Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Clarke’s line reads as a paradoxical warning: technology may be so transformative that what we call a “technological society” could be a brief transitional phase rather than a permanent condition. Implicit is the idea that advanced tools—automation, computing, spaceflight, or artificial intelligence—might dissolve familiar social categories (work, governance, even “human” capability) and yield a post-technological state where technology is ubiquitous, invisible, or fully integrated into life. The quote also carries a moral urgency typical of Clarke’s futurism: if we are living at the hinge-point of such a transition, then decisions made in the present (about control, ethics, and direction of innovation) may determine what comes after.