We live in the interval between two eras: the analog age, which shaped human thought, and the digital age, which is redefining it. In this space of transition—where memory meets algorithms and the human voice blends with that of machines—History reminds us of the past, while the young point toward who we might become: our Future. And the Present? Today it is a non-place, scarcely worth inhabiting, burned by the expectations of an impending Tomorrow.
History is the great archive of human experience: not a mere sequence of dates and battles, but a network of causes, intuitions, and dreams. It proves that humanity has always sought meaning in its journey, even when direction seemed lost. Young people, by contrast, represent its constant rebirth: the vanishing point toward a future that no generation can control, yet all can inspire. As George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And yet, remembering is not enough: we must also know how to imagine. Memory is the root, but vision is the fruit.
For this reason, it is a privilege of my generation to still be able to help the next. It is a rare gift to look the future in the eyes through them—interpreting with them the signs of a past we have lived through and, at times, suffered—and to use that past as a key for understanding the future to come.
Every generation is a bridge: it builds with the stones it has received and leaves to those who follow the task of continuing the journey.
Our era is living through a silent yet total revolution: that of artificial intelligence. After the industrialization of the body and the globalization of markets, we have reached the automation of the mind. Algorithms learn, neural networks generate ideas, and machines encroach upon what was once the sacred territory of thought.
According to the Future of Jobs Report 2025 by the World Economic Forum, by 2030 nearly 40% of core human skills will have changed. So-called “hard skills”—calculation, technique, coding—are giving way to “soft skills”: empathy, creativity, intuition, ethics. The former build; the latter understand. And only understanding may still save us.
Humanoid robotics, despite absorbing a large share of public and private investment in recent years, has not yet proven victorious on this terrain. Personally, we hope that this gap will not be filled—at least for the time necessary for human beings to imagine (the most important soft skill of all) other irreplaceable competencies.
In a world where artificial intelligence writes texts, composes music, and generates images, human value no longer lies in production, but in interpretation. Machines may think, but they cannot feel. And what distinguishes human beings is not the speed at which they process information, but the depth with which they feel.
The risk is that when the young—who once made revolutions—no longer have a thought to refine or a synthesis to pursue, the real challenge will begin: remaining intellectually alive. In a future where neural networks think for us, thinking will become an act of courage—not against technology, but against the laziness of the soul. Creating and maintaining critical thought—not necessarily oppositional, but independent—will be the highest form of freedom.
Yet in the future that awaits us, something paradoxical will occur. Digital wallets will fill with funds—money paid for jobs we will no longer perform—and productivity will become increasingly detached from human labor.
Armies of robots will carry out all the work that today involves human beings, from personal care to the construction of cars (autonomous or even flying, of course), and to the building of infrastructure. In essence, what we have read and seen in the finest science fiction books and films of the past thirty years will have come true.
These robots will work and “live” in our world, and to do so they will consume energy. It is not far-fetched to imagine that they will be required to pay for this energy, effectively replicating a medieval system of serfdom—owners only of their own hardware (likely after having paid for it, and only so they can be charged for something they own). This raises another crucial issue.
We speak often of digital identity. In order to assign “duties” to an entity, we must name it, and likely grant it minimal rights.
From the iconic I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (1950), in which robots are imagined as entities without rights yet recognized as “living,” to the more recent Walkaway by Cory Doctorow (2017), where the author depicts a world in which robots claim ethical rights and moral equality, we see the arc of a trajectory in which robotics is destined to be a present, necessary, and—one might say—inevitable component of the world of the present and the future.
Those who truly work will once again become a minority—not because of wealth, but because of responsibility. They will be the true opinion leaders, those who shape the lives of people who simply enjoy the freedom to do (almost) whatever they wish—or so it will appear. Paraphrasing Marx, even freedom, when conditioned, can become the opium of an anesthetized people.
Work will thus return to being a privilege, and with it the distinction between those who shape reality and those who merely consume it. And in a world populated by happy but unaware consumers, the risk is the loss of democracy—the only imperfect system that, until now, has worked. History teaches us that every excess of control, even when born of the best intentions, inevitably generates new inequalities.
The greatest paradox of our time is that this acceleration toward digital dependence was not created, but amplified, by what was meant to liberate us: DeFi, blockchain, artificial intelligence. Technologies born—at least in part—to decentralize power now risk concentrating it in the hands of a few. According to McKinsey, 92% of global companies will increase investments in AI over the next three years, yet only 1% consider themselves “mature” in its use. Multinationals and major digital platforms have become the true engines of this revolution, no longer driven by a promise of freedom, but by the need for billions of stable, predictable, consuming users. The dream of “digital freedom” thus risks transforming into a new form of voluntary servitude.
Within this broader scenario, human robotics and cognitive artificial intelligence raise even deeper questions. The MIT AI Ethics Lab and the Stanford HAI Report 2024 emphasize that the real danger is not a rebellion of machines, but the surrender of humanity: the gradual abandonment of our capacity to discern, to wonder, to choose. When algorithms know our emotions better than we do, freedom will no longer be a conquest, but a calibrated illusion.
We do not yet have answers to these concerns, but we do know who must find them: the young. They are the ones who today show us the garden of the future, though they do not yet hold its keys. They will find them if they can unite knowledge with conscience, technology with sensitivity, reason with humanity. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and save it from ruin.”
History, in the end, is an act of love: a continuous dialogue between those who remember and those who dream. And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of our time—to look the future in the eyes, not to predict it, but to understand it. Because understanding, today more than ever, is the most authentic form of hope.
