Over the last decades, technological progress has accelerated in ways that would have seemed impossible not long ago. Intelligence is cheaper, tools are more powerful, and the barrier to building keeps falling. And yet, despite this abundance of capability, much of what gets built feels narrow in scope and shallow in ambition. We keep shipping products and optimizing user experiences, but struggle to articulate what future this acceleration is actually serving. The problem is not a lack of innovation, but a growing disconnect between technological progress and a shared sense of purpose.

Silicon Valley was built to impulse the West, and for a time, it worked. The prime years, particularly through the 1970s, were defined by a rare alignment between builders, governments, and society around a shared technological project. New generations inherited the infrastructure, but lost the project. Modern capitalism preserved the incentives while stripping them of purpose: Big tech benefited from this collective movement, yet today rarely recognizes it or contributes back to it.

As this shared direction faded, working on the hardest and most current problems became stigmatized. Defense, geopolitics, hunger, crime, disease: these grew controversial, unsexy, and increasingly avoided. Builders and engineers retreat to escape the messiness of geopolitics and responsibility. Inserted into a system shaped by investor expectations and modern capitalism, the pursuit of enrichment becomes privileged over advancing the world or keeping peace. This explains the steady flow of talent toward consumer-facing apps, even though our benchmark of innovation should be Apollo, not Facebook. Risk is not engaging with hard problems; Risk is running away from them.

This shift is reinforced by a broader mentality: indefinite optimism. We increasingly explain success as randomness (timing, luck, exposure) and when taken seriously, this belief stops people from fighting to master the world. Since the early 1980s, we have lived in a bullish world with no concrete plans, where big visions of the future became archaic curiosities.

Artificial intelligence makes the cost of this drift impossible to ignore. AI will drive the next major power shift in defense and geopolitics, and continued avoidance puts the way of life we practice at risk. Much of the hesitation, especially within the West and Europe, stems from the belief that this power war has already been won and that peace is guaranteed. Unlike the atomic revolution, this era of power will be built on software and AI: it will be less visible, but no less decisive. Software will make decisions, strategize, and determine how hardware is deployed. Development will be faster and more democratized, which only amplifies the stakes. Alignment between specialists, governments, and companies is no longer optional if stability and peace are to be preserved.

Our fear of making claims about truth, beauty, the good life, and justice has left us with a thin collective identity, where neutrality replaces conviction. Rebuilding a meaningful vision and definite optimism requires an explicit embrace of values, virtue, and culture, and alignment between the technologies we create and how they are deployed. A definite future requires conviction at both the institutional and individual levels, expressed through commitment, coordination, and responsibility in deployment.