The Shape of Tomorrow: Why No One Can Predict the Future—and Why That’s the Point
For as long as people have stood together and wondered about tomorrow, there’s been a fundamental mistake at the heart of our predictions. The mistake is not in dreaming, or even in planning. The mistake is believing that one person, or even one movement, can know the future’s texture—its colors, sounds, culture, its daily rituals and wild mutations. The honest reality is that no one can predict the future in its details. And not only is that unavoidable, it’s absolutely necessary.
Consider Karl Marx. What Marx gave the world was not a field guide to the politics of the twentieth century, or a play-by-play of who would hold power in what year, or what city would spark revolution. What he actually saw, and what set his work apart, was the underlying logic of capitalism itself. Marx understood that so long as value could be extracted and accumulated, as long as labor could be alienated and capital could concentrate, the system would drive itself toward a crisis—one of inequality, exploitation, and rupture. He did not predict the faces of the future, or the slogans, or the mechanisms of resistance. He traced the pressure points, the bones beneath the flesh, the trajectory of a world that could not continue unchanged.
Fast forward a century and a half to Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s legacy isn’t that he could list the names of every company that would define the twenty-first century, or the release dates of every major technological breakthrough. His contribution is something deeper and far more lasting. Kurzweil recognized the shape of technological progress—not a straight line, but a rising curve, exponential in nature, compounding on itself. He gave us the Singularity: the idea that at some point, progress accelerates so rapidly it redefines what it even means to make a prediction. Kurzweil never claimed to see the texture of the future. What he understood is that the rate of change would shatter any attempt to fully script what comes next. He mapped the bones, not the face.
And then there’s Jacque Fresco. I stand firmly and without apology on Fresco’s shoulders. The Venus Project remains the most coherent attempt to demonstrate, with blueprints and models, what a civilization could look like if we organized for abundance and not for control. But even Fresco, for all his brilliance, was only ever sketching the skeleton. He laid out the fundamental requirements: if you want a world where people flourish, you need to engineer out scarcity, design for stewardship, and make dignity the foundation. My own additions are not corrections, but updates—folding in new technology, and, more importantly, making explicit what Fresco hinted at: a world designed for abundance leads to more freedom, more diversity, more creativity, not less. My vision is detailed because the mechanics must be; it must be robust enough to withstand cynicism and the test of reality. But the real beauty is that the details are left for others. The flesh is for each person to fill in.
This is not a flaw. This is the point. To try and predict the future in granular detail is to step over a line and into the realm of control. To say, “I know what your world will look like, what art you’ll make, what dreams you’ll have, how you’ll spend your mornings and who you’ll love,” is not prophecy—it’s preemption. That’s not liberation, it’s enclosure. It’s the opposite of what we fight for. Every real advance, every authentic step toward freedom, begins by sketching the structure—the bones—and then stepping back. The future, if it is to be free, must always be unfinished. The point is not to script the play, but to build the stage and leave the lights on for others.
It’s important to be honest about the difference between shaping possibility and suffocating it. Marx, Kurzweil, and Fresco each saw the broad structure. They each glimpsed the gravitational pulls, the deep logics. Maybe they understood this limitation explicitly, maybe not, but reality does not bend to the vanity of full control. What we inherit from them is a set of principles: understand the dynamics, respect the limits of your own perspective, and never mistake the bones for the life that will animate them.
When I lay out my vision—whether it’s a world after the withering of the state, or a city engineered for self-actualization and abundance—I am only describing the structure. The point is not to fill in the rest. I can show you how such a world is possible, how the laws of science, engineering and the lessons of philosophy make it achievable, how the incentives align for more freedom, more variety, more room for contradiction and flourishing. But the moment I try to pin down every variable, I would be killing what makes such a world worth building. The details—the art, the love, the ordinary weirdness of daily life—are not for me to dictate. They are for the people of the future to live.
If my vision feels concrete, it’s because freedom demands a foundation strong enough to resist collapse or capture. The bones must be solid, or nothing new can grow. But the real measure of progress is in how much remains open: how much space is left for unanticipated lives, for untamed possibility, for difference that could never be engineered from above.
When you see the shape of my vision, remember that the bones are all I will ever claim. The rest is yours. That is the heart of the philosophy. That is why the future, if it is to be free, must never be fully known in advance.