Lara Natale / Mar 2026
Roxana Mînzatu, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness, and Glenn Micallef, European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport. Photo: European Union 2026
The EU just made a historic commitment to future generations. But when it comes to the technologies that will shape their world, it's playing it dangerously safe.
Something remarkable happened in Brussels with little fanfare. For the first time in its history, the European Union published its Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, explicitly designed to protect people who can't vote yet: future generations, whose lives will be shaped by the decisions we make today.
Getting 27 countries to agree on anything is hard enough; this genuine attempt to build long-term thinking into how Europe governs itself is groundbreaking. Commissioner Glenn Micallef, who drove this initiative through the College of Commissioners, deserves real credit.
The Strategy emerged from something equally rare: real citizen participation. A panel of 150 Europeans from across the Member States spent months deliberating on what we owe to future generations. Their 24 recommendations shaped the Strategy from the ground up. At a time when democracy feels increasingly hollow and technocratic, this bottom-up approach feels like a breath of fresh air.
However, the Strategy has a weak link.
To be serious about protecting future generations, you can't avoid the reality that their world will be shaped by technologies. AI, biotechnologies, neurotechnologies, climate interventions are technologies that will reshape how we live, work and govern ourselves. These technologies are being built right now and the decisions shaping them will outlast the people making them.
While these might sound like distant sci-fi scenarios, the reality is these are the focus of decisions being made in boardrooms, laboratories, and government offices today, with consequences that stretch across generations.
Take solar radiation modification: the controversial idea of reflecting sunlight back to space to cool the planet. It sounds like science fiction, but research is already underway. If deployed, it could affect weather patterns, agriculture, and ecosystems for centuries. The people who would live with those consequences will be our grandchildren and their grandchildren, yet they have no say in whether it happens.
The EU's new Strategy talks a good game about involving citizens in long-term decisions. But when it comes to these transformative technologies, it treats them almost entirely as economic opportunities rather than governance challenges. Digital skills, competitiveness, innovation — all important, but not nearly the whole story.
Who gets to decide how these technologies are developed and deployed? Whose interests count when we're making choices that can't be undone? What do we owe to people who can't speak for themselves yet?
These are democratic questions as much as technical ones.
There's another dimension the strategy undersells - Europe is not alone in the world. These deliberations are happening at the same time competitors are moving ahead. China and the United States are racing ahead on AI development and biotechnology, while the market is overflowing with new neurotechnology start ups and patents. The decisions made outside the bloc will shape the technological landscape that future Europeans inherit.
The EU has tools to respond: policy coordination, massive funding programmes, the soft power of its regulatory standards. The Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness could have been the framework to use all of these tools strategically. Instead, it mentions them in passing while focusing on safer ground like youth employment and housing.That's a missed opportunity.
But the Strategy's very breadth creates openings for those willing to use them.
Firstly, the European Group on Ethics — the EU's advisory body on ethical issues — has been given a formal mandate to examine "fair digital futures." That is a direct channel for concrete proposals on how to govern AI, biotechnology, and other emerging technologies with future generations in mind.
Second, the EU is developing a Futures Balance Tool, an AI-powered system to help policymakers think through long-term consequences across the piece. It's still being designed, so there's an opportunity to shape what it measures and what risks it flags. But the tool will only be as useful as the foresight behind it. Right now, Europe tends to regulate technologies after they’ve already reshaped markets and lives. A tool that simply models the future based on today’s assumptions will just formalise the habit. To actually protect future generations, the Tool needs to be built around anticipatory methods that ask what’s plausible and overlooked, not just what’s probable and convenient.
Crucially, the Strategy commits to a progress report in 2028. That will be the natural moment to assess whether all this talk of intergenerational fairness has translated into real governance reforms - and to push for the technology focus that's currently missing.
The EU has built something genuinely valuable: a framework for thinking beyond electoral cycles, a commitment to citizen participation, and institutional architecture that could last for generations. The question is whether it will have the ambition to apply that framework to the technologies that will matter most.
Future generations won't judge us by the elegance of our political brinksmanship or the elegance of our on-paper strategies. They'll judge us by what we actually governed and what we left to chance.
Right now, on the technologies that will define their world, we're leaving far, far too much to chance.
