Editorial
REWRITING THE INEVITABLE
By David Ebenbach
AI is inevitable; there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Or so, at least, we’ve been told.
In fact, if the proponents of AI are to be believed, it’s not even a matter of an inevitable future so much as an already-established present. The phrase “AI Is Here” has shown up in headlines in the Wall Street Journal (Noonan, 2025), Forbes (Harmon, 2026), and World Economic Forum (MacDonald & Madzou, 2020), as well as at various institutions of higher education (cf. Central Michigan University, 2026; Pace University, n.d., Goddard, 2018). Headlines at PR Daily (2026), The Hill (Tsipursky, 2026), and others have taken it further: “AI Is Here to Stay.” Similarly, in a 2025 New York Times piece, David Brooks wrote, “A.I. isn’t going anywhere.” Two years earlier, Wharton professor Kartik Hosanagar had already said that “the only thing you can do—and you have to do—is get to the station, board the train, and be part of the process of shaping where it goes” (Basiouny, 2023).
And yet, as writer L.M. Sacasas reminds us (2025), this vision of inevitability isn’t reality; it’s just a vision. More to the point, it’s manufactured very intentionally. In his piece, he quotes business thinker Margaret Heffernan as saying, “Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.” Or, in the words of tech journalist Rachel Auslander, “the pronouncements that have been made about generative AI and work can be better understood as marketing tactics to create hype, gain new users, and ultimately deskill jobs as a result” (2025). All of which is to say that claims about inevitability serve more than one function, depending on the agenda of the person using them: for some, they are a simple attempt to describe what they believe might be reality; for others (particularly those who are financially invested in the success of AI), they are an attempt to create a reality. Those people tell us that there’s nothing we can do about AI not because that’s true but because they desperately want to convince us that we have to take the path of embracing AI. They are actively trying to engage in self-fulfilling prophesy.
But this path is not inevitable. In fact, it’s just one version of the present and future. And if the tech sector’s vision of the world isn’t fated but manufactured—historian Mar Hicks goes so far as to call it “a fantasy” (Auslander, 2025)—we can take it apart and tear it down. More importantly, we can create a better alternative. As Hicks says, “History doesn’t just happen. People, organizations, and institutions make it happen. There’s always time to change things.”
To do so, however, we have to stop listening to other folks’ stories about the present and future and start imagining, sharing, and living out our own. In the words of scholar Caitlin Gunn, “If we reject rhetoric delineating what we can or should have, we can begin to conceptualize the radical futures we desire” (2019). Indeed, everything depends on that fresh conceptualization, that envisioning. As journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis put it, “The stories that we tell about ourselves and our place in the world are the raw materials from which we build our existence” (2020). Commenting on our cultural fixation on dystopian narratives these days, she adds, “We need different stories.” Our job as AI resisters, then, is to envision and describe a future we’d actually want to live in, so that we can make it happen. We need to become bold storytellers.
Rewriting the Story
What does it take to change the story of our future?
Well, per Gunn (2019), the first thing we need to do is to reject the rhetoric about AI that we’ve been handed. Among other things, we need to throw light on the fact that many of the tech sector’s biggest claims about the power of AI are looking like busts. For example, there’s little reason to expect that AI is really going to give us a bunch of new free time or make us more productive (Ebenbach, 2026). But we also need to note that many of the claims are actually undesirable; that is, if they somehow do workout, it’ll be bad news. For example, who’s really rooting for the possibility that AI will replace our teachers, our artists, our doctors, our clergy, or our therapists? In other words, we can shake the AI-future narrative in part by loudly pointing out the ways in which that future won’t play out as expected, and also the ways in which it shouldn’t.
Rejection also comes from talking about the parts of the narrative that the tech sector leaves out. Rather than accepting tech companies’ focus on productivity, we can shift attention to the environmental costs, the mental health threats, the privacy risks, the cognitive harms, the dangerous military applications, and, well, the list goes on (Ebenbach, 2025).
With that vision deconstructed, “we can,” as Gunn (2019) suggests, “begin to conceptualize the radical futures we desire.” So: what future would we actually want to live into? What would technology look like in that scenario? How would people relate to one another? What structures would govern society? What would get valued, and how?
The possibilities are endless. And it’s important to point out that endlessness, because when AI advocates aren’t trying to force a single vision of the future on us, they instead usually try to jam us into a false binary that isn’t any more helpful. Take video game designer and director Hideo Kojima. “I think there isn’t any point in saying ‘We shouldn’t use AI’ or ‘AI is useless.’ We can’t go back,” he argued in 2025. This might sound reasonable at first—it’s true that we don’t know how to travel back in time—until you realize the limitations of this view: he’s sketching a picture of a world with only two options: the realistic one where we embrace AI, and the unrealistic one where we try to go back (Makuch). But who decided that those were the sum total of our choices? That binary isn’t inevitable, either. We don’t have to choose between an AI future and the past; we can, and need to, do much better than both.
If we open ourselves to more possibilities, what forms could our visions take? Luckily, there are already plenty of models out there to work from. Classic fiction such as Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Aldous Huxley’s Island, and of course Thomas More’s Utopia lay out imagined ideal, collective societies that meet all of the community’s needs, cherish the diversity of people’s individual gifts, and work consistently toward the public good. Naturally, you won’t find AI in any of them.
The more recent catalog of Afrofuturist fiction, meanwhile, is large and growing. In this approach, exemplified by authors like N. K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, Rivers Solomon, and Nnedi Okorafor, the future is imagined through an African cultural lens, sometimes detailing idyllic societies rooted in African traditions and philosophies. Similarly, as Kendra Pierre-Louis points out (2020), Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther offers a Wakanda built entirely on environmentally sustainable principles (2018).
And this is just a thin slice of what’s already out there. The fact that I’m citing fiction rather than, say, philosophical treatises (although some of the above would count as both) is probably mainly a sign of my biases as a creative writer myself. But we can turn to many different kinds of models, whether artistic, academic, mythological, ancestral, or communal. We also probably need brand new ideas—lots and lots of new ideas. What matters to us? What’s going to work for the next generation and beyond?
Our answers, too, will probably find expression in a variety of ways. Some of us will articulate them casually, in conversations with one another or in social media posts. Others will paint the future or write it into songs and novels. Still others will find their voices in podcasts or op-eds or policy briefs, or who knows what else? The point is to find spaces, wherever they are, where you can create and offer up what you’re imagining. If we all develop better stories, and if we all share them, and if we all listen to what others are sharing, we can build something deeply meaningful on that.
In the next section, I’ll share some of my own world-building priorities.
An Alternative Vision
What does better look like? Answering that question is going to take all of us, so this article can’t hope to nail it down all by itself. That said, I would like to suggest a few possible governing principles that would be worth considering as we design our future, all of which attempt to respond to some of the most problematic aspects of the AI-world vision:
Deliberation
Mark Zuckerberg is famous for, among other things, coining the slogan “move fast and break things” (Smith, 2025), and that idea is not totally without merit. After all, there are plenty of constricting assumptions, oppressive structures, and harmful practices that need to be broken if the world is going to become more just and sustainable. But the tech sector’s combination of speed and destruction has not reliably led to good outcomes; among other results, it has produced addictive social media and handheld devices that we can’t put down, as well as unregulated, harmful AI. A more livable future needs a better approach, one that keeps us entirely open to change (“breaking things”) where it’s needed, but that also restores an emphasis on “strategic planning and consideration of potential consequences” (Smith, 2025). Call it “Question everything and take thoughtful action,” maybe. But whatever you call it, the point is that there is value in caring deliberation—value that’s currently being cast aside. As a matter of fact, deliberation is likely to help us find what really does need changing, as well as the best way to make it happen.
Sustainability as a Non-Negotiable
As we think through the possible effects of our actions, we need to specifically give a much higher priority to sustainability—social, economic, and ecological—than the tech sector has so far. If we’re hoping to produce a society with longevity, it’s logically self-evident that sustainability has to be baked in.
Yet we know that isn’t how things work right now. Not only is AI technology already consuming massive amounts of natural resources, and not only is it set to demand more and more if we allow the tech to proliferate—it’s also aiding the spread of climate misinformation (Hertsgaard, 2026). Meanwhile, lots of experts are also worried about the economic sustainability of this model (Hsu, 2025). Endemic to the “move fast and break things” attitude is the assumption that it’s fine to take hugely disruptive action and just worry about consequences later: somehow we’ll keep this from destroying crucial social bonds; somehow we’ll make this financially viable; somehow we’ll figure out how to not destroy the world.
A wise civilization doesn’t just launch world-shaking technology on the assumption that we can safely consider sustainability afterward; a wise civilization first figures out whether the technology can be introduced and maintained in a sustainable way, and only allows it to go forward if the answer is yes.
Community-Driven Technology
Technology isn’t automatically bad, obviously. Technological advancements have extended our lives, reduced famine, allowed us to connect with one another even during a worldwide quarantine, and much more. We’re likely going to need some ongoing technological innovation to further fight disease, to help us reverse climate change, and so on. That said—and AI is just one of many examples—the innovation process is not inherently oriented toward the public good.
One of the myths about the most successful tech innovators (e.g., Steve Jobs) is that they essentially have psychic powers (cf. Harker, 2026). They figure out what we need before we know that we need it, which is (we’re told) what accounts for their success in going on to sell it to us. But I would argue that this is just another example of manufactured inevitability, and manufactured need. It’s not that we’ve been waiting all along for the new technology; it’s that savvy, relentless marketing has convinced us that we’ve been waiting for it, when perhaps we don’t need it at all. This, then, is the cart leading the horse.
So: if we want something better than the AI future and the past, technology needs to emerge not because we can be convinced to buy it but instead in direct response to the articulated needs of the communities that it’s going to enter.
A Focus on Human Need
An ideal society puts human need ahead of economic indicators like GDP and the Dow-Jones Average. This means, first of all, tending to the most fundamental essentials, like access to shelter, clean water and air, nutritious food, and so on. It means making sure people are safe from violence, exploitation, and ubiquitous surveillance, and that they are equitable participants in societies where they fully belong. The current Trump administration has deliberately attempted to disrupt the momentum of social justice movements, and we need to restore and redouble that momentum.
If technology has the potential to replace human labor, we should focus it on dangerous and/or meaningless work—meaningless as defined by the person doing it—and society should only unleash that technology if it can and will ensure the economic stability and wellbeing of the people displaced from those jobs.
Meanwhile, AI has been rushed in to fill crucial gaps in our systems of care—acting as companions for isolated people, serving as therapists or medical advisors for people who can’t afford the real thing. People using the technology this way doesn’t solve the problem so much as just underscore its seriousness. In many ways, AI makes the problems worse. We need to fill these gaps with human care. An ideal society would make care a core value. It would emphasize and support strong social networks and, again, tend to human essentials like mental and physical healthcare.
AI has also reminded many of us of the importance of human thought and creativity, just as we’re poised to potentially lose them. What the AI future offers is a humanity that hands off its most astonishing gifts to a machine, a humanity that gets steadily dumber, duller, and more economically stratified. A better future lifts up philosophy, ethics, spiritual meaning, the arts, and creativity more generally, and keeps all of it in human hands. Rather than working toward a statistical average of human possibility, we can work to bring out the individual perspectives, talents, and passions of every person, all channeled toward the common good.
Conclusion
Stories are curious things. On the one hand, they’re enormously powerful, shaping how we see the world of the present as well as driving what we desire and strive for. In that way they can constrain reality. On the other hand, stories are not actually reality, no matter how forcefully they’re shouted at us—and they can be replaced by even more powerful ones that genuinely clarify the present and set up futures worth pursuing. This truth matters because we’re living in a moment where the emergence of AI is accompanied, very intentionally, by a false narrative of inevitability.
Luckily, this narrative can be deconstructed, and there are good alternatives to an AI-driven vision of the future. Some of those alternatives have already been articulated, and many others are yet to emerge. There’s a critical opportunity here. Rather than leading us inexorably toward dystopia, AI can serve as the provocation that reminds us of our highest priorities and spurs us to design, and bring into being, a truly human story.
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