The arrival of the Second Machine Age will rewrite how rural geographers understand the nature of sustainability and the weightings accorded its various dimensions. Fast changing technologies, accompanied by the rise and decline of various economic sectors and their employment, will force rural communities to become much more adaptable and innovative in economic terms compared with the past. Moreover, many rural communities may encounter difficulties in realigning their psychologies and behaviours to the needs of innovation on account of sparse populations which attenuate the mutual support and networking that is crucial to the development of business ideas and their subsequent funding. Reasons are advanced as to why central governments are increasingly vacating the local development field and handing it back the development task to often ill-prepared local governments and groups of local activists. We conclude that a whole-of-community approach with strong leaderships may be needed to re-orient rural communities to the future.