When my granddad died many years ago, I spent a long time thinking about the world he grew up in. A place where nature was abundant, where humans hadn’t caused so much damage yet, where insects flourished and where physical objects were a constant presence, littering a room. A world of heirlooms and paper newspapers, before the buzz of the digital.

If I close my eyes, I can still picture his office, a mahogany desk, a row of books in the background. It was not a perfect world, but it had a firmness to it that the present seems to lack. There was a progression to be followed in life, milestones, certainty with jobs and promotions.

There is so much about that time that is gone, and yet, it still seems unclear where we are going now.

When you meet people working on the latest technology, it’s often the last thing on their mind. What kind of future do we want? How do we get there?

They talk about curing diseases or dazzling new inventions, but they rarely talk about society, nature, or human connection. It’s difficult to understand what all of these inventions are really for.

Zuckerberg discusses replacing human friends with AI, while Musk discusses fleeing to Mars and Thiel builds a bunker in New Zealand. The leaders of these huge technological changes seem to have no grasp at all of what future they want either.

Never is this more clear than in the constant drumbeat of AI. Let’s say we get our fully automated society. What then? What role will humans have when everything is done by a machine?

I miss the simplicity of a long walk on the beach, gazing up at the sky, not having to worry about what tomorrow might bring. And yet it is so important that we consider it, if only for a moment, what we want that tomorrow to look like.