Nikolai Davydov, co-founder of the VC fund DVC (backer of Perplexity, Etched, and Thinking Machines Lab), talked with his kids — nine and sixteen — about the future. Both are growing up in Silicon Valley. His son is glued to a computer most of the day, loves coding, and attends Alpha School, where the entire curriculum gets compressed into two hours a day via adaptive apps, and kids work with "guides" instead of teachers. His daughter couldn't care less about tech and wants to become a doctor. One thing unites them: neither is moved by what technology could in principle make possible.
A promise that skipped a generation
Davydov writes that at his age, the future looked like a promise — space, cures for incurable diseases, unlimited energy, a flight to Australia and back in an hour. All of it looked like something his generation was going to invent and build. His kids see the future differently — as something that will simply happen to them: more AI, more robots, more screens, a world with less of the human in it. At best you adapt to it — you don't shape it.
> They don't feel like authors of the future. More like its subjects.
It's clearly not just about his own family — the post pulled in 120 comments.
What the comments say
Olga, CTO and co-founder of an AI startup, recalls that twenty years ago, access to technology belonged to a few, which gave you the feeling of living inside science fiction. Today anyone can ship a product, and money flows to weak ideas while skipping strong ones.
> Generation Alpha is jumping onto a train that's already leaving. We jumped into the future on a rocket ship.
One commenter, who runs AI products at Yandex, frames it through the growth curve. Millennials grew up at the start of it — they saw how primitive the present was and could easily extrapolate what the world would become. Today's teenagers live inside the curve; they don't remember a world without advanced AI, so their baseline already is that future.
> They inherited the future we dreamed about, but not the experience of watching it take shape.
Dmitry Kossakovsky, a physical chemist at Caltech, comes at it from another angle. Everything Davydov dreamed of required breakthroughs and decades of waiting. What's happening with AI now happens in six months, sometimes less — it's genuinely hard to yearn for something that's going to happen by next summer anyway. His kids, he says, get far more excited about a trip to a faraway country or a new hiking route.
A lesson for Davydov himself
The most uncomfortable comment was aimed at Davydov directly: he's the one who put his son in a school where the path to knowledge is optimized down to two hours a day — and he's surprised the kid doesn't feel like an author of the future.
Alpha School is rolling out around fifty campuses this school year, and its claims about doubled learning speed rest on its own internal numbers, not independently verified ones. So the question of a route someone else designed for you is going to keep coming up for kids — and plenty of adults. What to do with that frustration, though, is anyone's guess.