Linda Kinstler writes:

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. [Continue reading…]