What Are We Building? A Free Illustrated Book About the Future We Choose Together
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a question that sounds simple but really isn’t: what are we actually building toward?
We spend so much of life earning, buying, competing, hurrying, and trying to get ahead. Some people are simply trying to survive, and that is different. But once we have the tools to do more, I think we owe ourselves a bigger question about purpose—individually and as a civilization.
Why I wrote it
What Are We Building? grew out of my frustration with how easily progress gets reduced to speed, money, output, and who can get ahead of whom. I wanted to ask that question in a way a child could understand without turning it into a lecture.
The story follows Nia as she starts asking what all that hurry is for. The answer does not come from one person, one country, or one machine. It comes from listening, drawing, arguing, revising, and imagining together.
Technology helps. People remain responsible.
AI and other powerful systems are part of the background of this idea, but the book is not about handing our future over to machines. In the story, the machines help with the numbers and the heavy lifting. People still have to decide what matters, check the work, and keep asking who is being left out.
That distinction matters to me. Better tools do not automatically create a better society. We still have to choose what those tools are for.
The question at the heart of the book
The children in the story stop asking, “How can we have more than them?” and begin asking, “What can we make possible together?”
That is really the whole book for me. Clean water. Healthy soil. Homes. Time with family. Music. Animals. Public spaces. People doing things they love. Countries cooperating without needing to become identical. Technology serving human priorities instead of defining them.
And above all: take care of our world, and take care of each other.
Read it, share it, argue with it
I’m making the complete illustrated digital edition available free because I would rather this start conversations than sit behind a paywall. Read it with your kids. Send it to a teacher. Share it with someone who sees the future differently than you do.
You do not have to agree with every idea behind it. The point is to ask the question seriously.
This is the complete 24-page illustrated digital reading edition. It preserves the approved story and finished artwork. It is not a commercial press-certified file; printer-specific trim, bleed, color, spine, and wrap-cover requirements would be a separate production step.
— Chris Manzano
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