There's a question that has practically disappeared from public conversation: how do we want to live in the coming years?
We ask ourselves how to make ends meet, how to respond to the next crisis, how to win the next election, how to increase GDP in the next quarter, how to survive the algorithm for another week. But we rarely stop to think about the society we want to build in the medium term. The present has become so demanding that the future has come to seem like a luxury.
There are legitimate reasons for this inability to look ahead. We live surrounded by crises that demand immediate attention: wars, inflation, housing, precariousness, climate change, democratic erosion. For many people, thinking about the next month is already an exercise in optimism. The greater the inequality, the shorter the future becomes. Those focused on surviving can hardly imagine it.
But there is also a set of forces that deliberately keep us trapped in the present.
Misinformation forces us to expend energy debating basic facts, preventing us from finding collective answers. While we debate whether the problem exists, we postpone the discussion on how to solve it.
Capitalism has convinced us that happiness is an individual exercise, measured by the ability to consume, produce, and accumulate. Instead of imagining happier societies, we seek apps, products, and experiences that make us feel better for a few minutes.
Inequality prevents us from thinking about common development because it separates people into those who can plan for the future and those who live permanently in a state of emergency.
Promoting competition teaches us to see others as adversaries. From school to work, we are encouraged to surpass, distinguish, and win, as if one person's success necessarily depended on another's defeat.
And polarization has turned compromise into weakness and doubt into betrayal. Democratic solutions, which require time, negotiation, and trust, seem too slow for a society addicted to immediate answers.
We are therefore very busy. But the future has not been put on hold while we try to solve the present. It continues to be built, just without the participation of most of us.
And this is where technology comes in. Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and new automation systems are not just tools that will make some tasks faster. They will structurally alter work, education, politics, and the distribution of power. Despite this, public conversation remains focused on the most superficial functionalities: whether a machine can write a text, create an image, answer a question, or replace an administrative task. These are relevant questions, of course. But there are others that are far more important.
What will happen when a substantial portion of work can be automated? Will the wealth generated allow for reduced working hours and improved lives for everyone, or will it remain concentrated in the hands of the organizations that control the technology? Will we work less, or simply live in greater fear of becoming obsolete?
What kind of school will make sense when access to information ceases to be the main problem? Will we continue to assess the ability to memorize answers, or will we begin to value critical thinking, creativity, cooperation, and the ability to ask questions?
How will democracy function when it becomes possible to produce thousands of personalized political messages, fabricate credible events, and anticipate individual behavior? Who will have more power: elected governments or the companies that control the data, algorithms, and infrastructure?
And what place will we reserve for activities that we don't want to make more productive, but more human? Caregiving, art, education, research, conversation, time spent with other people?
Perhaps the most frightening thing is not the possibility of machines starting to think. It's the possibility of us ceasing to do so.
To say that we have no idea what society will be like in fifteen years might be an honest statement. No generation has been able to fully predict its future. But not thinking about it is a political choice. Thinking about the future doesn't mean guessing what will happen. It means discussing what we want to happen, understanding what we want to avoid, and making decisions in the present that increase the chances of reaching some collectively chosen destination.
We need to start thinking about the near future again. Not the year 2100, so distant that it allows for all sorts of empty promises, but the next ten or fifteen years. A horizon long enough to transform society and short enough for us to still live within it.
If we don't fill this space with imagination, debate, and democratic decisions, someone else will do it for us. In fact, they already are. The future hasn't ceased to exist. It's simply being decided while the present keeps us occupied.
