On Inevitability

I keep getting asked the same question after keynotes at the moment. Some version of: Is it inevitable? Has the ship sailed? Is this just what’s coming, whether we like it or not?

It’s a fair question. Honestly, it’s the question. Because when you look at the speed of what’s unfolding, the scale of investment, the certainty with which the architects of this future speak about it - it can feel like the rest of us are just passengers. That the trajectory has already been set by people with more money and more power than we’ll ever have, and our job is simply to adapt. To get on board or get out of the way.

But I don’t think that’s true. I keep saying no, it’s not inevitable. And I wanted to sit with why I believe that, even when the momentum feels so overwhelming.

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When people talk about AI as inevitable, what they’re really saying is: stop asking questions. Get in line. The future has been decided by people smarter and richer than you, and your role now is to make peace with it. There’s something almost religious about the way it gets delivered. Like we’re being asked to accept a prophecy. To submit.

But it’s not prophecy. It’s not physics. It’s not gravity. It’s a series of choices, being made right now, by specific people, for specific reasons. And when you actually look at who’s making those choices - when you listen closely to what the architects of this “inevitable” future are describing - it’s not a vision I want any part of.

Surveillance as the default. Prediction as a form of control. Recording everything civilians do, which hands those in power the tools to crush protest before it starts, to criminalise dissent preemptively, to hollow out whatever remains of democratic participation. This is Minority Report sold back to us as progress. And the men driving it - Karp, Musk, Thiel, Ellison - they scare the shit out of me. I don’t think that’s hysterical. I think that’s paying attention.

But what I keep coming back to is this: they’re not inevitable. They’re just very good at making you believe they are.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why it’s so hard to imagine alternatives. Why, even when we can see the dangers clearly, we struggle to picture a different path.

I think we’re living through a crisis of imagination. And I don’t mean that in a soft, whimsical way. I mean it as a diagnosis. We’ve spent so long inside a particular story - Western civilisation’s narrative of progress, of technology as salvation, of individualism and meritocracy and capitalism as natural law - that we’ve mistaken one narrow lane for the entire road. We’ve forgotten that these are stories. Powerful ones, yes. Stories that have shaped everything. But stories nonetheless. Invented. Contingent. Not the only way things could have gone. Not the only way they can go.

Mark Fisher wrote that it’s easier for people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I think about that line all the time. That we can conjure apocalypse in exquisite detail - we have whole genres dedicated to it - but we cannot seem to picture a genuinely different way of organising ourselves. A different set of values at the centre. A different relationship between humans and technology and land and each other.

That’s not a failure of intelligence. It’s a poverty of imagination. And it’s one we’ve been trained into, slowly, over decades. Through the stories we’ve consumed, the systems we’ve participated in, the sheer repetition of being told this is just how things are.

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But when you step outside that lane, when you actively go looking, you find that other imaginations have always existed.

Afrofuturism. Indigenous futurism. Polyfuturism in all its forms. These aren’t escapist fantasies or anthropological curiosities to be studied from a distance. They’re living proof that different relationships to technology, to time, to knowledge, to land, to community - these have always been possible. Have always been practiced. Have always offered something the Western narrative has consistently failed to provide: a vision of the future that isn’t just more extraction in shinier packaging.

The Western frame was never the only frame. Its dominance is historical accident. And the more I learn about these alternative pathways, the more I realise how impoverished my own imagination had become. How trapped I was in a lane I didn’t even know I was in.

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And it’s not just philosophy. It’s not just theory. There are concrete alternatives being built right now.

In Switzerland, a coalition of public institutions - EPFL, ETH Zurich, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre - has just released an AI model called Apertus. The name is Latin for “open,” and they mean it. Every part of the design and training process is publicly accessible: the architecture, the training data, the documentation, all of it. It was built on data in over a thousand languages, including Swiss German and Romansh, languages that typically get left out entirely. And the whole thing was designed to comply with Swiss data protection laws and the EU AI Act from the ground up.

What strikes me most is the framing. They’re calling it “public AI” - AI built by public institutions, for the public good. One of the leads described it as public infrastructure, like highways or electricity. Not a product to be sold. Not a tool for surveillance or extraction. Just... infrastructure. For everyone.

And then there’s Te Hiku Media, a Māori broadcasting organisation in New Zealand. They’ve built their own speech recognition AI to help preserve and revitalise te reo Māori - an indigenous language that, like so many others, is at risk of disappearing.

They built this technology on their own terms. They created something called the Kaitiakitanga license, which ensures the data can only be used for the benefit of the Māori people. They ran a community crowdsourcing campaign to collect speech samples - over 300 hours of labelled data in just ten days - and used it to train models that now transcribe te reo with 92% accuracy.

They’re calling it trustworthy AI. And the work is already inspiring similar projects among Native Hawaiians and the Mohawk people in Canada.

“It’s indigenous-led work in trustworthy AI that’s inspiring other indigenous groups to think: ‘If they can do it, we can do it, too.’”

That’s what different looks like. Not hypothetical. Not someday. Now.

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I want to be clear about what I’m not arguing for here.

I’m not saying we should switch it off. I’m not romanticising the Luddites or pretending we can wind back the clock. The genie is out of the bottle. We’re not putting it back, and I’m not sure we should want to. AI is an insanely powerful technology. I’ve seen what it can do. I use it in my own work. And I genuinely believe it can be wielded toward good ends - helping us understand our environment in ways we’ve never been able to, reconnecting us to systems and knowledge we’ve severed ourselves from, amplifying forms of wisdom that have been systematically devalued and ignored.

Imagine AI that doesn’t just optimise for engagement or profit or productivity, but that helps us understand soil health, ecological balance, the intricate systems that sustain life on this planet. Imagine AI that amplifies indigenous knowledge rather than bulldozing it. Imagine AI that’s built to create abundance for many rather than untold riches and power for few.

These aren’t fantasies. They’re choices. Different choices than the ones currently being made, but entirely possible ones.

Because “the genie is out” doesn’t mean a handful of reckless, ego-drunk men get to decide what the genie does. The question was never technology or no technology. It was always: for whom, by whom, toward what ends. And that question is still live.

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I don’t have a formula for how we get there. I don’t have a definitive plan or a policy platform or a manifesto. I’m not pretending I’ve figured any of this out. I’m genuinely just trying to learn. Trying to widen my own sense of where this could take us.

So I’m choosing what I give my attention to. I’m reading about the history of capitalism- how recent it actually is, how invented, how broken. How many people seem to think it’s the natural order of things when really it’s just a few hundred years old and already falling apart at the seams. I’m learning about indigenous epistemologies, about ways of knowing that don’t start from a premise of domination and destruction. I’m looking for the people who are already building different paths, and I’m trying to let their work expand my sense of what we could be moving toward.

Not because I have a destination mapped out. But because I refuse to accept that the destination has already been chosen for me. By them. By anyone.

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That refusal is the point, really.

They want you to feel powerless. They want you to believe that the future is already written and your only option is to adapt to it. That feeling of what can I even do - that’s not an accident. It’s deliberate. Learned helplessness, manufactured at scale and sold back to us as this inevitable future.

I’m not buying it.

And I don’t think you have to either.