Somewhere right now, in a meeting room you weren’t invited to, someone is making a decision about what your future looks like. They’re choosing which skills will matter in five years, which jobs will be automated, which communities will get access to new tools and which ones won’t. They’re not doing this maliciously. They’re doing it without you, which is a different kind of problem.

The story we keep hearing is that the AI future is already decided. That it’s a wave, a force, something arriving whether we’re ready or not. That framing is everywhere: in headlines, in policy papers, in keynote speeches. And it’s wrong.

What this article covers: This article challenges the idea that the AI future is inevitable and pre-determined. It argues that the people most affected by AI-driven change, particularly those from marginalised and underserved communities, must be active participants in shaping it. It explains what the Silicocene is, why participation matters more than prediction, and how Breakthrough equips people to co-author what comes next.

The myth of inevitability

Why treating AI as inevitable strips agency from the communities it affects most

There’s a phrase that keeps turning up in conversations about AI and the future of work: “AI will just happen.” It sounds neutral. It sounds realistic. But it carries a specific politics.

When we describe the future as something that happens to people rather than something people shape, we quietly remove accountability. If the outcome is inevitable, no one needs to ask who benefits and who loses. If change is a force of nature, no one is responsible for the communities it displaces.

This framing serves a very particular set of interests. It protects the companies building AI systems from scrutiny about who those systems are designed for. It lets policymakers defer hard questions about access and equity. And it tells millions of people, particularly those in underserved communities already navigating structural barriers to employment, education, and opportunity, that their role in the future is to adapt, not to decide.

The truth is that every technological era has been shaped by human choices: who funds what, who regulates what, who has a seat at the table when the rules are written. The Silicocene, coined by Breakthrough CEO Sobanan Narethiran, is the emerging age defined by silicon-based computing, AI, and digital infrastructure, is no different. It is not arriving fully formed. It is being constructed. And right now, it is being constructed by a remarkably narrow group of people.

That narrowness shows up in the technology itself. AI systems trained on data that reflects historical inequalities reproduce those inequalities at speed. Language models built without diverse input carry blind spots that become someone else’s problem. The pattern is consistent: when the people most affected by a technology are absent from its design, the technology encodes the assumptions of those who were present.

What a future grounded in human flourishing actually takes

How equitable AI depends on widening who has the literacy, confidence, and access to shape it

When people talk about “AI for good,” they often mean better products, cleaner data, more ethical guardrails. Those things matter. But they’re not enough on their own, because they still locate power in the same places.

A future grounded in human flourishing and equality requires something more fundamental: widening who holds the literacy, the confidence, and the access to participate in shaping what AI becomes.

AI literacy is not a technical skill reserved for engineers. It is a civic skill. Understanding how automated systems make decisions about hiring, housing, healthcare, and criminal justice is as essential as understanding how your local government works. Knowing what questions to ask about an algorithm’s training data is as important as knowing what questions to ask your MP.

But literacy alone isn’t the whole picture. People also need the practical confidence to use AI tools in their own work and communities. They need pathways from understanding to capability to progression: routes that don’t just explain what AI is, but equip people to use it, critique it, and build with it.

The communities most often excluded from technological progress should be the first to benefit from it, not the last to be consulted.

This is what participatory AI looks like in practice. Not a focus group at the end of a development cycle, but genuine co-authorship from the start. It means people from marginalised communities having the skills and standing to say: this system doesn’t work for us, and here’s what would. It means treating underserved communities not as populations to be managed through transition, but as co-designers of the Silicocene itself.

That shift doesn’t happen by accident. It takes deliberate infrastructure: programmes that build real capability, partnerships that share resources without hoarding power, and institutions willing to rebalance who gets to imagine the future.

Putting the pen in more hands

How Breakthrough equips underserved communities to co-author the AI future

This is the work we do at Breakthrough. Not predicting the future. Building the conditions for more people to shape it.

Our whole model is designed around a simple conviction: agency, capability, and progression should not depend on your postcode, your background, or whether a system was designed with you in mind. We equip people from underserved and marginalised communities with AI literacy, digital skills, and career development, so they can participate in the economy and the society that AI is reshaping.

The results tell a clear story:

700+ associates trained  ·  80% completion rate  ·  68% progression to employment

But numbers only tell part of the story. What matters is what they represent: people moving from exclusion to participation, from being talked about to being part of the conversation.

We don’t do this work in isolation. We are a founding contributor to the ITU AI Skills Coalition, alongside AWS, Microsoft, and UNDP, a global effort to close AI skills gaps at scale. Our curriculum is co-designed with IBM and CGI, grounding it in real employer needs while keeping it accessible to people who may never have touched a line of code. We hold Ofsted Expected Standard, because rigour and inclusion are not opposites.

Each of these partnerships is built on the same principle: the AI future should be co-authored, not handed down. When an associate on our programme learns to evaluate an AI tool, interrogate a dataset, or present a digital project to a potential employer, they are not just gaining a credential. They are gaining a voice in what happens next.

That is what it means to bridge the gap between where the future is being decided and where its consequences are felt. That is what it means to rebalance who gets to imagine.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about AI futures, the Silicocene, and who gets to shape what comes next

The Silicocene will be shaped by whoever shows up to write it. We’re working to make sure more people can.

Whether you’re an organisation that wants to co-design inclusive AI skills programmes, a funder investing in equitable futures, or someone who believes the next chapter should have more authors, we’d welcome the conversation.
Get in touch at hello@wearebreakthrough.org