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I remember my first glimpse into the future. In August 1992, when I arrived in California as a student, I discovered during orientation that the university required all incoming students to have something called an email account. To access it, I had to call up a text-based mail client on Unix, using a series of line commands. If I needed a file that sat on a university computer in New York, I could use file transfer protocol to download it in Los Angeles, the whole process taking no more than a few minutes. That’s brilliant, I remember thinking.

That fall, the incoming Clinton administration announced a plan to invest billions of dollars into civilian research and technology. The goal, according to The Times, was to “flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry.” Computers across the country needed to be able to communicate, transmitting data on a high-speed network that Al Gore liked to call the “information superhighway.”

Highways are a good metaphor for change; they take us from one place to the next, from the past to the future, from old selves to the new. My transformation into a Californian happened slowly. I learned to estimate with frightening accuracy how long it would take to get somewhere in traffic; to live with the threat of earthquakes, mudslides and wildfires; and to speak Spanish. I finally understood what Don Henley meant when he sang about the “warm smell of colitas.”

The computer I had in my dorm room was a Macintosh Classic II, with a nine-inch screen that heralded a future when machines would become ever more portable. I was supposed to use the Mac for my schoolwork in linguistics, though I spent many nights writing fiction; I had secret and not entirely formed ambitions of being a writer. Now I carry in my pocket a tiny device that, in addition to everything the Classic II did, can play movies, deliver the news, give directions, send money, book airline tickets and check my royalty statements. It also recognizes my face, listens to everything I say, stores my health records and tracks my location.

What I mean to say is that the future was both what I imagined and nothing like what I imagined. Here, too, highways are a good analogy. They don’t move in straight lines; they twist and turn; they have offramps that can lead in unexpected or perhaps dangerous directions. In 1999, while trying to write my first novel, I went to work for an internet start-up that competed with Google, Yahoo and AltaVista in the search-engine field. I remember spending hours each day running queries on our site and comparing them with results on competitors’ sites. The goal was to deliver the best, fastest and most relevant search results for customers.

But a couple of years later, a Google engineer noticed that data logs from users’ searches were more revealing than the search queries themselves, an insight that effectively transformed Google from a simple search engine into a data company. Google began to sell targeted advertising and turned privacy into a commodity, launching what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”

California’s tech companies have since brought unprecedented connection and convenience to our lives, linking us with loved ones thousands of miles away and delivering information on everything from unclogging the kitchen sink to real-time election results. At the same time, they have collected so much user information that they’ve managed to confine us to ideological bubbles, calling free will into question and eroding democratic governance.

If you want to know the future, the saying goes, look to California. This is a place that tries out new ideas all the time, and on a scale rarely seen anywhere else. But while California has an exceptional purchase on the future, it’s also vulnerable to the same exclusionary tendencies that exist elsewhere in the nation. There’s a longstanding friction here between an idealistic push for progress and a nostalgic pull toward the past.

California was the first state to pass tailpipe-emissions standards, the first to legalize the medical use of marijuana, the first to adopt paid family leave, the first to experiment with guaranteed income on a municipal level, but also the first state to stage a tax revolt that hobbled public services, the first to ban affirmative action and, in 1994, the first to pass a ballot initiative — Proposition 187 — that would have barred undocumented immigrants from public social services, including education and health care. Prop 187 was a consequential episode in the state’s history, crystallizing the nativist backlash to changing demographics and foreshadowing similar movements in the rest of the country.

California’s character emerges out of the seesawing between two impulses, one restrictive, the other rebellious. Although a majority of voters cast a ballot in favor of Prop 187, resistance to the measure was steadfast, especially among young people, chipping away at its support. It was declared unconstitutional in federal court and was effectively ended by Gov. Gray Davis in 1999. The proposition’s passing strengthened Latino voter turnout and changed the electoral map for the next 25 years.

Now, as California takes on the threat of climate change, a housing crisis that is spilling out of state and a demographic exodus, we find ourselves again at a crossroads. Listening to the radio after a wildfire a couple of years ago, I heard a caller pin his hopes on technological innovation as a solution to this problem. But as we approach the future, it might be worthwhile to consider how we got here in the first place.

Three hundred years ago, the future arrived on foot, clad in the brown robe of a Franciscan friar. In 1769, charged by the Spanish crown with exploring and “civilizing” the area then known as Alta California, Father Junipero Serra and the padres set about building a chain of Catholic missions on a 600-mile route that ran through the territory on a vertical line. The road, which in parts followed already existing Indigenous trails, was called El Camino Real (“the Royal Highway”). The highway supported the farms and ranches that would eventually become the backbone of the territory’s economy, but the mission system presaged a long and brutal campaign of displacement, forced labor, acculturation and violence against the Indigenous peoples of the state — which the Spanish envisioned as a Christian territory filled with gente de razón (“reasonable people”).

In 1848, as California came under U.S. rule, flecks of gold were found in the American River. By some estimates, nearly 300,000 people moved to California during the Gold Rush, tripling the state’s population in roughly 10 years. In order to transport people and goods to and from the West, a new type of roadway was needed: the Transcontinental Railroad. The newcomers hoped that a combination of luck and hard work would make them rich, a belief that became known as the California dream, a precursor to the national mythology around the American dream.

But the Chinese workers who took on the difficult and dangerous work of building the railroad became the target of resentment, special taxes and a host of legal restrictions. Chinese Californians fought against discrimination in various ways. When a young cook named Wong Kim Ark was denied entry to the United States after visiting China, he sued, arguing that his birth in San Francisco made him a citizen under the 14th Amendment and therefore exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor in a landmark case that established the principle of birthright citizenship. But the exclusion of Chinese immigrants remained the law of the land until 1943, when American interests in World War II aligned the nation with China against Japan.

By this time, the trains and electric trolleys that had allowed speedy — and racially mixed — transit through the state’s biggest cities were falling out of favor. The future belonged to automobiles. The Arroyo Seco Parkway, now part of the 110 freeway, opened in 1940, connecting Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles. Other freeways and highways soon followed, linking rural areas to cities and California to the rest of the country. The junction in East Los Angeles where the 5, 10, 101 and 60 freeways connect is now one of the most traveled highway interchanges in the world. But as the urban historian Gilbert Estrada has shown, it was once home to Mexican American families, some of whom were displaced to make way for construction. Black and brown dispossession was integral to freeway construction and, along with explicitly racist housing policies, contributed to today’s low level of Black homeownership.

The history of the highways and byways of our state follows a pattern: Each future that previous generations imagined for California attracted newcomers, claimed land or resources and transformed a few people into millionaires, but it also trampled on the rights, livelihoods and properties of vulnerable communities. Yet Californians’ resistance to predations of all kinds is precisely what led to progress. In 1969, for example, Native American activists began to occupy Alcatraz Island in protest of the federal government’s policy of tribal termination. This was more than symbolic; it brought national attention to Indigenous autonomy and civil rights and helped nurture tribal solidarity across the country. Likewise, when hydraulic gold mining in the 1870s caused a small town near Sacramento to flood, the survivors rebelled, mounting a series of legal challenges that culminated in one of the country’s earliest environmental laws, which prohibited mining companies from dumping in waterways in 1884. Over the next century, California established itself as a national leader in protecting the environment.

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Credit...Illustration by Benjamin Marra

California’s history of progress through resistance teaches us that the future doesn’t just happen; it is built day by day, a result of choices that we and our leaders continue to make. Consider the state’s recent efforts at acknowledging and making amends for its troubled history. Amid a rise of anti-Asian crimes, the City of San Francisco officially apologized for its role in persecuting Chinese immigrants and discriminating against them in housing and jobs. Last year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to return Bruce’s Beach — a beachfront property that was taken from a Black couple in 1924 using eminent domain — to their surviving descendants.

In 2020, the Legislature appointed a special task force to document the impact of slavery and racism, develop proposals for reparations and recommend policies to prevent continuing harm. After careful study, the task force recommended that Black Californians have two pathways for seeking redress, one for general community harm and one for those who experienced specific injustices like expropriation. The task force limited reparations eligibility to Californians who are descendants of a Black person, free or enslaved, who lived in the United States before the end of the 19th century.

While the task force hasn’t set an exact figure on how descendants of enslaved people might be compensated for overpolicing, mass incarceration and housing discrimination, the economists who advise it estimate that the losses suffered by the state’s Black residents could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. Whether compensation will actually be approved is yet to be determined.

The reparations conversation shows that California has a unique ability to reckon with its troubled history. But that thinking doesn’t always extend to the future. Artificial-intelligence systems are being used to moderate content on social media, evaluate college applications, comb through employment résumés, generate fake photos and artworks, interpret movement data collected from the border zone and identify suspects in criminal investigations. Language models like ChatGPT, made by the San Francisco-based company OpenAI, have also attracted a lot of attention for their potential to disrupt fields like design, law and education.

But if the success of A.I. can be measured in billion-dollar valuations and lucrative I.P.O.s, its failures are borne by ordinary people. A.I. systems aren’t neutral; they are trained on large data sets that include, for example, sexually exploitative material or discriminatory policing data. As a result, they reproduce and magnify our society’s worst biases. For example, racial-recognition software used in police investigations routinely misidentifies Black and brown people. A.I.-based mortgage lenders are more likely to deny home loans to people of color, helping to perpetuate housing inequities.

This would seem to be a moment where we can apply historical thinking to the question of technology, so that we can prevent the injustices that have resulted from previous paradigm-altering changes from happening again. In April, two legislators introduced a bill in the State Assembly that tries to prohibit algorithmic bias. The Writers Guild of America, which is currently on strike, has included limits on the use of A.I. in its demands. Resistance to excess also comes from inside the tech industry. Three years ago, Timnit Gebru, a head of the Ethical A.I. Team at Google, was fired after she sounded the alarm about the dangers of language models like GPT-3. But now even tech executives have grown wary: In his testimony before the Senate, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, conceded that A.I. systems need to be regulated.

The question we face with both reparations and A.I. is in the end not that different from the one that arose when a Franciscan friar set off on the Camino Real in 1769. It’s not so much “What will the future look like?” — although that’s an exciting question — but “Who will have a right to the future? Who might be served by social repair or new technology, and who might be harmed?” The answer might well be decided in California.

Laila Lalami is the author of four novels, including “The Other Americans.” Her most recent book is a work of nonfiction, “Conditional Citizens.” She lives in Los Angeles. Benjamin Marra is an illustrator, a cartoonist and an art director. His illustrations for Numero Group’s “Wayfaring Strangers: Acid Nightmares” were Grammy-nominated.