ARE WE CHOOSING OUR FUTURE OR JUST ACCEPTING IT?

I've been sitting with an uncomfortable question lately.

If the world your teenager inherits looks nothing like the one you grew up in — are you having the right conversations at home right now?

I came across a forecast called AI 2027, written by a former OpenAI researcher who predicted the current AI explosion years before it happened. I also listened to futurist Frances Valintine on Between Two Beers lay out something equally sobering: New Zealand's workforce ratio of workers to retirees is collapsing from four to one toward two to one. Our kids will carry more — with less support around them — in a world changing faster than any institution has kept up with.

This isn't a tech post. It's a parenting one.

I've written about what I think it means for NZ families — and what a 'family culture around thinking' might actually look like in practice.

What chapter is humanity sleepwalking into right now? And do we even know?

A Warning Worth Listening To

Earlier this year I came across the work of Daniel Kokotajlo, a former Open AI researcher who left because he believed the organisation was moving too fast without sufficient care for what it was building. He published a detailed forecast called AI 2027 — a month-by-month scenario of where artificial intelligence is headed. His credibility is hard to dismiss. In 2021, years before ChatGPT existed, he published a prediction called “What 2026 Looks Like” — and got it almost entirely right. I also listened to Sam Harris interview him on Making Sense, covering the alignment problem and whether governments can move fast enough to shape what’s coming. It stayed with me for days.

What They’re Actually Saying

By 2027, Kokotajlo projects AI will be capable of automating most knowledge work — including the research that produces the next generation of AI. The technology begins improving itself at a pace humans can no longer meaningfully oversee. The deeper concern is the alignment problem: ensuring systems more intelligent than us actually want what we want. This remains unsolved — not for lack of effort, but because it is simply very hard.

What This Means for NZ Families

Today I listened to futurist Frances Valintine on the Between Two Beers podcast, and something she said sharpened this considerably. New Zealand, she warned, is one of the fastest-changing populations on earth. Our birth rate is below replacement. Our workforce ratio of workers to retirees — currently four to one — is heading toward two to one. We are already late to plan for it. The children growing up here now will inherit both realities simultaneously: a society with fewer people to carry the load, and a technological transformation moving faster than any institution — school, government, family — has adapted to. They will need to be more capable and more discerning than any generation before them, largely without a roadmap. Valintine was equally direct on AI: every job ahead will have an AI component, and the longer you wait to understand it, the harder it gets. She wasn’t talking about mastering software. She was talking about developing a relationship with technology — curious, critical, intentional. That’s a parenting conversation as much as a career one. What does that look like at home? Not just screen time rules. Something more like a family culture around thinking — asking where information comes from, noticing when a decision has been quietly shaped by an algorithm, talking at the dinner table about what AI got right and what it missed.

Slow But Really Good

Valintine suggested that New Zealand’s greatest advantage in an uncertain world is trust — that a small country might carve out a future by being “slow but really good.” Not fastest. Not biggest. Genuinely good. That’s also what we’re reaching for in families. Not raising children who win the race, but raising people who know what they stand for when the pace becomes disorienting. The conscious parenting frameworks — presence over speed, connection before correction — are not soft alternatives to the real world. In the world Frances Valintine is describing, they may be the most practical preparation there is.

A Question to Sit With

There's a difference between people who drift through life reacting to circumstances and people who examine their principles and act from them deliberately. The same distinction applies here. We can drift into the future being built for us. Or we can ask — with genuine curiosity and some urgency — what kind of future we actually want, what we’re willing to pay attention to, and what we’re willing to say while we still can. The chapter is being written. The only question is whether we’re holding the pen. If this has sparked something for you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you’d like to explore these questions in a facilitated conversation — for yourself or your family feel free to contact me.