Euspesia in Eufuturia: Hope as a Governance Principle for the EU AI Act

Two concepts are missing from current AI governance discourse — not because they are obscure, but because they are so fundamental that frameworks have passed over them in favour of proxies.

The first is euspesia (from Greek eu-, good, and Latin spes, hope — with deliberate resonance to the European institutional horizon). Euspesia is not optimism. It is the structural orientation of a person toward a future that remains genuinely open: the capacity to project oneself into a not-yet, to act in the present in response to a future that has not yet been written. Without euspesia, persons do not merely feel pessimistic — they lose access to futurity as an experiential dimension. The clinical literature on severe depression documents this precisely: the depressed patient does not say things will go badly; they say I cannot see tomorrow (Beck et al., 1974). The future has not become threatening. It has become inaccessible.

The second is eufuturia (from eu-, good, and Latin futurum — anchored also to the Futurium platform as a space of open institutional imagination). Eufuturia is not merely an open future. It is the good future: the future that becomes possible when euspesia has found its space and been allowed to unfold. It is hope that has become world. Eufuturia is the realisation of euspesia — not its container, but its fulfilment. Where euspesia is the orientation, eufuturia is the horizon that orientation was always moving toward. A future that has been fully predicted, pre-populated, and optimised by AI systems before it is lived is not eufuturia. It is a schedule. And a schedule, however comfortable, cannot be hoped toward — because it has already been written without the person who must inhabit it (Valente, 2026a).

Between euspesia and eufuturia lies the concept that makes both possible: the potential space of hope. Extended from Winnicott’s notion of potential space — the intermediate area of experience between inner reality and external world where play, creativity, and meaning-making occur (Winnicott, 1971) — the potential space of hope is the experiential field in which a person and their open future meet. It is neither purely subjective nor purely objective. It is the space where infuturation happens: where the self projects toward a future that is real enough to orient action, yet open enough to remain genuinely inhabitable (Heidegger, 1927/1962). Hope, in Bloch’s sense, is not a passive wish but an active anticipatory consciousness oriented toward what has not yet become (Bloch, 1954/1986). Without the potential space, euspesia has nowhere to go and eufuturia has no one to realise it. The sequence collapses: no space, no unfolding, no good future.

Then the question that governance must face directly: if the future is fully determined — predicted, pre-populated, optimised before it is lived — where will the potential space of hope be located? Not destroyed, perhaps, but progressively displaced: pushed into the margins of experience that AI systems have not yet reached, shrinking with every efficiency gain. In a fully deterministic future, hope has nowhere to stand. And if hope has nowhere to stand, eufuturia cannot be reached — not because the future is bad, but because it has been arranged before anyone could move toward it.

This potential space is fragile. It can be destroyed by loss, by clinical depression, by relational foreclosure (Shneidman, 1985). And it can be eroded — gradually, without malicious intent — by AI systems designed to eliminate the friction, uncertainty, and indeterminacy on which it depends (Valente, 2026b; 2026c). A system that anticipates every preference before it is expressed, that arranges tomorrow before the person has decided about today, that smooths every friction before it is felt, does not merely reduce effort. It consumes the architectural material of hope. It produces what the CGF has termed hope closure: not despair, which is still oriented toward a future, but the quiet disappearance of the future as a space of possibility — and therefore the impossibility of eufuturia (Valente, 2026a).

The EU AI Act addresses risks, rights, transparency, and human oversight. These are necessary. But they are downstream of a more fundamental question: do the AI systems we govern preserve the conditions under which persons can move from euspesia toward eufuturia — from the orientation of hope toward its realisation?

The governance implication is concrete. AI systems deployed in life-domain applications — health, education, career development, relational life — should be assessed not only for their risks and biases, but for their eufuturial impact: whether they preserve or foreclose the potential space within which euspesia can unfold into a good future. This is a natural extension of existing EU AI Act provisions on human oversight and fundamental rights, applied to the existential infrastructure that makes those rights meaningful (Valente, 2026d).

Euspesia cannot be regulated into existence. But the conditions of its realisation can be protected. The right to an unwritten future — to move through one’s own temporal existence rather than inhabit a pre-arranged simulation of it — belongs among the foundational principles of AI governance in a human-centred Europe.

The Futurium platform is itself an exercise in eufuturia: a space where the good future of AI governance has not yet been written, and where the orientation of hope still has somewhere to go. That is not an accident. It is the condition of good governance.

References

Beck, A.T., Weissman, A., Lester, D., & Trexler, L. (1974). The measurement of pessimism: The Hopelessness Scale. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(6), 861–865.

Bloch, E. (1954/1986). The Principle of Hope. (Trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice & P. Knight). MIT Press.

Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time. (Trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson). Harper & Row.

Shneidman, E.S. (1985). Definition of Suicide. John Wiley & Sons.

Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications.

Valente, S. (2026a). The Space Inhabited by Hopes: On the Necessary Incompleteness of Futures. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20617743
Valente, S. (2026b). The Interposition Problem: A Formal Model of Delegation Boundaries in Human–Agentic AI–World Interaction. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20607306

Valente, S. (2026c). No-Friction Failure Model (NFFM). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20546168

Valente, S. (2026d). The Right to Friction: Seven Regulatory Proposals for AI Cognitive Autonomy under the EU AI Act. Futurium / Apply AI Alliance.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This contribution was drafted with the assistance of AI tools. All theoretical frameworks, conceptual developments, and governance proposals are the intellectual work of the author.