The Future We Are Capable of Inventing

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The Worldview Behind the Future May Matter More Than the Technologies We Fill It With

A year ago, I thought Imagine Next would already be in print. The manuscript is finished. But I have stopped naming a publication date. This work has taught me that better tools do not make the challenge I set for myself any easier. I spent much of 2026 once again immersed in the very nature of invention. I don't consider recombining existing things within familiar frames to be true novelty. That is precisely what AI tools have learned to do well in the years since I began my personal challenge of creating one concept a day. I started with a one-pager for a startup idea, and kept diving deeper into the question of what should actually count as new.

One Saturday morning, an image of the future appeared in my feed: blue light, a robotic arm, the familiar visual vocabulary of new technology. It brought me back to a question that had been ripening for months: what stays out of the frame when we imagine the future? I opened the notes app on my phone, and instead of a short post, this essay emerged.

Picture San Pablo Avenue in Albany, a small city next to Berkeley. Locals know it, among other things, for the homeless encampment stretching along the street: tents, shopping carts, people living right there in public space. Just steps away stand buildings, many of them empty. How can one street hold both realities at once? People sleep outside while empty spaces sit next door, and everyone walks past as if this is simply how a street should look. When exactly did we agree to this?

Now imagine this street in 2036. If we change nothing deliberately, and neither imagine nor build a different future, things will most likely get worse. An honest extrapolation of San Pablo Avenue means more tents. It may also mean more people displaced by economic shifts, including those driven by the rapid rise of AI. Futurists almost never depict this consequence. Job loss can't compete with the aesthetics of the robotic arm, and it rarely makes it into the frame.

Now add a robot to this street. It walks along the sidewalk and doesn't merely ignore the people in the tents. It might step over a tent and keep going. It might even step on a person along the way. Why is this not so unlikely? Because in public discourse, tech gurus and futurists keep telling us that AI is better than humans and can replace them at almost everything. We are already seeing many results of putting this vision into practice. Yet we remain blind to the layers of assumptions it is built on.

Our imagination is made of what we have already seen: existing technologies, stories, economic systems, cultural beliefs about whose lives deserve the attention of inventors. We carry all of this with us unconsciously. That is why most of what gets called "imagining the future" is really the present extended forward, made of better materials and assembled from new combinations of what already exists. We need to do the mental work deliberately. That means uncovering the assumptions beneath our forecasts, breaking them, and constructing new ones. It means imagining and daydreaming about how things could be different. We need to design the world of 2036 and beyond around what matters to have in it and which values we put first. If we don't, we leave to chance the story of a robot that sees no value in a person living in a tent on a street in Albany.

In a world where 2036 is merely an extrapolation of today, there will be robots, armies of robots, and a surplus of goods and services presented as unimaginable abundance. The absence of work for most people will be presented as "wonders." In a world where people and life on the planet are valued, a new philosophy will emerge. It will bring a new vision of 2036, and with it a new design of systems, spaces, and cities. In that world, people, animals, and living ecosystems are valuable simply because they exist. They are not devalued for losing a contest of functionality in a market where none of them can match AI.

Today we can create an almost unlimited number of images and ideas of the future. But ask AI to generate a thousand cities of the future, and you'll get a thousand different pictures built on nearly identical assumptions. AI fundamentally changes the scale of what we can create. But it does not, on its own, change the frame we think within. And when the imagination of the person directing it is not trained well enough, scale only reproduces that frame faster, more beautifully, and more confidently.

This is the risk of approaches that model the future based on multiple most probable, median scenarios.

My understanding that the future can be designed rather than merely extrapolated grew out of my practice of invention. I began it more than three years ago as a challenge to myself, and it did not end with the first 365 ideas. This practice taught me to break frames of assumptions and build new ones. I also had to study what humanity had already invented in fields connected to my challenge, my work, and my life. It showed me more radical ways of moving beyond paradigms, and it keeps training my imagination and inventiveness. Beyond the present multiplied by science fiction and industrialism, 2036 still holds many possibilities and a great deal of open space.

So let's imagine San Pablo Avenue in 2036. Not the one that will happen by default, but the one we deliberately chose.

The formerly empty commercial spaces and warehouses have been converted into social housing. It is not "affordable" in the barest sense of the word, but genuinely beautiful, the kind of place people want to live in. Nearby are cozy cafés that double as spaces for making. People of all ages gather there, forming teams around shared interests. Some are building things and some are painting. Others are working on a model of a new ecosystem with floating houses and living walls. The street is lined with fruit trees, with flocks of birds, butterflies, and bees circling above them. These people have chosen real life. They buy from one another, teach one another, and spend time with one another.

I am not offering this picture as an "alternative scenario," one more option on a list of possibilities. It is only one step beyond extrapolation, and from there we can imagine further, more boldly, and differently. The point is which assumptions we build our reality on. The robot stepping over a tent and the street where people create together under fruit trees do not grow out of different technologies. They are just different answers to a single question: what is the value of a human being?

What could we imagine as a society if we directed even a tenth of the effort and resources we now spend teaching machines to imagine better toward people instead? What if we enshrined it in policy: people first? Not comparing them to AI. Simply because that is what we have chosen. And because we will never reduce the value of a human being to a comparison of how efficiently they perform functions.