CONCEPT
Vision Problem (Heilbroner)
Heilbroner's diagnosis that societies lose the capacity to imagine coherent futures—producing institutional paralysis under technological acceleration.
The vision problem names the condition Heilbroner diagnosed in his final decades: advanced capitalist societies had lost the confident narrative of progress animating modernity for three centuries without replacing it with a coherent alternative framework for relating to the future. This was not merely psychological pessimism but a structural transformation in temporal orientation. In the 'distant past,' futures were imagined as continuous with the present. In 'yesterday,' futures were imagined as progress—material improvement, technological advance, moral enlightenment. In 'today,' the future became genuinely uncertain: progress's catastrophic side effects (environmental destruction, nuclear risk, persistent inequality) undermined the narrative without generating a replacement. The result was apprehension—a state of productive anxiety in which societies accelerate technologically while losing institutional capacity to direct acceleration toward chosen ends. The AI transition occurs squarely within this third period, inheriting a civilization that has lost its capacity for confident futurity precisely when technological change demands it most.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Heilbroner developed the vision framework most systematically in Visions of the Future (1995), arguing that visions are