in a place we don’t like. And no one will have chosen it. It’ll just have happened.

But that’s the thing. We can choose. Not with one big national vote or a sweeping policy tomorrow. But with daily decisions in schools, in nonprofits, in tech firms, in government, and in our communities. We decide how we design systems. We decide how we treat each other. We decide whether we build structures that recognize people’s value or ones that measure their worth by productivity alone.

Why This Work Matters to Me

I care about this because I’ve seen what happens when we do it wrong. I’ve seen students walking into classrooms exhausted from night shifts. I’ve seen parents skipping meals to keep the lights on. I’ve seen people lose hope not because they lacked talent, but because the system told them over and over that they didn’t count.

And I’ve also seen what happens when we do it right.

I’ve seen what happens when someone receives unconditional support. When someone feels seen. When someone is trusted with resources instead of being forced to prove they’re struggling enough to deserve help. It changes everything.

And as AI and automation continue to reshape our economy, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink how we define work, contribution, and success. This isn’t just about the future of jobs. It’s about the future of people.

Final Thought: Let's Not Miss the Moment

We can build a future where people have time to rest, to create, to grow, to care for each other. Where work is a meaningful part of life, but not the thing that determines your worth or your access to basic needs. Or we can slide into a future where people are disposable, where tech distracts instead of empowers, and where survival becomes the ceiling.

I know which one I want. I think you do, too.

Let’s get to work on Star Trek. (p.s. ChatGPT helped create this article)