A letter to the children who cannot yet vote, object, or consent about the autonomous weapons we normalized, the cures we chose not to build, the jobs we automated, the genes we may edit, and the planet we warmed. An honest accounting of what our generation chose to leave behind, and the irreversible inheritance we are creating at quarterly earnings speed.
I am writing this in April 2026, from Toronto, on a planet that is warming faster than our models predicted, in a civilization that is automating itself faster than our institutions can govern, and in the brief window of time when the decisions that will define your world are still barely being made.
You cannot read this yet. You cannot vote. You cannot object. You cannot sue. You cannot march in the streets or write to your representative or sign a petition. You have no voice, no legal standing, no advocate with a seat at any table where your future is being negotiated.
And yet, of all the people affected by what we are doing right now, you will bear the consequences longest.
This letter is an accounting. Not an apology because apologies without change are cowardice but an honest reckoning with what we are choosing to leave you, and what we are choosing to take away before you arrive.
In the first article of this series, I wrote about the decision to remove humans from the kill chain to build autonomous weapons that identify, track, and destroy targets without meaningful human oversight.
By the time you read this, that decision will likely be irreversible.
In 2024, Israel deployed an AI system called Lavender that assigned kill scores to 2.3 million people in Gaza. At least 37,000 people were mistakenly marked as death targets by the algorithm. A companion system, "Where's Daddy?", tracked targets to their family homes and triggered nighttime bombings when entire families were asleep. The human operator spent approximately twenty seconds confirming each strike.
In 2026, the Iran war demonstrated autonomous drone swarms, AI-directed targeting at speeds no human could follow, and the operational integration of artificial intelligence into every phase of modern warfare. The Pentagon designated Anthropic the one major AI company that refused to allow its technology to be used in fully autonomous weapons a supply-chain risk to national security.
UN treaty negotiations on autonomous weapons have stalled. The US and Russia refuse to sign binding prohibitions. The two-year window from 2025 to 2026 has been the most active period in AI governance history, and the result so far is paralysis.
Here is what this means for you: by the time you are old enough to have an opinion about autonomous killing, the infrastructure will already exist. The military doctrines will already depend on it. The economic incentives will already favor it. The precedents will already be set. You will inherit a world where machines kill people, and the debate about whether they should will be as academic as the debate about whether nuclear weapons should exist a question settled not by moral reasoning but by the irreversibility of deployment.
We did not ask your permission. We did not consider your vote. This is the first item of your inheritance.
In the second article, I wrote about Ray Kurzweil's prediction that nanobots will flow through our bloodstreams by the mid-2030s, repairing tissue, preventing disease, and potentially conquering aging itself. I wrote about longevity escape velocity the point where medical science extends life faster than biology degrades it predicted for 2029–2032.
I also wrote about why this is not happening at the speed it could. Not because the science is impossible, but because the business model of healthcare is built around managing disease, not curing it. A patient cured is a customer lost. The pharmaceutical industry could boost profits by $254 billion through AI, but 49% of companies cite "cultural resistance" as their primary obstacle. Hospitals allocate 4.2% of their IT budgets to AI governance.
Meanwhile, 80% of all venture capital in Q1 2026, $242 billion flowed into AI. The space economy is heading toward $1 trillion. SpaceX is preparing the largest IPO in human history.
The technology to dramatically extend your lifespan may exist by the time you are born. But the decision about who gets access to it whether it becomes a universal human right or a luxury for the wealthy is being made right now, by the capital allocation patterns we are establishing today.
If longevity technology follows the distribution pattern of every other exponential technology concentrated among the few, priced for the powerful, and reaching the many only decades later then your generation will be the first in history for whom death is optional for some and mandatory for others. Not because of biology, but because of economics.
We are building a world where the rich may live forever and the poor will die on schedule. You will inherit the moral architecture of that choice.
In the third article, I wrote about the 80,000 tech workers laid off in Q1 2026 nearly half because AI could do their jobs. I wrote about Sam Altman's prediction of one-person billion-dollar companies, about the gleaner strategy for building businesses in the niches that industrial-scale AI cannot serve.
But here is what I did not write, because it was not yet clear enough: by the time you enter the workforce, the concept of "workforce" as we understand it may no longer exist.
When a single founder with AI tools can generate $1.8 billion in revenue as Matthew Gallagher did with Medvi the traditional employment model is not being disrupted. It is being replaced. When Block reduces its workforce from 10,000 to 6,000 because AI handles 70–80% of customer inquiries, the efficiency gain is real. But so is the displacement.
McKinsey estimates that 92% of companies will increase AI investment through 2028. The jobs being created require fundamentally different skills than the jobs being eliminated. And the education systems that should be preparing you for this reality are, with few exceptions, still teaching curricula designed for an economy that is vanishing.
You will enter a world where the most valuable skill is not knowledge AI has more of that than any human ever will but judgment. The ability to decide what to build, for whom, and why. The contextual, cultural, deeply human capacity to understand what a machine cannot: what matters.
We are not teaching this. We are teaching algebra to children who will have AI agents that solve differential equations on command. We are teaching history as memorization to children who will have perfect recall engines in their pockets. We are preparing you for our past, not your future.
This, too, is part of your inheritance.
In 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui used CRISPR to edit the genes of twin girls the first genetically modified humans. He was imprisoned. Released. And now, in 2026, he has returned to the field, defiant, arguing that "AI is threatening humanity, we must fight back by gene editing."
Scientists have called for a 10-year moratorium on altering the genomes of eggs, sperm, or embryos destined for live births. The consensus is that CRISPR is not yet precise enough for safe germline editing the high frequency of unintended mutations endangers not only the edited individual but all their descendants.
And yet, the economic incentives are building. The same exponential acceleration that is transforming AI is transforming genetic engineering. The cost of genome sequencing has dropped from $3 billion to under $200. CRISPR tools are available to any competent molecular biology lab. The technical barriers are falling faster than the ethical frameworks can be built.
If germline editing becomes commercially available even in jurisdictions where it is legal your generation may be the first to include individuals whose genetic code was selected, modified, or optimized before conception. The question of what it means to be human already complicated by AI becomes entangled with the question of who designed you to be what you are.
Over one-third of the scientific literature on human embryo editing raises justice and equity concerns: that affluent individuals will have disproportionate access, creating a biological caste system layered on top of the economic one that already exists.
You may inherit not only an unequal economy but an unequal biology. Designed by parents with means and preferences you did not choose, in a market shaped by forces you cannot see.
At 1.4°C of global warming where we are now warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback. Parts of the polar ice sheets may have already crossed tipping points that commit the world to several meters of irreversible sea-level rise, affecting hundreds of millions of people.
Up to eight climate tipping points could be triggered below 2°C of warming. The window to prevent them is, in the words of researchers, "rapidly closing." It is increasingly likely that global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the late 2020s or early 2030s around the time many of you will be born.
J.P. Morgan has begun pricing tipping-point risk into financial models. The repricing, analysts warn, "may come suddenly, unevenly, and across asset classes." What this means in human terms: the economic stability of your world depends on ecological thresholds that our generation is crossing now, with full knowledge that they are irreversible.
We know. We have known for decades. We have chosen economic growth over ecological survival, and the accounting of that choice will arrive in your lifetime, not ours.
Perhaps the cruelest part of your inheritance is not any single decision, but the absence of a framework to address them together.
In 2026, policymakers confront what the Council on Foreign Relations calls a "decisive year" for AI governance. The hard questions who bears responsibility for an AI system's actions? Which governance models fill the vacuum while democracies deliberate? Remain largely unanswered.
As AI systems evolve from tools to autonomous agents capable of making decisions and executing tasks independently, the regulatory challenge grows exponentially. AI agents now execute code, sign contracts, and conduct transactions independently. The question of liability for "autonomous errors" is unresolved. The governance gap is not narrowing; it is widening, precisely because the technology accelerates faster than the institutions that should govern it.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy the Indigenous nations of northeastern North America practiced a principle called Seventh Generation Stewardship: every major decision should be evaluated for its impact on the next seven generations. Every choice from resource use to governance to technology was weighed against a 175-year horizon.
We do not think in seven generations. We think in quarterly earnings. Our political cycles are two to four years. Our venture capital expects returns in five to seven. Our AI development cycles are measured in months.
The mismatch between the speed of our decisions and the duration of their consequences is the defining structural failure of our era. We make century-scale choices at quarterly-earnings speed, and you inherit the gap.
I want to be honest about something. Not everything in your inheritance is a failure of will. Some of it is a failure of imagination.
We could have directed the $242 billion in AI venture capital toward healthcare, education, and climate rather than toward weapons, advertising, and speculation. We did not. Not because these investments were impossible, but because the incentive structures we built rewarded short-term returns over long-term survival.
We could have insisted on international treaties governing autonomous weapons before the technology made them unenforceable. We did not because the nations with the most advanced AI had the most to gain from keeping it unregulated.
We could have prepared your education for the world you will actually inhabit. We did not because reforming education is politically difficult, pedagogically complex, and electorally unrewarding.
We could have treated longevity technology as a public good rather than a market opportunity. We did not, because the people who fund medical research expect financial returns, not civilizational progress.
Every one of these failures has the same structure: the benefit of action is diffuse, long-term, and shared, while the cost of action is concentrated, immediate, and personal. This is the fundamental asymmetry of intergenerational ethics: the people who pay the price of good decisions are not the people who benefit from them, and the people who benefit from bad decisions are not the people who suffer their consequences.
You are on the wrong side of this asymmetry. You always have been. Every generation is. But never before has the asymmetry been this large because never before have the decisions been this irreversible.
I am not writing this to paralyze you with guilt that is not yours, or to burden you with despair about a world you did not make.
I am writing this because I believe you deserve to know what happened. Not the sanitized version. Not the story of progress and innovation and human ingenuity that the textbooks will tell. But the full accounting: what was chosen, what was avoided, who benefited, and who paid.
You deserve to know that there were people who objected. Anthropic refused to build autonomous weapons and was punished for it. Scientists called for moratoriums on germline editing. Climate researchers published warnings with increasing urgency. Educators protested the irrelevance of their curricula. Developers questioned the ethics of the systems they were building.
You deserve to know that objection, by itself, was not enough. That structural change requires structural power, and structural power was concentrated in the hands of those who benefited most from the status quo.
And you deserve to know that the choices are not finished. The singularity, the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and the trajectory of civilization becomes unpredictable may arrive by 2045. By then, some of you will be adults. Some of you will be the decision-makers. And you will face questions that make ours look simple.
Whether to merge human consciousness with AI. Whether to extend life indefinitely. Whether to modify the human genome by design. Whether to colonize other worlds. Whether to build intelligences greater than your own and what rights they should have.
These are not our questions to answer. They are yours. But they will arrive in a world shaped by our answers to the questions we faced and too often, failed.
I cannot promise you a better world. That would be dishonest. The tipping points may already be crossed. The autonomous weapons may already be normalized. The inequality may already be structural. The governance may already be too slow.
But I can promise you this: I will tell the truth about what we did and why. I will not dress up self-interest as progress. I will not call a business decision a technological limitation. I will not pretend that the future was inevitable when it was, in fact, chosen.
And I can promise you that for as long as I have a voice, I will use it to argue for the principle that should have governed every decision in this series: the people who will bear the longest consequences deserve the loudest voice.
You do not have that voice yet. So this letter, inadequate as it is, will have to serve.
With the sorrow of complicity and the stubborn hope that you will do better,
Aziz Banihashemi
Toronto, April 2026
---
*This is the final article in the "Singularity Paradox" series by Aziz Banihashemi, founder of DevCraft Solutions. Previous articles: "The Forbidden Fruit of Autonomy", "The Cure We Chose Not to Build", and "The Gleaners".*
Insights
After 4 failed startup attempts as a non-technical founder, I learned the hard way that great ideas are not enough. Now AI has changed everything. Here is what I wish I knew earlier.
AI & Development
AI can analyze logs and find bugs in minutes like a senior engineer. But in edge cases and race conditions, it might confidently give you the wrong answer. Here is when to trust it and when to think twice.
Business
The AI landscape is changing faster than you can drink your morning coffee. Here is how to maintain your sanity and focus as a founder when the world feels like a roller coaster.
