Keir Starmer has resigned. The sixth U.K. prime minister to do so in 10 years. A common objection against Starmer was that he lacked vision. He came to power promising change, but in one of his first speeches, he told people that "things will get worse before they get better". That "better" was never articulated. Starmer is not an aberration. Across the Western world, politics is becoming a project of managing one crisis after another. When it's more radical - like with Brexit or Trump - it's nostalgic about some lost past, not forward-looking. Politicians have stopped thinking about the future.

At the same time, the barons of Silicon Valley do nothing but think about the future. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Mark Andreesen are busy drafting manifestos about the future. And it's not just technological change they envision - it's political. AI company CEOs like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are now literally sitting at the G7 table. With democratic politics having given up on long-term thinking, is Silicon Valley going to decide what our future will look like? How can we create the space to imagine plausible alternatives to AI-driven dystopias? And what will it take for democratically elected politicians to start thinking about the long-term future again?

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics and Deputy Head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics, where he researches and teaches on democracy, political thought and political theory. His latest book is In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile, 2024). He has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and Boston Review, and more recently an article entitled, The End of the Future, for Foreign Policy.

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. He is also host of the podcast, “The Philosopher and the News”.