How Technology Could Change the Narratives That Divide Us
Abstract
Unfortunately, much of our news and politics is racially charged. And my experience is that a lot of people, regardless of their background, unnecessarily find this stressful. Bringing different communities together can involve practical frictions, and societies continually develop tools for navigating them. This article proposes that advances in AI, genetic medicine, robotics, and material abundance could expand those tools dramatically, with some developments already underway and further transformative capabilities plausibly emerging over the coming decades. It introduces demographic fatalism as the belief that population changes permanently determine the prospects of future generations. Genetic engineering challenges one premise of this belief by making particular inherited biological outcomes potentially modifiable across ancestral backgrounds. A parallel thought experiment considers future robots recovering accumulated plastic waste and processing it into reusable materials. Both cases expose the limitations of projecting present problems forward while holding future capabilities constant. Anticipatory peace describes the relief that may arise when an apparently irreversible threat becomes open to intervention. The article develops this psychological hypothesis alongside a broader forecast of technological progress, while identifying conditions involving safety, voluntary participation, and broad access. Recognizing humanity’s diversity and expanding possibilities may reduce avoidable distress generated by false generalizations and narratives of permanent conflict.
Proposed term
Meaning
Demographic fatalism
The belief that changes in a population’s composition permanently determine a society’s prospects, leaving little room for adaptation or shared improvement.
Threat permanence
The perceived irreversibility of a danger. Your hypothesis is that a threat becomes more emotionally consuming when people imagine it extending indefinitely into their descendants’ lives.
Ancestral destiny narrative
A story that treats ancestry as the principal determinant of a person’s or society’s future, overshadowing institutions, learning, relationships, and technological change.
Anticipatory peace
Present emotional relief arising from credible possibilities for future security, cooperation, and improvement. This is especially close to the experience you described.
Possibility reappraisal
Reassessing a feared situation by considering how future capabilities could expand the available responses. It involves updating the range of possibilities while acknowledging uncertainty.
Shared abundance horizon
An imagined future in which improvements in health, knowledge, and material security are broadly accessible, making another group’s progress feel more compatible with one’s own.
Narrative disarmament
Weakening a story’s capacity to generate hostility by examining its assumptions about permanence, collective blame, and unavoidable competition.
When a headline becomes a forecast
A disturbing story can occupy far more mental space than the event itself warrants. A crime becomes a judgment about an entire population. A dispute over migration becomes a forecast about the fate of a country. A change in a neighborhood becomes a warning about what life will be like for descendants who have yet to be born. The reader moves from an event in the present to an imagined future in which its consequences continue indefinitely.
I have found that contemplating the capabilities future generations may possess changes my response to these stories. When I imagine major advances in medicine, environmental repair, and material provision, the future feels more open. A headline becomes less capable of convincing me that humanity has crossed an irreversible threshold. This experience motivates the argument developed here.
Human diversity belongs at the beginning of that argument. People bring different family histories, languages, traditions, and experiences into shared communities. Their biological variation also contributes to the complexity of human life and the study of health. Genomic research describes extensive overlap among populations and substantial variation within them. Ancestry, ethnicity, and socially assigned racial categories capture different aspects of a person’s history and identity [1].
Coexistence can require effort. Communities need housing, functioning institutions, ways to communicate, and fair procedures for resolving disagreements. Yet an argument over how to meet these needs can acquire a much heavier emotional burden when it becomes a claim about permanent incompatibility. The distinction matters because practical difficulties invite responses, whereas imagined inevitability can make vigilance feel endless.
Demographic fatalism
I use demographic fatalism to describe the belief that changes in population composition permanently determine a society’s biological possibilities and future prospects. Such beliefs can attach to migration, birth rates, intermarriage, and changing cultural identities. They become especially powerful when the consequences are imagined to extend across generations without any meaningful possibility of intervention.
The biological version of this belief treats ancestry as a fixed limit on what descendants can become or experience. The cultural version assumes that changing demographics necessarily extinguish valued traditions. A material version assumes that another community’s growing prosperity must reduce the resources available to one’s own. These beliefs often become bundled together, even though each involves a different causal claim.
Threat permanence names the perceived irreversibility of a danger. A problem may feel more consuming when someone believes that neither their own efforts nor the ingenuity of future generations can change its course. The person is then responding partly to the immediate situation and partly to an imagined succession of future losses.
This framing encourages several questions. Which feared outcomes actually follow from the event? Which depend on assumptions about institutions or resources? Which assume that today’s medical and technical limitations will persist? Answering these questions can change the meaning of a demographic trend before the trend itself changes.
Human biodiversity and shared possibilities
Humanity’s biological diversity deserves an accurate description. Genetic variants differ in their distribution, and certain variants can have important medical effects. At the same time, broad population labels conceal substantial individual variation. The National Human Genome Research Institute emphasizes that most human genetic variation occurs within groups and that differences often concern the frequency of variants shared across groups [1].
This means that medical needs are best understood through the relevant characteristics of individuals, including their specific variants, family histories, environments, and clinical findings. A population average cannot describe every member of that population. Nor does a story about one individual establish the characteristics of everyone assigned to the same category.
The value of human diversity also extends beyond what can be measured medically. People inherit memories, relationships, and practices that give life meaning. A desirable technological future would help people participate in those traditions while gaining access to protection from disease and hardship. Shared benefits could expand across communities whose identities remain important to them.
The prospect of improvement therefore begins with equal human standing. Medical care and social opportunity can serve people across the full range of human variation. Their entitlement to respect is already present, including when they decline an intervention or continue to live with illness or disability.
Imagining the recovery of accumulated plastic
Consider a different source of anxiety. Plastic has accumulated in waterways, oceans, soils, and landfills, often in places where recovery is currently difficult or expensive. Someone who extrapolates today’s waste burden far into the future may imagine an increasingly contaminated planet with little prospect of repair.
I envision a future in which AI-guided robots systematically locate and recover accumulated waste. Machines operating in different environments would collect accessible material and move it into automated systems for sorting and processing. Biological methods could break down suitable polymers, while chemical processes could handle other materials. Recovered components could return to productive use. Greater energy availability and inexpensive automated labor could make remediation practical in places that currently seem beyond our reach.
Parts of this technical picture have experimental foundations. Research on engineered enzymes has demonstrated the breakdown of PET, a commonly used polyester. Machine learning has also helped researchers develop enzymes for PET depolymerization [6]. Extending such work to widespread environmental remediation would require advances in collection, material identification, processing, and ecological protection. Dispersed microplastics and mixed waste present particularly demanding recovery problems.
My long-term expectation is that these capabilities will develop far enough to resolve plastic pollution as a continuing environmental burden. The scope of that expectation exceeds what existing demonstrations establish. It depends on sustained technical progress, deployment at scale, and methods that provide an ecological benefit in the environments where they operate.
The psychological comparison concerns assumptions about permanence. A person who anticipates effective restoration may experience existing damage differently from someone who imagines it accumulating indefinitely. The environmental case concerns discarded materials. The human case concerns fear, hostility, and the conditions under which people live together. In both cases, expectations about future capabilities affect how threatening the present feels.
Projecting problems forward while capabilities stand still
Long-range anxiety can contain an unnoticed asymmetry. We imagine a problem growing over decades while imagining little comparable growth in humanity’s capacity to respond. The damage accumulates, the institutions strain, and the conflict spreads, but the available tools remain close to those of the present.
Technological development can change several constraints at once. Improved scientific models can identify interventions that were previously unavailable. Automation can lower the labor required to apply them. Better manufacturing can increase their availability. Advances in energy and infrastructure can alter which projects are economically feasible. These developments can reinforce one another, making forecasts based on a single current limitation incomplete.
I expect the coming decades to bring capabilities that are difficult to specify from today’s perspective. Some relevant technologies are already in use, while others are at an experimental stage. Their convergence could occur within the lifetimes of people now worrying about their descendants. The pace, coverage, and timing remain uncertain, so the argument rests on an expanding range of possibilities rather than a fixed completion date.
This perspective can support both hope and participation. Building, evaluating, and distributing useful technologies are ways of helping the anticipated future arrive. A less fatalistic person may have more emotional room to consider those tasks without experiencing every setback as a permanent defeat.
Genetic engineering and the future of descendants
Genetic engineering challenges a specific premise within demographic fatalism. If particular biological outcomes become modifiable, the pattern of ancestry inherited by a population becomes less decisive for the outcomes those interventions can influence. People from different backgrounds could gain access to the same protective biological mechanisms.
Suppose a family worries that its descendants will inherit a particular vulnerability. A successful intervention could change the consequences of that inheritance. Conversely, suppose someone imagines that preserving a particular ancestry is the only conceivable way for descendants to retain a biological protection. If medicine eventually makes that protection available across backgrounds, the assumed necessity of preserving that ancestry pattern loses its biological basis.
This reasoning can apply to fears about intermarriage. Future descendants could have medical options that neither side of their family possessed. Their opportunities for health would depend partly on the interventions available to them, as well as on their inherited variants and living conditions. The potential benefit comes from expanding what descendants can access across the range of human ancestry.
Existing treatments illustrate several possible mechanisms. Casgevy modifies blood stem cells to increase fetal hemoglobin in people with sickle cell disease, changing the consequences of an inherited disorder [7]. A personalized editing treatment reported in 2025 targeted a specific variant in an infant with a rare metabolic disease. Early improvement in that individual provided a demonstration requiring continued follow-up [8]. These examples show that medicine can sometimes intervene directly in the biological processes connecting inherited variation to illness.
Most such interventions affect somatic cells, the cells of an existing person’s body. Their effects generally remain with that patient. Heritable editing would affect variants transmitted to subsequent generations and therefore connects more directly to beliefs about descendants’ biological futures. That prospect carries additional unresolved questions about safety and the consequences for future people [9].
The possibility explored here is that interventions could progressively reduce some medically consequential disadvantages across populations. Human biodiversity would continue to provide a varied set of starting conditions, while treatment could make some of those conditions less predictive of suffering. The further proposition that this development would reduce intergroup fear is a psychological hypothesis, to be investigated alongside the medical advances themselves.
AI and the expansion of biological options
AI could accelerate parts of the work needed to develop such interventions. Computational systems can help researchers study genetic variation, model molecular processes, identify candidate targets, and design experimental tools. Published work has demonstrated AI-designed CRISPR-associated proteins that edit human cells in laboratory settings [10]. Other models predict how DNA sequences and variants affect gene regulation [11].
These capabilities could make it easier to investigate individual biology in detail. They may also help researchers find interventions that act on pathways shared by people with different ancestral histories. Experimental validation, effective delivery, and clinical evaluation determine which candidates become useful treatments.
As the available options expand, biological forecasts based on broad group categories could become less relevant to particular medical decisions. A person’s needs and the mechanisms available to address them would become increasingly central. This provides a concrete route by which technological progress could weaken the sense that ancestry imposes an unalterable medical destiny.
Abundance and cultural continuity
Genetic medicine addresses one component of demographic anxiety. Material provision and cultural continuity require their own forms of progress. Housing shortages, barriers to care, and uncertainty about livelihoods can make social change feel costly. Technologies that expand useful production could help communities meet those needs, provided institutions turn increased capacity into accessible goods and services.
In this context, abundance means dependable access to essentials at costs people can bear. Improvements in construction, energy, food production, and healthcare could reduce some of the pressures under which communities compete. Their social effect would depend on ownership, public investment, and the distribution of benefits. Families need reasons to expect that technological progress will improve their own lives alongside those of their neighbors.
Cultural continuity also has practical supports. Language learning tools, searchable archives, oral histories, and communication across dispersed families can help people participate in inherited traditions. Families with multiple heritages could find it easier to teach their children more than one language or maintain relationships across communities. Recent work on Indigenous-led AI emphasizes communities’ agency in governing their knowledge and deciding how it is used [13].
Humanity’s cultural and biological diversity can thus be approached as a feature of the future we are building. Integrating different communities may involve negotiation and friction, while expanding tools offer more ways to respond. AI-mediated deliberation provides one early example. In structured experiments, a system that synthesized participants’ views helped groups develop statements of common ground and reduced disagreement within the participating groups [12].
The larger forecast is that progress across these domains could eventually remove much of the practical and psychological basis for racial and ethnic hostility. I expect such hostility to become increasingly unnecessary and, ultimately, something humanity can overcome. That expectation combines a judgment about future technology with a commitment to institutions and choices that make cooperation possible.
The emotional cost of permanent threat
News and social media can repeatedly activate the connection between group identity and danger. Rathje and colleagues found that language referring to political opponents strongly predicted social media engagement in the material they studied [2]. Such incentives help explain why people can encounter a stream of stories organized around antagonism.
Ford and colleagues studied everyday political experiences through diary methods and experiments. Political events evoked negative emotion associated with poorer psychological and physical well-being. Emotion regulation could improve well-being, while also reducing motivation for political action [3]. That tradeoff makes the desired outcome worth specifying. The aim of anticipatory peace is to support proportionate engagement with problems while reducing the burden of imagined inevitability.
Group framing can also affect how a story is received. In an experiment by Brader and colleagues, news emphasizing the costs of immigration generated greater opposition among white American participants when it featured Latino immigrants than when it featured European immigrants [4]. The response depended partly on the group cues through which the event was presented.
These findings motivate a proposed cycle. Threatening stories may increase vigilance, vigilance may direct attention toward further threatening examples, and those examples may reinforce negative generalizations. A person can then become more suspicious of unfamiliar people while feeling that the suspicion is required for self-protection. The contribution of perceived permanence to this process remains an empirical question.
Chronic stress has potential physical consequences as well. Research by Cohen and colleagues linked prolonged stress and reduced sensitivity to hormones that regulate inflammation with responses to experimentally administered cold viruses [5]. This provides a reason to take sustained stress seriously. Establishing a specific health effect of demographic narratives, or of changing those narratives, would require direct study.
Some distress arises from real harm requiring attention. Other distress is added by false generalizations, selective anecdotes, or predictions treated as certainties. The possibility of reducing that avoidable burden is central to this article. People can evaluate a particular event more accurately when it carries fewer unsupported assumptions about entire populations and distant generations.
Anticipatory peace
I use anticipatory peace to describe present emotional relief arising from credible expectations of future security, repair, and improvement. It begins when a feared outcome becomes less permanent in someone’s imagination. The person can envisage more ways to respond, which may reduce the helplessness attached to the threat.
The proposed mechanism has several parts. A person encounters a concern, imagines its future consequences, and estimates the capacity available to address them. If that capacity is assumed to remain limited, the concern may seem to demand ongoing vigilance. If the person instead anticipates effective interventions, the perceived stakes can change. The emotional response may then become more proportionate to the immediate event.
For me, this shift has made some inflammatory stories less consuming. Thinking about future medicine and abundance makes it harder to interpret demographic change as a final judgment on the prospects of descendants. Thinking about future environmental restoration makes accumulated damage feel more open to action. The technologies remain partly prospective, while the change in my response is already something I can observe.
The account also suggests why the future must feel shared. A treatment available only to a privileged few could increase anxiety among everyone excluded. A convincing expectation of broad access could have a different effect. Anticipatory peace therefore depends partly on trust that progress will reach people across communities and that they will retain a meaningful voice in how it is used.
This perspective may make it easier to treat strangers as individuals. If someone feels less threatened by the supposed permanent implications of group membership, they may be less inclined to interpret an individual’s behavior as evidence about millions of others. That would be a significant interpersonal consequence to test.
Conditions for credible progress
The future imagined here requires voluntary participation, demonstrated benefits, and broad access. Genetic medicine should respond to individual needs through appropriate care and consent. Respect for people with varied bodies, histories, and preferences belongs within that goal. The direction of technological development matters as much as its increasing power.
The same applies to environmental restoration and abundance. Successful recovery must improve ecological conditions. Increased production must translate into useful access. Cultural technologies must serve the communities whose knowledge they contain. Each domain requires evaluation and choices that connect technical capability to human and environmental benefit.
A complete resolution of plastic pollution and racial or ethnic hostility is the long-term forecast motivating this essay. Evidence presently supports particular technical achievements and particular psychological relationships. The wider forecast remains contingent. Its psychological relevance can still be studied now, because people already vary in how possible, inclusive, and near they consider future progress to be.
There is also a practical reason to preserve present engagement. Decisions about research, institutions, and access help determine which future arrives. Confidence in progress can support those decisions through patience and cooperation. Whether anticipatory peace produces that combination of calm and participation is one of the proposal’s central tests.
A research program
The hypothesis can be evaluated through experiments that present credible accounts of future capabilities. Participants could read about genetic medicine, material abundance, or comprehensive environmental repair, with each account clearly identifying demonstrated achievements and prospective extensions. A comparison condition could present general optimism without describing how the relevant constraint might change.
Researchers could then measure perceived threat permanence, demographic fatalism, emotional responses to group-related news, and judgments about individuals from unfamiliar communities. The proposed mechanism predicts that reduced perceived permanence would help explain any reduction in hostility or distress. The strongest effects may occur among participants whose original fears are explicitly tied to irreversible consequences.
Access and credibility should be varied separately. A future with broadly available benefits may produce different reactions from one with benefits concentrated among a small group. Highly speculative descriptions may reassure some readers and reduce credibility for others. Measuring these responses would identify when the argument helps and when it fails.
Follow-up assessments could examine whether effects persist and whether participants remain willing to support constructive action. Longer studies would be needed to investigate sustained stress or physical health. The terms introduced here serve as working concepts for that research, with their definitions intended to make the proposed relationships testable.
A shared human future
Humanity’s extraordinary biological and cultural diversity offers many ways of living, relating, and belonging. As communities meet and change, they face practical questions that deserve thoughtful responses. Our capacity to answer those questions can grow. Future generations may inherit tools that make today’s apparent limits increasingly manageable.
Genetic engineering gives this possibility a specific biological meaning. Some inherited conditions may become less decisive for health. Abundance could ease material pressures. Cultural tools could support continuity across changing families and communities. Together, these developments could make it easier to imagine descendants flourishing across a wide range of ancestral backgrounds.
I expect the future to give humanity far greater power to repair environmental damage and overcome the conditions that sustain racial and ethnic hostility. That expectation changes how I experience the present. A troubling event can still deserve attention, but it carries less authority to dictate what I believe about the fate of future generations.
Anticipatory peace names the relief available when the future becomes more open in this way. It invites us to examine the assumptions that make a problem feel permanent and to consider the tools people may develop together. We can value the diversity already among us while working toward a future in which more people have the security to welcome it.
References
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[8] Musunuru K, et al. Patient-Specific In Vivo Gene Editing to Treat a Rare Genetic Disease. New England Journal of Medicine. 2025;392:2235–2243. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2504747
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