We’re all familiar with the motivating cry of “YOLO” right before you do something on the edge of stupidity and exhilaration.
We’ve all seen the “TL;DR” section that shares the key takeaways from a long article.
And, we’ve all experienced “FOMO” when our friends make plans and we feel compelled to tag along just to make sure we’re not left on the sidelines of an epic experience.
Let’s give a name to our age’s most haunting anxiety: TFWM—The Future We’ll Miss. It’s the recognition that future generations may ask why, when faced with tools to cure, create, and connect, we chose to maintain the status quo. Let’s run through a few examples to make this a little clearer:
- AI can detect breast cancer earlier than humans and save millions in treatments and perhaps even thousands of lives. Yet, AI use in medical contexts is often tied up in red tape. #TFWM
- New understanding of the interior design of cells via AI tools has the potential to increase drug development. AI researchers are still struggling to find the computing necessary to run their experiments. #TFWM
- Weather forecasts empowered by AI may soon allow us to detect storms ten days earlier. A shortage of access to quality data may delay improvements and adoption of these tools. #TFWM
- Firefighters have turned to VR exercises to gain valuable experience fighting fires in novel, extreme context. It’s the sort of practice that can make a big difference when the next spark appears. Limited AI readiness among local and state governments, however, stands in the way. #TFWM
I could go on (and I will in future posts). The point is that in several domains, we’re making the affirmative choice to extend the status quo despite viable alternatives to further human flourishing. Barriers to spreading these AI tools across jurisdictions are eminently solvable. Whether it’s budgetary constraints, regulatory hurdles, or public skepticism, all of these hindrances can be removed with enough political will.
So, why am I trying to make #TFWM a “thing"? In other words, why is it important to increase awareness of this perspective? The AI debate is being framed by questions that have distracted us from the practical policy challenges we need to address to bring about a better future.
The first set of distracting questions is some variant of: "Will AI become a sentient overlord and end humanity?" This is a debate about a speculative, distant future that conveniently distracts us from the very real, immediate lives we could be saving today.
The second set of questions is along the lines of “How many jobs will AI destroy?” This is a valid, but defensive and incomplete, question. It frames innovation as a zero-sum threat rather than asking the more productive question: “How can we deploy these tools to make our work more meaningful, creative, and valuable?”
Finally, there’s a tranche of questions related to some of the technical aspects of AI, like “Can we even trust what it says?” This concern over AI "hallucinations," while a real technical challenge, is often used to dismiss the technology's proven, superhuman accuracy in specific, life-saving domains, such as in medical settings.
A common thread ties these inquiries together. These questions are passive. They ask, “What will AI do to us?”
TFWM flips the script. It demands we ask the active and urgent question: “What will we fail to do with AI?”
The real risk isn't just that AI might go wrong. The real, measurable risk is that we won't let it go right. The tragedy is not a robot uprising that makes for good sci-fi but bad public policy; it's the preventable cancer, the missed storm warning, the failed drug trial. The problem isn't the technology; it's our failure of political will and, more pointedly, our failure of legal and regulatory imagination.
This brings us to why TFWM needs to be a "thing."
FOMO, for all its triviality, is a powerful motivator. It’s a personal anxiety that causes action. It gets you off the couch, into the Lyft, and into the party.
TFWM must become our new civic anxiety. It’s not the fear of missing a party; it's the fear of being judged by posterity. It is the deep, haunting dread that our grandchildren will look back at this moment of historic opportunity and ask us, “You had the tools to solve this. Why didn't you?”
This perspective creates the political will we desperately need. It reframes our entire approach to governance. It shifts the burden of proof from innovators to the status quo. The question is no longer, "Can you prove this new tool is 100% perfect and carries zero risk?" The question becomes, "Can you prove that our current system—with all its human error, bias, cost, and delay—is better than the alternative?"
YOLO, FOMO, and TL;DR are shorthand for navigating our personal lives. TFWM is the shorthand for our collective responsibility. The status quo is not a safe, neutral position. It is an active choice, and it has a body count. The future we'll miss isn't inevitable. It's a decision. And right now, we are deciding to miss it every single day we fail to act.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and author of the Appleseed AI substack.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.