Válasz Online — The Next Sixteen Years (essay)

My essay published by Válasz Online on 30 April 2026 — translated from the Hungarian original.

The Next Sixteen Years

Credible, well-prepared people are entering government in Hungary now. I know Dávid Vitézy personally and respect him greatly — it is a huge joy to see him in this role. Judit Lannert is one of the most recognized researchers of Hungarian public education, and what I have read from her about creative learning and equal opportunity spoke from my heart. András Kármán at finance, with decades of central-bank and EBRD experience. Anita Orbán at foreign affairs. I could go on.

Now the time of trust has come. I believe the most we can do is give them our trust. Let them start working. Instead of everyone telling the new education minister what her most important task is, let us trust Judit Lannert. That is how we can help her the most. All of them.

As a company founder I learned this on my own skin. When we managed to hire excellent people, the most important thing was not to direct them but to give them space and trust. That is when they could truly do great work. It is worth thinking this way now. The members of the government finally do not stand above us — they work for us. Let us give them trust and room to move.

But that is not everything. I often see us as a culture that expects the solution from the state, or from the West. My experience says otherwise. Everywhere I have been and worked, I saw that small, active communities set things in motion.

The great causes, too, were born of small steps. With a few people.

So what should we do with all our energy, all our will to act? I would like to tell you briefly about something I have lived through several times. Beside the state, beyond the state, we too have work to do. As civil society, as people, even as companies. And in my experience this can be a very exciting and happy period: working for something that matters to us, and that gives value to others as well. To our community, our union, the world.

Living in reality again

One of the most oppressive experiences of our country, for me, was that we could not deal with our truly important, long-term future. We fought daily not to sink back into some lukewarm stagnant water, or we battled a cruel cynicism.

I am endlessly grateful that we get the chance to live in reality again.

I would like us to talk now about how we create and contribute — from here, with our own special language and culture — to the future of our civilization. I believe this outlook helps a great deal. It inspires. And it moves quickly past the traumas Orbán caused. (Accountability must not move past them — but I hope that from now on, that is not everyone's task.)

Two personal experiences

I am Ádám Somlai-Fischer.

I was still a university student, an exchange student in Stockholm around 2003, when we studied robotics in a design course and everyone had to build moving, interactive systems. I had no money, so I salvaged parts from discarded devices and cheap Chinese toys. It quickly turned out that this way one could create with electronics not only more cheaply, but more freely. The results were often more interesting — and everyone could see how accessible this world is. The method drew attention fast, and more and more design universities invited me to teach: Milan, Norway, the Netherlands, London. Even students without an engineering background learned to use it, and became able to create interactive experiences, smart spaces and devices.

In 2006 this grew into a larger exhibition at the Reorient architecture biennale. We built handmade interactive installations out of cheap children's toys, and showed a vision of the future where technology can be taken into one's own hands again — not through expensive systems, but with simple, accessible tools. This resonated around the world. Hundreds of publications and many lectures followed; our works travelled from Tokyo to Paris — even a hacked, meowing toy cat made a cover page.

The other, globally most relevant work I could create with my partners became Prezi. It made free-form, visual storytelling and thinking available to 160 million people, among them countless students all over the world.

But where did the idea come from? Like many others, I learn and think primarily not in text but visually. There are many of us like this, yet education is overwhelmingly text-based.

I solved my own problem, and along the way we could help many.

My favourite memory is when a barista in a New York café saw the Prezi sticker on my laptop and came over: "You helped me through college." Our software carried him through the difficulty that a text-based university meant.

I know others have achieved far more. Katalin Karikó, for one, saved a world of human lives. I do not mean to say I know what anyone should do, or to overvalue my own impact. But I do know that this kind of work brought me very happy and active years.

And perhaps this is the most important: we should re-enter the European community as equal partners, as a creating party. Let us not wait for solutions — let us proactively offer what we are good at.

That is what I wish for many in Hungary for the next sixteen years.

How does one find such a task?

It can be anything. Let everyone start where something already hurts them, or already excites them. The two are often the same. Let me mention a pattern that often works.

The starting point is often exposure: the feeling that we must solve something that is of value to others too, but that we ourselves need urgently.

Finnish education is a good example. A dear friend, the Finnish curator Juha Huuskonen, put it to me most precisely: for decades, across political groups, there was consensus in Finnish politics that education must be given priority support. That is not self-evident in a country where most voters lived from fishing and agriculture. The motivation was not theoretical. The historical experience of a small country, and the fear of a Russian invasion, created a simple national minimum: we are few, we can leave no one behind. Thus grew an educational culture that is good for every child. In Finland today the local school is good enough — you don't need connections to find a "better" place. Exposure, in the end, produced a world-class system.

The same logic worked in Barcelona. I spent a lot of time there, worked there, we lived there with my family. Tourism had nearly suffocated the city. Public spaces were overcrowded all year round; the everyday city of the people living there was disappearing. Ada Colau did not start as a politician but as an activist, fighting evictions after the 2008 crisis. When she became mayor, out of that exposure an answer was born: the superilles, the system of superblocks — urban spaces that belong again to the people who live there. Today this model is watched and followed worldwide. And we are trying it in Budapest too — in more and more places, I hope.

Local necessity, global solution.

The great challenges of the next sixteen years

Let us play with the thought: which are the challenges that will touch us soon, and where — with much work, science, innovation, attention and sensitivity — we can give answers both to ourselves and to the world?

Take Yuval Noah Harari's much-cited three challenges, and see whether we have work to do with them.

Artificial intelligence. We will not be the ones to release the next great model — that takes enormous resources today. But we will feel its impact exactly the same: suffering it and building on it at once. Why couldn't we give a relevant answer to how one should learn with it? How to use it and where to limit it, at school and at work? Where it is very useful, and where dangerous?

The environmental crisis. Here is a concrete task that concerns us in particular: water retention. Válasz Online has written much about this, rightly. Hungary's geography and hydrology are such that whatever we learn here about retaining water, about land use, about rethinking agriculture, will have global relevance. Exposure can inspire again. This too can be a "Finnish education" — in our own way.

The danger of nuclear war is Harari's third challenge. Here we truly start at a disadvantage: we are not a nuclear power. But precisely for that reason we are among those whose existential interest is nuclear disarmament. Alliances can be built, and pressure applied together to shrink the arsenals. And we have an experience that can be of value here as well: in recent years we learned how an autocracy can be replaced peacefully. This knowledge is already sought abroad — representatives of our independent press are invited to speak about it. The lesson is simple: with persistent work, smaller actors can influence larger ones. That logic may hold for handling the nuclear threat too — for the sake of our common survival.

That is the whole invitation. I do not want to tell you what to work on — only to pass on the mood. Let us trust each other; let us trust the state — without expecting it to solve everything. Let us find our own task, one that matters to us and to others. Here in Europe, in the world.

A rare historical window is opening now. Let us switch into creating mode.

The next sixteen years begin now.