Pervasive anxiety about the future stems from its uncertainty. Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz reframes this uncertainty as good news. A future that isn't written is a future that can be influenced. This means we possess the agency to intervene and create a better world, an opportunity that a fully predictable future would eliminate.

The belief that technology is the only path to a better future reveals a deep pessimism about our ability to improve society through culture, laws, and institutions. This view ignores that most daily frustrations are social and political, not technological, and that technology is not the current bottleneck for human progress.

The fact that slavery abolition was a highly contingent event demonstrates that moral progress isn't automatic. This shouldn't be seen as depressing, but empowering. It proves that positive change is the direct result of deliberate human choices and collective action, not a passive trend. The world improves only because people actively work to make it better.

Cynicism is often mistaken for realism, but it's a paralyzing force that kills imagination and reinforces the status quo. Hope isn't naive optimism; it's a practical tool that allows individuals and teams to envision a better future and provides the energy to pursue it.

Utopian visions often lead to dystopia because we can't accurately define an ideal future. A better goal is "Viatopia"—a societal state that isn't the final destination but a stable waypoint from which we can safely navigate to a near-best future. It prioritizes a good decision-making process over a specific outcome.

The narrative around advanced AI is often simplified into a dramatic binary choice between utopia and dystopia. This framing, while compelling, is a rhetorical strategy to bypass complex discussions about regulation, societal integration, and the spectrum of potential outcomes between these extremes.

Instead of an authoritarian crackdown, a major future conflict could be a popular uprising against a ruling class that fails to deploy technology for the public good. As people realize a vastly better world (e.g., affordable housing, healthcare) is technologically feasible, they may revolt against the policy failures preventing it.

The tech industry often builds technologies first imagined in dystopian science fiction, inadvertently realizing their negative consequences. To build a better future, we need more utopian fiction that provides positive, ambitious blueprints for innovation, guiding progress toward desirable outcomes.

The most likely future is a "weird" state we can't easily classify as good or bad. Rather than comparing today to a hypothetical endpoint, we should focus on evaluating the desirability of the path, or trajectory, we are on.