Invent the Future

In The You On AI Field Guide

The line emerged from Kay's work at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, where the Dynabook vision required the team to build hardware, languages, and interfaces that did not yet commercially exist. The dictum was a working principle of the lab. If you could sketch the computing environment you thought children should have in 1985, you should build toward it in 1972. The sketch was the forecast; the building was the inventing.

Kay has distanced himself over the years from the dictum's reduction to startup-pitch wisdom. The reduction omits what he considers essential: that invention is a moral obligation, not a market opportunity. The researcher who sees that the industry is building designed passivity and declines to build an alternative has abdicated responsibility. The line cuts in both directions — it congratulates the inventor and indicts the forecaster who merely predicts.

In the AI moment, Kay deploys the dictum against what he sees as the industry's default trajectory. Left to its own momentum, the industry will build AI systems that maximize output, minimize user effort, maximize engagement metrics, and — almost as a side effect — widen the imagination-to-understanding ratio. This future is predictable because it is the future being built. Inventing a different future — one in which AI tools make reasoning transparent, preserve friction where friction teaches, and treat the user as a thinker — requires the deliberate work that the dictum names as obligation.

You On AI closes with the same phrase, invoked more optimistically. Segal uses it to mobilize readers toward building structures that support human flourishing in the AI age. Kay's version is adjacent but pointed: the invention must be concrete, must be a working alternative to the default, must make the preferable future cheaper and easier to instantiate than the default would be. Citation without construction is not invention. It is prediction wearing the costume of agency.

Origin

Peter Drucker

Kay began using the phrase in talks in the early 1970s. Its first widely cited appearance is in a 1971 meeting at Xerox PARC. The line has circulated as an apocryphal quote attributed variously to Peter Drucker, Abraham Lincoln, and others; the attribution to Kay is well documented and Kay has confirmed it in interviews.

The formulation's popularity owes much to Bill Joy and Steve Jobs, both of whom quoted it, and to the Stanford and Silicon Valley commencement-speech circuit. The reduction to startup maxim — invent your own future, disrupt an industry — is the version most of the culture has absorbed.

Key Ideas

Prediction as obligation. To see a future is to owe the work of building toward or against it.

The PARC working principle. Sketch the world children should have, then build the hardware and software that would make it possible.

Against the startup misreading. Invention is not primarily a market opportunity; it is a civilizational responsibility.

The design question for AI. Which future are the current builders inventing — the one of maximum output, or the one of maximum understanding?

Citation versus construction. Quoting the line does not satisfy its demand; only building does.