Release date April 2, 2025 – A majority of global technology experts say the likely magnitude of change in humans’ native capacities and behaviors as they adapt to artificial intelligence (AI) will be “deep and meaningful,” or even “fundamental and revolutionary” over the next decade. This new report covers the results from the Imagining the Digital Future Center’s 18th “Future of Digital Life” canvassing of a large set of global technology experts. These experts wrote detailed accounts predicting the future of humans in 2035.

PDFs Available: [Executive Summary] [News Release] [Full Report]

Nearly 300 of the experts in this early 2025 study responded to a series of three quantitative questions, and nearly 200 wrote predictive essays in how the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and humans might affect essential qualities of being human in the next decade. Many are concerned that the deepening adoption of AI systems over the next decade will negatively alter how humans think, feel, act and relate to one another. They predicted whether change will be mostly for the better or for the worse in the 12 categories you see below – in the table of contents.

• Introductory section: Experts Predict Significant Change in Humans’ Ways of Thinking, Being and Doing as They Adapt to AI
• Likely changes in 12 key human capacities and behaviors
  • Capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex concepts
  • Social and emotional intelligence
  • Confidence in our own native abilities
  • Trust in widely shared values and cultural norms
  • Mental well-being
  • Empathy and application of moral judgment
  • Individual agency, the ability to act independently in the world
  • Sense of self-identity, meaning and purpose in life
  • Native metacognition, the ability to think analytically about thinking
  • Native curiosity and capacity to learn
  • Native decision-making and problem-solving abilities
  • Native innovative thinking and creativity
• A sampling of compelling ideas found among the dozens of essays in this report
• Essays Part I: Experts predict expected change by 2035
• Essays Part I Continued: More predictions for the future of the human OS in 2035
• Essays Part II: Societal forces shaping AI and human change
• Essays Part III: Closing thoughts on being human in 2035
• Research Methodology and Acknowledgements