In 2025, Luminary Labs launched the Nowcasting series to examine the structural forces already reshaping American life — demographic change, AI, energy, human connection, and institutional trust. The premise was simple: To make important decisions and place big bets on the future, leaders need to first make sense of the present moment.
Over the past year, we did the work of separating signal from noise — and found that the richest insights often came from conversation. Through interviews and curated convenings, we spoke with over 100 leaders at the forefront of these topics to garner a broad cross-section of perspectives and pressure-test assumptions. What happened next both surprised and delighted us: Rather than belabor the problems, these nowcasters started to co-create solutions with us in live dialogue. And they did so with optimism and joy.
Now, in 2026, we are building on these conversations. In the coming months, we’ll assert concrete positions on what America must build, invest in, or redesign across three domains: health and wellbeing, education and work, and design and infrastructure.
If you or people you know are working on solutions in any of these areas, we’d love to connect.
Health and wellbeing
A majority-older nation will require a deliberate agenda to increase our healthspan through prevention, diagnostics, and a new generation of therapeutics for age-related disease. But the health agenda is not only about the largest older adult cohort in American history; it is equally about the smaller generation inheriting the cost of long-term care. Investing in youth health now — in mental and relational health, as well as physical health and prevention — builds the foundation for a generation that can avoid the most preventable diseases. Alongside that investment, the delivery system itself must be redesigned; this means rethinking workforce, implementing favorable immigration policies for health care workers, and incorporating AI into clinical practice. And none of it is sustainable without a new fiscal architecture — one that confronts the long-term care gap most Americans will eventually face and the shrinking tax base that was never designed to carry the health care costs of a much larger older cohort
Education and work
The purpose of K-12 education has never been more contested — or more consequential. A smaller youth cohort inheriting a larger set of obligations deserves a system built for the world they are actually entering: one that integrates AI, equips students with the relational and critical thinking skills machines cannot replicate, and offers postsecondary pathways — apprenticeships, certificates, community college, and beyond — that match the modern economy. As automation reshapes jobs, reskilling and adult learning move from afterthought to required infrastructure. And undergirding all of it is a more fundamental rethinking of work itself — what humans do best and how we measure contribution. GDP was designed for a different economy, retirement age was set for a different time, and a tax system built on human labor was not designed for a workforce augmented by machines. America needs new frameworks for measuring productivity, structuring worker protections across generations, and funding the public services that an older, AI-augmented workforce will require.
Design and infrastructure
Who we are becoming and the climate we live in should reshape how we design everything: the everyday things we use, the homes we live in, the communities we build, and the energy that powers them. Updating standards, corporate practices, and incentives will make universal design the norm rather than the exception. Our homes and communities demand the same: housing beyond the single-family default and zoning reform that makes the built environments we need possible to build. A new design and infrastructure agenda will require rethinking energy itself, where the transition to sustainable sources is not a technology problem but one of policy, capital, and governance. Climate resilience will be a mandatory input to every investment we make, including the radical ones like managed retreat from regions that can no longer sustain the populations they hold.
