Silicon Valley Claims the Future as Markets Waver

Mark Zuckerberg said artificial intelligence could bring “an abundance of personal agency” and other benefits only if Meta was in charge, placing a corporate gatekeeper at the center of his promised future. A New York Times Magazine article examined that claim as technology stocks faced renewed pressure and investors looked to major companies’ AI plans for clues about what comes next.

Who Gets to Define the Future

CoreWeave shares slid in premarket trading Monday amid concerns about the AI trade, and other neocloud and chip stocks fell too. Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft were due to report earnings during a busy week for investors, who were watching for updates on their AI investments. The Federal Reserve was also due to make an interest-rate decision; markets expected it to leave rates unchanged.

That attention gives the companies’ investment choices a prominent place in the public story about AI. The magazine article described technology leaders’ predictions as presenting AI as ubiquitous and unavoidable: it either eliminates jobs, enables bioengineered viruses and catastrophic warfare, or delivers a utopia where people gain “greater power to live life as they choose,” as Sam Altman told the U.N. Those futures appear to be choices made by technology—and by the people building and directing it.

In August, Zuckerberg published a manifesto titled “The Future Is for Everyone.” “If our beliefs and principles lead,” he wrote, “then the balance of power will favor individuals and a better future for everyone.” But the article pointed to the condition attached to that promise: the benefits would come only if Meta was in charge.

Warnings From Inside the Industry

In September, OpenAI’s Sam Altman told the United Nations Security Council that AI could lead to a society where “more people can participate in the future” or one where humans had lost “control of the future.” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei recently called for a voluntary slowdown in AI development, saying it might avert the future the industry was headed toward for an “extra year or two.” These warnings and reassurances come from leaders in the same industry whose choices shape how the technology develops.

Alternative positive visions of the future have largely disappeared from American culture and politics, the article said. It cited left-wing pessimism about climate disaster and economic collapse, along with fears of demographic decline on the far right. Recent election cycles, it said, suggested the country’s best future lay in the past, pointing to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and the Make America Great Again movement.

Markets have found another way to put a price on what comes next. Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket turn the future into a commodity people can trade and monetize. The people placing bets and those shaping AI’s development hold different roles; in the article’s account, the future itself becomes the traded object.

An Open Future Is a Political Resource

British philosopher Jonathan White warned that ceding the future to Silicon Valley carried profound risks. He called the open future a “democratic resource” integral to political freedom, which depends on “the capacity to imagine alternatives that may be improbable and to pursue them against the odds.” The article said abolitionists needed to believe in an emancipated future to fight slavery, while mid-20th-century social safety nets became possible because liberal politics envisioned protections for future generations.

Before the French Revolution challenged the divine right of kings in 1789, political arguments were largely about the past, political scientist Dan Edelstein said; afterward, “each side claimed a privileged knowledge of the future.” The article also said Enlightenment ideas about inevitable progress and technological advances encouraged belief in a perfect world just around the corner. Yet those same forces could work against democracy. Edelstein wrote that conviction in such a future led some people “to accept the temporary suspension of democratic beliefs” to achieve it.

French bond yields traded just below 5% after weekend protests in France remained relatively orderly. Brazilian stocks were poised to sell off after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unexpectedly won re-election the previous night; investors had celebrated earlier in the month when Flávio Bolsonaro, seen as the more markets-friendly candidate, won the first round. Oil fell but stayed above $110 a barrel. Markets registered the election result and protests as signals, while political and corporate leaders still hold the power to direct the future.