Finding the steel rider

As I set down to write a sequence of paragraphs - I promised to myself not to call it a book - on what makes a person today successfully negotiate life and work over the next 20 or 30 years, I should start with an admission: I have nothing new or insightful to say about how such future lives would pan out to be. I simply don't know. 

Therefore, unlike the other 'books' of this kind, I can't start this project with a confident posture, peppered with quotations from McKinsey, PwC or the World Economic Forum. Not that I don't find what they publish useful, but they are useful to me for a different reason. I don't look so much into the Executive Summary and the bold claims these make, but more to the footnotes and the methodology they followed. The methodology often tells a story very different: That these reports, presented as guides for the future of humanity, reflect the views of a very small number of people, drawn from mostly similar backgrounds. They reflect a point-of-view (POV in valley speak) rather than any clear and definitive roadmap for the future. 

Therefore, these reports and guides are useful to know what some people - the most privileged, the richest, people who went to the best universities and were secure enough to drop out of them - want the future to be. These reflect their private hopes and often, their private fears. This is neither an inevitable nor an universally applicable vision of the future. Instead, for my own kind of people, without any special position or privilege, there is a range of possible futures, which may include the dystopia of, for example, one depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. 

However, it would be a mistake to assume that we would be the mere recipients of a given future, which would be shaped for us by an Elon Musk, or DeepSeek, or Presidents Trump-Putin, or anyone big, rich, and powerful. This is because - I shall paraphrase Viktor Frankel here - there is one thing that can't be taken away from a human being: Whatever the circumstances, one can always choose how to respond to it. This is the human super-power, and this gives everyone a stake in shaping the future. As Theodore Zeldin put it in his An Intimate History of Humanity, the powerful always tried to shape the conversation, until the people chose to change the language. 

Therefore, I am writing these paragraphs for the 'Steel Riders', those who would participate in the future and shape it. These are not super-heroes, and won't have any magic power at their disposal. But my hope is that they would have the capabilities to shape their own lives. They would be able to choose their responses and be able to bring people together to do meaningful things. They wouldn't look for big men to solve their problems, but will solve it themselves. They would use the power of technology and not run away from it: They would seek out alternative sets of possibilities from the tools, or create the new tools of public use. 

These are not special people that I have to go and find, I believe. Rather, I believe there is a special ability in everyone, and the task is to let them find - and cultivate - the same. In a way, the steel riders practice what the German enlightenment era thinkers would call Bildung, a known idea but one almost impossible to practice when education is defined as a set of activity with a well-defined end (degree certificate). I am yet to define what the end goal of this enterprise is (I am a strong believer in journeys bringing their own reward) but this one I already know: How to instill a culture of cultivation within a modern, bureaucratic education institution?