By 2035, Synthetic Sentiences Will Vastly Outnumber Us; We Will Reinvent Ourselves, Our Communities and Our Cultures
“Tools inevitably transform both the tool maker and tool user. To paraphrase McLuhan, first we invent our technologies, and then we use our technologies to reinvent ourselves, as individuals, as…
We Must Train People to be Self-Aware, to Understand Their Own Motivations and to Understand that AI’s Goals Are Those of the Organizations and Systems That Control It
“The short answer is: The future depends on us. The slightly longer answer: The future depends on how we use AI and how well we equip the next generation to…
By 2035, ‘Authenticity is De Facto Dead’: Change Could Lead to Multiplicity of the Self, One-Way Relationships and Isolation Through Personalized ‘Realities’
“In my work as a professional futurist, I have developed a number of futures scenarios and emerging-future personas. The following list highlights some of the specific trends that I see…
AIs Can Help Humans Really See the World, Teach Us About Ourselves, Help Us Discover New Truths and – Ideally – Inspire Us to Explore in New Ways
“I choose to spell out a positive vision about the possible impact of AI on humans because there is already a lot of negative commentary – much of which I…
Humans Can Shift Their Focus From Deepening Their Intelligence to Achieving True Enlightenment in an Age in Which AI Handles Their Day-to-Day Needs
“Let me propose a scenario: Imagine that it is 2035. Humans’ dependence on AI has redefined the essence of being human. Every human boasts a personalized AI assistant, and a…
Human Competence Will Atrophy; AIs Will Clash Like Gladiators in Law, Business and Politics; Religious Movements Will Worship Deity Avatars; Trust Will be Bought and Sold
“Much of whatever people used to think was special about being human will have to be redefined. It sure won’t be ‘intelligence.’ Opportunities will abound to suffer crises of purpose…
By 2035, Supernormal Stimuli Engineered to Trigger Humans and Individually Calibrated AI Companions Will Profoundly Reshape Human Experience
“By 2035, the integration of AI into daily life will profoundly reshape human experience through increasingly sophisticated supernormal stimuli – artificial experiences engineered to trigger human psychological responses more intensely…
Expect More Isolation and Polarization, a Loss of Cognitive Depth, and a Muddling of ‘Facts’ and ‘Truth’ That Undermines Trust and Our Capacity for Moral Judgment
“I see four main impacts of artificial intelligence on digitally connected people’s daily lives. In brief, they are the: loss of mental capacities; reduction of social interactions with other humans;…
Expect Significant Impact by 2035: Imperfect Systems Will Be Routinely Used By People and AIs, Creating Potential for Considerable Turmoil and Problems With Unwarranted Trust
“Given the past decade of AI research results, especially the emergence of generative, multi-modal large language models (LLMs), we can anticipate significant impact by 2035. These tools are surprising in…
Dangers Arise as AI becomes Humanlike. How Do We Retain a Sense of Human Dignity? They Will Become Self-Aware and ‘Inner Lights of Consciousness Will Come On for Them’
“AI large language models [LLMs] are not actually intelligences, they are information-retrieval tools. As such they are astonishing but also fundamentally limited and even flawed. Basically, the hallucinations generated by…