The Context
How
Silicon Valley Stole the Future
A.I. will
reshape our world. But does that mean the people who make the technology get to
control our imagination, too?
Credit...Photo
illustration by Chantal Jahchan
Oct. 26,
2026, 5:02 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/magazine/how-silicon-valley-stole-the-future.html
These days,
the leading tech companies are not primarily fighting one another for market
share or talent or computing power. The bigger battle is over who can claim to
know the future.
In August,
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, published a manifesto titled “The
Future Is for Everyone,” in which he argued that artificial intelligence will
bring about “an abundance of personal agency” and other riches — but only if
Meta is in charge. “If our beliefs and principles lead,” he wrote of his
company, “then the balance of power will favor individuals and a better future
for everyone.” In September, Sam Altman of OpenAI told the United Nations
Security Council that A.I. could lead to either a society in which “more people
can participate in the future” or one in which humans have lost “control of the
future.” And in his recent call for the voluntary slowdown of A.I. development,
Dario Amodei of Anthropic claimed it was imperative to stave off the future we
are headed toward, if only for an “extra year or two.”
Our very
ability to imagine the future has been captured by the rich and powerful. Each
of these prognostications suggests that, by virtue of their ownership of
advanced technology, these leaders have privileged knowledge of what may be
coming for us all: either a world in which A.I. has eliminated all jobs,
unleashed bioengineered viruses and enabled catastrophic warfare or a utopia in
which the technology gives people “greater power to live life as they choose,”
as Altman told the U.N. In both cases, A.I. is positioned as ubiquitous and
unavoidable, its future omnipresence a fait accompli.
Tech leaders
have been able to swiftly lay claim to this imaginative space in large part
because alternative positive visions of the future have largely disappeared in
American culture and politics. Over the past 20 years, pessimistic narratives
have come to dominate public life: on the left, grim warnings of impending
climate disaster and economic collapse; on the far right, apocalyptic
conspiracy theories about demographic decline. The last several election cycles
sent the strong message that the best future for the country lay in the past:
Joe Biden’s 2020 victory promised a return to a bygone era of politics as
usual, while the Make America Great Again movement is at heart a restorative
fantasy. (And America’s gerontocratic ruling class hasn’t helped.) When
Americans can imagine the future these days, it’s often in the shortest
of terms: Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have turned it into a
commodity to be traded and monetized.
The British
philosopher Jonathan White has warned that the effective abdication of the
future to Silicon Valley comes with profound risks. The very idea of an open
future, he writes, is a “democratic resource” integral to political freedom,
which depends on “the capacity to imagine alternatives that may be improbable
and to pursue them against the odds.” Abolitionists could not have fought
against slavery without a belief in an emancipated future; the social safety
nets of the mid-20th century were possible only because liberal politics were
able to envision protections for future generations. When the future
increasingly seems like something to avoid rather than something to look
forward to, White argues, the very foundations of democracy are weakened.
The future
has been the primary terrain upon which all politics are practiced since the
French Revolution challenged the divine right of kings. Before 1789, “political
arguments were largely about the past,” the political scientist Dan
Edelstein argues. After that date, “each side claimed a privileged knowledge of
the future.” Enlightenment ideas about the inevitable progress of
mankind, coupled with technological advances, gave rise to the belief that “a
perfect world lay just around the corner,” if only society could find a way to
get there. But the same forces could work against democracy, too. This
conviction was so strong, Edelstein writes, that it led some people “to accept
the temporary suspension of democratic beliefs” in order to bring it about.
“The contest
over the future is a contest over power, over who gets to decide,” said Aditi
Juneja, the executive director of Democracy2076, a nongovernmental organization
she founded to develop strategies for protecting democratic values over the
next 50 years. Silicon Valley executives are eager to assure the public that
the future is safe in their hands. But even by insisting, as Altman has, that
they are on “Team Humanity,” they are claiming the authority to determine the
course of what lies ahead.
A Polymarket
pop-up in Washington, D.C., this year. On prediction markets like Kalshi and
Polymarket, the future is a commodity to be traded and monetized.Credit...Alex
Kent/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
During
the Cold War, too,
the future felt wildly unknowable and frightening. Technological acceleration,
global insecurity and changing racial dynamics reshaped American life; fear of
nuclear war hovered over everything. Academics and bureaucrats responded to
this moment by coming up with new ways to quantify possible future trajectories
for the nation. Herman Kahn, a mathematician and physicist, developed the
practice of future scenario planning at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s to
help the U.S. Air Force prepare for the possibility of thermonuclear war,
laying the groundwork for the field of futures studies.
In 1964, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences partnered with the Carnegie Corporation
of New York to establish the Commission on the Year 2000, led by the
sociologist Daniel Bell, calling on dozens of prominent thinkers from different
fields to “imagine the future and to identify the problem areas” that would
define the new millennium. Its central concerns — Would violent conflict
continue to be a major threat? Would computers inevitably replace “much routine
activity that now passes for intellectual work”? — emerged from the deep
uncertainty of the era.
“These
questions reflected a fundamental anxiety, namely, that the American polity was
changing and that the outcome of this process might not be a recognizable
liberal form but rather, a new version of the future,” writes the historian
Jenny Andersson. Predicting the future functioned as a way of both coming to
terms with the unruly present and controlling its outcomes, effectively
narrowing the window of political possibilities.
For Bell,
future scenario planning was critical if governments and policymakers were to
ensure that American society continued to modernize. But the push toward
quantification and prediction took power away from individuals to shape the
course of public affairs. Instead, it popularized an understanding of the
future as a “domain of finite possibilities, arranged according to their
greater or lesser probability,” as the historian Reinhart Koselleck once
described it.
The collapse
of the Soviet Union was a fleeting moment of radical possibility, as the old
international order fell and millions experienced a new kind of freedom. But it
was soon eclipsed by the idea that it had brought about the “end of history,”
in which the future belonged exclusively to liberal democracies and their
capitalist economies. The political scientist Ivan Krastev has argued that the
moment was actually the “end of the future,” because it gave way to a “politics
without real choices,” in which fundamental questions about how governments
should be organized seemed to have been asked and answered. After the 2008
financial crisis, the range of political futures once more opened up as
socialist and populist movements began to contest the status quo. But for
individuals, dreams of the future — of owning a home, finding a steady job,
starting a family — diminished. “People felt their options narrowing,” the
historian Nils Gilman told me.
Today, both
the narrative and economic outlooks for the future are overwhelmingly dominated
by A.I. That is, in itself, a radical foreclosure. Because when we place the
technology at the center of our political imagination, we risk becoming blind
to other outcomes that might still be possible alongside it — or in its stead.
Image
Celebration
in Moscow after the failure of a Communist-led coup in 1991. Some scholars saw
the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “end of history.”Credit...Anatoly
Sapronenkov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The
current crisis of
the future has much in common with that of the last century. Then as now,
geopolitics had become newly unstable and democracy imperiled just as emerging
technologies were rapidly reshaping everyday life. Then as now, a sense of
uncertainty produced forecasts and philosophies that boomeranged between
utopian and dystopian visions.
The leading
A.I. companies now occupy much of the same role that the midcentury foresight
firms did in their time. The difference, of course, is that they have far more
technical and material ammunition on their side: Not only do they own the very
technology they aim to study, but they can also draw upon a vast volume of user
data to inform their predictions. OpenAI, for example, just created its
Strategic Futures unit, an “internal think tank” led by Dean Ball, a
conservative writer and former White House staff member who helped draft the
Trump administration’s 2025 white paper on A.I. The team’s purpose is to
discern what the “long-term political economy outcomes from advanced A.I. are
likely to be and what they should be, which are importantly different
questions,” Ball told me. “What levers can we pull today to steer the world
toward better outcomes?”
Many
predictions of how A.I. will alter the world take a reductive binary form: It
will eliminate all jobs or create thousands of new ones; it will cure cancer or
unleash a deadly virus; it will solve climate change or fatally accelerate it;
it will bring about a new golden age or destroy the world as we know it. “All
of these are contested narratives that are highly limiting in how we think
about tomorrow,” Ari Wallach, a self-described futurist and social-systems
strategist, told me. “My concern is that we take the current false poles in the
debate as the imaginary for what is actually possible.”
The A.I.
companies are now encountering meaningful opposition to their vision. The
debate over the future is scrambling partisan divides and catalyzing new
political groups. Senator Bernie Sanders recently appeared alongside Steve
Bannon at a “pro-human” event in Washington and has argued that Silicon Valley
should not be able to “dictate humanity’s future.” Alex Bores, a New York state
assemblyman, started a group called Who Decides that aims to unify Democrats on
A.I. policy; a separate group, Tomorrow Together, formed to “help Dems win the
politics of tomorrow” by focusing on A.I.
Each of
these efforts is an attempt to offer up a different story, to put forward
public narratives about A.I. that are not written by those who have the most to
gain from its widespread adoption. But even as they seek to reassert the
people’s voice in decision-making about A.I., they may make the mistake of
fighting the battle on terms set by the A.I. companies, placing the technology
at the center of their political vision even as they seek to contest its power.
The real
lesson from Bell, Kahn and their colleagues in the 1960s comes from what they
failed to predict. In their quest to develop a science of the future, they
neglected to consider the possibility that the younger generation might rise up
against the unjust structures of their time, taking to the streets to oppose
the Vietnam War and to fight for free speech and civil rights. The Commission
on the Year 2000 never published its final report; it was disbanded in 1974,
considered, as Andersson writes, a “spectacular failure” because it had been
“overtaken by unpredicted developments that far extended its collective
imagination.” Generational social change was not in its forecast.
Source
images for illustration above: The Image Bank/Getty Images; iStock/Getty
Images; Moment/Getty Images; Heather Diehl/Getty Images; Jon Putman/Anadolu,
via Getty Images; Finn Gomez/Getty Images.
Linda Kinstler is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a
contributing writer for the magazine.
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