Europe 2031
What getting AI wrong means for us
For months now, most of my evenings and weekends have been filled with one project: Europe 2031.
A group of incredibly smart and caring people found me through some of my unhinged posts on X. I was working on a scenario piece about Europe and AI. They had the same plan. After a few meetings, we discovered that we view the world in much the same way. AI had moved us, changed us, and we could no longer unsee what we had seen.
But most of Europe has not yet absorbed what AI is about to do to us. The few who have are not saying it loudly enough…and time is running out.
Europe 2031 is a five-year scenario of the continent’s slide into irrelevance: how AI is driving it, and what can still be done.
Rather than a prediction, it is an exercise in disciplined imagination: internally consistent, traceable to current political conditions, and intended to make the cost of Europe’s inaction on AI very concrete.
We are researchers, scientists and investors who have advised European leaders, co-authored national AI strategies, built and funded these systems from the inside. We have no interest in hype and we deeply care about this continent.
Plenty in Silicon Valley have already written Europe off. We don’t accept that.
Instead, we believe the current trajectory of AI calls for the most ambitious political and economic agenda in the history of post-war Europe. Unless we embark on it now, Europe will lose the ability to shape its own future. We will end up economically and politically sidelined, with values we cannot enforce, social welfare systems we cannot fund, technologies we cannot govern, and an alliance that cannot hold.
Positioning yourself at an angle to the world takes courage. I don't expect everyone to agree with our work. In fact, I would love for people to disagree, because it would mean we finally start having a conversation we have so far mostly conducted in fancy words and little else: sovereignty. We talk about it constantly. But feeling it in every bone, thinking concretely through what the future means for us, what truly meaningful leverage would take and which hard trade-offs we must accept to get ahead: that work has barely begun. I hope our piece moves it forward.
If this moment doesn’t give us licence to be bold, to find a voice and give shape to the future, its threats and even more its potential, then we will all end up like Caroline, one of two protagonists in our scenario: ashamed and angry, haunted by the ifs and buts and maybes of what could have been.
Europe, it is time to reclaim our future.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas, Botteghe Oscure, 1953.
A huge thanks to my incredible co-authors Michiel Bakker, Daan Juijn, Stan van Baarsen, Lily Stelling, Philip Fox, and Alex Petropoulos, as well as to Tom Chivers for his great copywriting and editing.
Thank you!
🤗👏 "We don’t accept that."