Retro poster illustration of a printing press, globe, light bulb, rotary telephone, vintage computer, microchip and robotic arm on a wooden desk, with a propeller plane, a rocket launch and a city skyline under orange and blue sunburst rays.

We stand on the shoulders of the future

Oct 24, 2026

The future is not coming. It arrived while most people were looking the other way. Tools that would have looked like magic five years ago now sit in the pocket of every teenager with a phone. A sixteen year old in a small town can research, design, code, and ship something that once required a lab, a team, and a decade of credentials.

And yet the mood of the moment is not wonder. It is worry. We have more power to build than any generation in history and less encouragement to use it. That is the real problem in front of us. We are not short on talent, and we are not short on tools. We are short on belief, and above all on people willing to tell the young that what they imagine is worth attempting.

Consider where we send our most ambitious young people. For a century the path was simple: get into a great school, learn from great minds, go build. Today a degree costs more than a house in much of the country. Our brightest graduates leave campus carrying debt instead of ideas, and they spend their most daring years paying it down instead of building the future. Meanwhile, almost anything a lecture hall can teach, a curious student can now learn faster, cheaper, and on demand with AI.

The problem is not only price. It is standards. When the president of Harvard faced credible charges of plagiarism, the offense that gets undergraduates expelled, she was allowed to step down from the presidency and keep her seat on the faculty. A truly elite institution would hold its leaders to a higher standard than its students, not a lower one.

Tenure was designed to protect the daring professor, the one willing to say the unpopular true thing. Too often it now protects the cautious one. Students cannot learn courage from people who are afraid, and when the adults in the room are afraid, the young learn to mistake caution for wisdom.

It is not wisdom. Every generation is shaped by the world it was born into. Many who grew up before this moment see new technology as a threat to be managed. Those growing up inside it see raw material. They have no habits to unlearn and no status quo to defend. They simply see what is possible. Steve Jobs told Stanford's class of 2005, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life." He called it life's agent of change, the force that clears away the old so the new has room. We may one day solve death. But we should not wait for the old to leave the room before we listen to the young. We need their vision now, and they need to hear that we want it.

Fear of the new is nothing new. The printing press was going to spread chaos. Electricity was going to burn down our cities. The automobile, the telephone, the internet: each arrived to a chorus of warnings. Each brought real problems, and each created new work, new industries, and new lives that no one at the time could picture. Concern about AI is fair. But this revolution is no different in kind. We cannot yet see the problems the future will need solved, which is exactly why we need more young people trained, and encouraged, to go looking for them.

Newton wrote that if he had seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. Every builder since has done the same. The giants of this era may not all be human. AI is a new set of shoulders, and the young are the first generation able to climb them without hesitation.

Imagine what they could reach from up there. Education that rewards building over memorizing. Health care that is faster, cheaper, and more human. A deeper understanding of our own health, and perhaps longer, stronger lives because of it. Sports reinvented for how people now play, train, and watch. Work that rewards innovation, creativity, and judgement over repetition. And maybe the hardest question of all: how to find purpose and meaning in a world where machines can do more and more. None of these fields is finished. Each one is waiting for someone young enough not to know it cannot be changed.

That someone could come from anywhere. Some cities, like Austin, have thrown open their doors to builders, and that is a start, not a finish. Progress concentrated in a handful of zip codes is not progress for a country. Rural towns, small cities, and overlooked places need to embrace this future too, because the next great idea is as likely to come from a farm town as from a coastal campus. Encouragement cannot be a privilege of the lucky few.

The answer to all of this is simpler than it looks. Fear is contagious, but so is optimism. A young person who is told their idea is worth trying, and then given room to try it, will often surprise everyone, including themselves. We are standing at the tipping point of the most important technological shift in generations, and somewhere along the way we lost our optimism. It is time to take it back. Whether or not one likes the shape of the future, it is here, and it is far better to lean in than to stand still.

Crecision exists to find those who already see it, and to give the permission to build.

The future is here. Let's go build it.