by Peter Topolewski
Happy New Year, and not soon enough. Out with the old. Good riddance, too. The laundry list of doom and gloom from 2025 looks long. If you shake out the cobwebs, and gaze back across December and the months prior, the list keeps unfurling. No let up, it seems. Time to forge ahead, buck up, steal yourself for good times. As tech commentator James Meigs recently put it, “…don’t listen to the naysayers. The future is coming and it’s going to be great.”
No denying that, the future is coming. It’s always coming.
Might need to squint a bit to get around his assumption that past science and tech advancements ensure future success, but we’re all team players here. Don’t dig too deep into the specifics of, say, how “AI will make our lives better and our economy massively more productive.” Makes holding the line tougher. What with the industry’s business model built on intellectual property theft. The absence of any foreseeable profits doesn’t help, nor does OpenAI’s plan to spend $150 billion over the next four years to get ChatGPT to answer our queries. That doesn’t include the cost of the building or improving our little AI friend, just the cost to operate it.
The finances might give the impression AI is a botched socialist pipedream, but it’s no such thing. Nor is it a horribly inefficient project run by inept government bureaucrats. AI is the domain of hard-hearted capitalists who know better than anyone how to create and capture value. Take their word for it. Ignore past promises about breakthroughs. Those were so 2025. Elon Musk, the brain behind the AI company creatively named xAI, has a new one for 2026: Grok, the company’s chatbot, has a 10% chance of reaching artificial general intelligence when it launches later this year.
What’s that mean?
It means don’t get bogged down in the details.
In the meantime, yes, AI data centers are sucking ah-shucks towns across America (and the globe) dry of power and water so users/bots can fill up YouTube with AI slop. And, yes, Mr. Musk’s very own chatbot is churning out nude photos of real women and children. But there are two sides to this coin, and when you’re a glass half full type, you see the upside: someone is getting what they want from Grok.
Silicon Valley understands. On the strength of this progress, xAI has raised another $20 billion already in 2026, more even than it was hoping for. Keep in mind, these are sophisticated investors! They know better than the rest of us.
If that doesn’t have you psyched for the future that is coming, maybe a glance back to 2025 will. No, it was not a good year for civilians caught in a rain of missiles, but in a Pinker-esque way, life in 2025 looked up on many fronts for people around the globe. Angus Hervey at Fix the News has a great summation of the real progress made below the buzz of media soundbites. For a taste, consider that in 2025:
- The ten-year trend of people getting first-time access to electricity and safe drinking water continued, bringing those totals over that period to 960 million and 290 million people, respectively
- 17 countries eliminated one or more diseases
- Over 10 million children received a malaria vaccine
- CO2 emissions from China—the country responsible for 90% of the world’s emission growth—were flat and possibly lower
These aren’t matches lit in the night, these are life-changing improvements that alter the trajectory of generations.
If there is a niggly feeling undermining your appreciation of these achievements, maybe it’s the sense that most of this good in the world happened in spite of those in charge. Yes, there was superpower China doing the command economy thing, electrifying everyday life and industry to the tune of 330 gigawatts of green energy. But as for the rest of the gains, if they appear a tad odd from here, the cusp of the future, it’s because pointy-headed technocrats in government and academia dreamed them up. It’s because NGOs and volunteers and dedicated healthcare workers and scientists implemented them.
Of course, all these people and the great things they accomplished warranted more of our attention. Too bad their depraved leaders pulled most eyeballs to themselves as they dragged their nations to a past only they pine for, a past that exists only in their warped minds. Too bad with the littlest of effort they’re doing their damnedest undo the good that’s been done.
Thus, we’re barely into 2026 and it reeks of disrespect for the U.N. Charter signed in 1945. It stinks of the rubble of checks and balances. It’s putrid with death, of thousands denied, on a whim, life-saving vaccines and medications. It molders with record subsidies for oil companies and disdain for clean-tech innovation. It is fetid with ignorance and the disavowal of science.
If it were merely a thought experiment, we could chuckle at the idea of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev getting together today and discussing how, in the coda to the Cold War, we ended up with two Russias. Both with maniacal drivers guiding their nations along a road to a long lost and fantastical history, certain, if they succeed, to put all the rest of us on the verge of chaos. Or worse.
The holidays are over, the kids are back in class. In Greenland, Denmark, Cuba, Colombia, Poland, Panama, Canada, are we teaching them critical thinking or should we be preparing them for war?
Perhaps the answer lies in another question.
Why are the tech oligarchs like Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg, the tech can-do-no-wrong guys like Diamandis—the guys pushing for eternal life on Mars and spouting the infinite promise of science and tech and especially AI—why are they continually bolstering and suck holing to people hellbent on sabotaging all those things? How does the proposed gutting of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation align with their hopes and ideas?
Jamelle Bouie pointed out way back in May, “Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years.”
So why endorse this move back to the Dark Ages?
Greed is an easy explanation. But the truer one might be that they’re among the few who have imagined their utopia.
Xi Jinping has surely joined them in this act of imagination. Can’t you picture him falling asleep to visions of a new planet-spanning dynasty?
The leaders of the two Russias, too, but they stay up all hours, frantic with schemes to preserve their legacies in tacky gold leaf.
And their political and financial enablers have a vision, too, of granting their “own kind” the right to pursue happiness inside the walls of a morally bankrupt castle, sealed off from a world they were happy to collapse.
For all their differences, these dreamers share one cause that Bouie pinned on his own government: “a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress.”
Strange but deserved bedfellows.
For the rest of us in civil societies, we have a mainly tacit understanding that’s been good enough to get us by. We look after each other. Through friendships and familial ties, through vast systems of laws and norms that outlast our own lives, we look after each other. We discover, by visiting other places and welcoming other people into our spheres and into our cultures, that we can form bonds with those from far away. And then we, too, look after each other. That alone keeps us busy enough. Not much time to conjure what a utopia atop this foundation might look like.
A new year has dawned. At last, the time has come to imagine the world we want.
You wouldn’t know it from how some of us treat others, but even with our number in the billions we are a rare and precious thing. So, here’s a prompt to get those imaginations going: maybe utopia is a place where murder is never considered a solution.
We’re a long way from such a world, but closer than we’ve ever been.
For now.
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