Imagining another future

I was at a birthday party this weekend with a group of old friends.  Many of us first met years ago at the school gate. We were young parents then, trying to make sense of children, careers and mortgages. Now those children are adults and we are talking about our grandchildren.

The conversation turned to their future.  Climate change. War. Artificial intelligence. Political instability. Jobs disappearing. Social media. A world changing faster than any of us can understand.  How, people asked, will our grandchildren cope with such a dangerous and impossible future?

I found myself the outlier in the conversation.  I do not believe that our grandchildren are uniquely ill equipped for the world ahead. I believe they will be as capable of living in their world as every previous generation has been of living in its own.

It is their world, not ours.  They will grow up in it. They will understand it in ways that we cannot. They will develop the skills, instincts and assumptions needed to navigate it.  Why do we find that so difficult to believe?

We imagine their future through our own eyes

When we picture the future, we imagine ourselves being transported into it.  We see unfamiliar technology, changing social norms, different patterns of work and threats we do not know how to manage. We quite reasonably conclude that we would find it difficult.

Then we assume our grandchildren will feel the same.  But they will not arrive in the future as visitors from 2026. They will grow into it.

A child growing up with AI will not experience it in the same way as someone who first encountered it in later life. They will learn its possibilities, its limitations and its dangers. They will make mistakes with it. They will develop rules and habits around it. Eventually, much of what currently seems extraordinary to us will seem ordinary to them.  That has happened before. Over and over again.

My generation grew up in a world shaped by war, rationing and the threat of nuclear destruction. We lived through enormous changes in the position of women, the decline of deference, globalisation, the arrival of computers and the birth of the internet.  Previous generations faced industrialisation, mass migration, epidemics, economic depression and world wars.

None of them knew in advance how to deal with what was coming.  We learnt, they learnt.  Why do we assume that the generations following us will be less capable?

Fear is not the same as foresight

Our fears for our grandchildren come from love. But love does not necessarily make us accurate forecasters.  Human beings naturally give more weight to threats than opportunities. A dangerous possibility captures our attention more powerfully than gradual progress. Bad news feels urgent. Improvement is often quiet.  We also mistake uncertainty for inevitable disaster.

AI will change work, but that does not tell us exactly what work will become. Climate change will create serious disruption, but it does not mean that every attempt at adaptation will fail. Political institutions are under pressure, but human beings have rebuilt institutions before.None of this is an argument for complacency.  The threats are real. Climate change is real. War is real. AI will remove some jobs and profoundly alter others. There will be disruption, unfairness and mistakes.

But a difficult future is not the same as an impossible one.  Nor is our inability to see the answers evidence that there are no answers.

Every generation develops for the world it enters

Children do not simply inherit a world. They develop in response to it. The skills rewarded by their environment shape how they think and behave. They learn from one another. They create new conventions. They abandon assumptions that no longer make sense.  This can be unsettling for older generations because adaptation does not always look like progress to us.

Young people may communicate differently, organise their lives differently and expect different things from work. We may interpret this as weakness, distraction or a lack of commitment.  But what if some of it is adaptation?  What if the behaviours we criticise are early attempts to live in a world whose institutions, careers and technologies will be very different from ours? Not every adaptation will be successful. Every generation takes wrong turns. But young people do not need to preserve our way of living in order to build a viable one of their own.

We are not required to predict their world

Perhaps part of the anxiety comes from believing that we ought to know what to tell them.  For most of human history, age brought knowledge of a world that changed relatively slowly. The experience of older people provided a useful guide to what younger people would face.  That relationship is becoming less straightforward.

We can still offer judgement, perspective and an understanding of human behaviour. Those things remain valuable because technology changes faster than human nature.  But we cannot give our grandchildren a reliable map of their future. We do not know what their working lives   will look like, which skills will matter or how their societies will organise themselves.

That does not make us useless. It simply means our role is different.   Perhaps we should spend less time giving them answers and more time helping them become capable of finding answers for themselves.  Can they think critically? Can they distinguish evidence from assertion? Can they build relationships? Can they recover from failure? Can they change their minds? Can they use technology without surrendering their judgement to it?  Those capabilities will matter in almost any future.

Optimism does not remove responsibility

There is, however, a danger in saying that young people will simply cope.  It can become an excuse for leaving them problems that we are unwilling to solve.  They will adapt to climate change, but that does not release us from reducing the damage. They will learn to live with AI, but that does not remove our responsibility to govern how it is developed and used. They will create new institutions, but we should not casually destroy the ones that still protect them.

Believing in their ability is not the same as transferring all responsibility to them.  We owe them serious work on the problems we can influence now.  What we do not owe them is our despair.

Their world will feel normal to them

Our grandchildren will face problems we did not face. They will also have capabilities we never possessed.  They will have access to knowledge, medicine, communication and technology beyond anything previous generations could imagine. They will use these tools well and badly, just as humans always have.Their lives will not look like ours.

Why should they?

The future always looks dangerous when viewed from the past. We see what will be lost more clearly than we see what will be created.  Our grandchildren may one day sit at a birthday party worrying about the impossible world facing their grandchildren.

Perhaps they too will forget that every generation grows into its own future.  It is not our task to pretend that the future will be easy.  It is our task to help the next generation become thoughtful, adaptable and resilient, then trust them to build a world in which they can live.