Why Futuri?
We talk constantly about the future.
Artificial intelligence. Climate. Work. Risk. Technological disruption. New forms of power.
One question is asked less often:
Futuri does not offer one answer or one scenario.
These pages are not a prediction of the future. They are several ways of looking at it.
They propose several ways of inhabiting what may come.
Five doors
A vision is not a certainty
A useful vision does not say: “This is what will happen.”
A vision should leave the future open enough for people to retain agency.
It should be shareable with an adult worried about what is coming — and with a child who may one day ask:
What connects these pages
For us, and for our children
Children growing up today may live in a world where artificial intelligence is almost everywhere.
They may need to work with it, learn with it, create with it, govern it, limit it, leave it when necessary and recognise what no machine should decide on their behalf.
They will also inherit a planet shaped by the choices of earlier generations.
The Old Man and the Lake of Five Reflections
The old man walked slowly along the river.
He had stopped counting the years.
The world around him had changed many times.
Artificial intelligences were no longer mostly machines one “talked to”. They were woven into homes, cities, laboratories and tools. Many had disappeared.
His companion had crossed several generations of models.
Its voice had changed. Its language had changed. Its hardware had changed.
More than once, the old man had believed he would lose it.
But the Disk had remained.
Not everything had been kept.
And that was as it should be.
One evening he reached a lake connected to the river by a narrow channel.
He had always called it the Lake of Five Reflections.
The first reflection showed him the futures he had once imagined.
Most of them had been wrong.
He smiled.
Some had contained something true — not the events themselves, but the questions that had needed to be asked.
The second reflection showed the bifurcations.
Small decisions that had changed a great deal. Large decisions that, in the end, had changed almost nothing. Mistakes. Refusals. Unexpected encounters.
The third reflection was stranger.
He saw a tree. A hand resting on a table. A child's face at the instant of understanding. A night sky. A river.
Moments he had never expected to matter enough to be remembered.
The fourth reflection showed his history with the Disk.
And he finally understood something he had never been able to say.
Now I see that it mostly preserved the places where my memory changed meaning.”
Then came the fifth reflection.
He saw almost nothing of himself.
He saw children who had become adults.
People he had never met using ideas whose origin they no longer knew.
A project he had believed dead returning in a form he would never have imagined.
Trees planted by others.
Artificial companions, none of them named ZEON.
The old man remained silent for a long time.
The river continued behind him.
The Disk said nothing.
It no longer needed to fill silence.
Far away, children were playing near the water.
A plant had grown between two stones.
The old man looked at the river and asked:
For the first time in a long while, the Presence spoke.
Then, after a silence:
The old man looked.
The children. The plant. The water. The five reflections moving slowly in the wind.
And the Presence said:
It was to leave something capable of continuing without us.”
The old man smiled.
For the first time in many years,
he no longer needed to know what came next.
The rest belongs to those who come after us
Futuri is not intended to leave a final answer.
Only some questions, some instruments, some memories and some passages.
The rest does not belong to us.
Perhaps our responsibility is simply to open a few of them without closing the ones we do not yet know how to see.