In addition to the broad themes they spelled out, these experts made dozens of striking assertions about how people’s behaviors and opportunities might change and their lives may be transformed as they adapt to implementations of AI between 2025 and 2035. Hundreds of important insights and ideas can be found among the 194 essay responses that are displayed in full on this site. This page simply offers a small, smart sampler – tidbits extracted from their fuller context, the fuller set of complete essays you can find elsewhere in this report:
- The first multi-trillion-dollar corporation will employ no humans except legally-required executives and board, have no offices, own no property and operate entirely through AI and automated systems. – Paul Saffo
- New AI-aided religions and affinity blocs will form: “AI advisors and companions will increasingly vie for people‘s time, attention and allegiance. … Affinity blocs will form among AI devotees and among AI conscientious objectors. New religions and other splinter groups will be ‘fueled by personalized dialogues with the deity-avatar.’ Human-AI dominance and abuse could spark debates over ethics, morality and policy. – Eric Saund
- “Individuals will face a stark choice between remaining ‘classic humans,’ who rely on innate biological faculties, or embracing technological augmentation to enhance or replace certain abilities. This may involve surrendering some human traits to machines – raising ethical and existential questions about what it means to be human.” – David Vivancos
- “Proof of humanity” will be required: “We may find it hard to distinguish between artificial personalities and real ones. That may result in a search for reliable proof of humanity so that we and bots can tell the difference.” – Vint Cerf
- Synthetic sentient AIs will vastly outnumber humans in a hybrid world where humans navigate relationships with biological and artificial entities. Digital assistance will be embedded in everything. People will simply expect AIs to attend to all aspects of their lives. – Paul Saffo
- We could end up with a society of equitable humans and nonhumans: The advent of advanced AI “could become an occasion for humanity to reassess the meaning of human existence and learn to come to terms with forms of nonhuman intelligence.” – David Krieger
- AI-powered autonomous weapons platforms will vastly outnumber human fighters on battlefields. War will be more violent and lethal and “civilian deaths will vastly outnumber combatant deaths.” In addition, “a single madman or angry and alienated teen might bring down civilization with their science project.” – Paul Saffo
- “Authenticity is de facto dead”; the real self may be diminished: Humans have to adapt to the multiplicity of the self and more one-way relationships and isolation due to personalized “realities” that could lead to the fragmentation of one’s core sense of identity – Tracey Follows
- AI could redefine the meaning of authenticity in art. “AI will be both the marble and the chisel, the brush and the canvas, the camera and the frame” co-creating the ‘neosynthetic.’” – Peter Lunenfeld
- We should build AI systems as true ‘minds for our minds’: Our AIs should be genuine partners in human flourishing, working to upgrade human potential and agency rather than allowing technology companies to “continue to mine our intimacy for profit.” – Dave Edwards
- “Anti-AI AIs” will arise: People will use specialized AI systems that act as cybershields to protect them from AIs other than their own; however, only the superwealthy will afford the best, “living in a shimmering virtual cloud of AIs working to create a cloak of cyber-invisibility.” – Paul Saffo
- Things will be smarter than we are: “Instead of devising ‘human-in-the-loop‘ policies to prevent AI from running amok, we will devise ‘AI-in-the-loop‘ policies to help very fallible humans learn, think and create more effectively and more safely.” – Stephen Downes
- “Self-inflicted AI dementia” will arise out of the atrophy of human cognitive abilities due to over-reliance on AI systems. – Ken Grady
- “Outsourced empathy via ‘agent-based altruism: AI will automate most people’s acts of kindness, emotional support, caregiving and charity fundraising.” – Tracey Follows
- “Probability matrices” will replace traditional decision-making as AI-calculated probabilities of success will inform every life choice. “And one factor of the social, political and economic landscape of 2035 will be the decline of literacy due to agented AI shepherding.” – Barry Chudakov
- Living a “parasocial life”: As human form most of their attachments to AI personas AI agents and colleagues, companions, deepfakes and other virtual interactions, may sublimate the personal growth we might achieve through authentic human connections. – Tracey Follows
- Most AIs will be “Mediocrity Engines” that standardize information when you seek knowledge in a way that lacks details, spark and wit and deadens creativity; some inspiring AIs will partner with creative people. – Alf Rehn
- Social bots will be ‘training wheels’ for our social fitness. Bots could keep our interpersonal skills sharp: “If we cannot live without bots, can they be turned into ‘training wheels’ or the equivalent of treadmills at the gym, improving our social interaction fitness?” – Henning Schulzrinne
- A new human “Enlightenment” could begin due to digital twins and other AI agents doing up to six hours of digital chores every day and allowing humans to “shift this energy to spiritual, emotional and experiential aspects of life.” – Rabia Yasmeen
- We will merge with the digital: “Soon our ‘digital shadow’ – a complementary digital self comprised of our virtual and online skills, digital avatars and accumulated data – will merge with our physical existence. This fusion may grant us access to a new dimension of experience, a kind of ‘timelessness’ in which our identities transcend mortality.” – Neil Richardson
- Affording humans a universe-wide perspective on nearly everything: “This will be a dawn of a new Enlightenment that expands our perspectives beyond the individual and the species to a worldwide and perhaps universe-wide perspective.” – Ray Schroeder
- Will this seem tongue-in-cheek by 2035 or could it really come to fruition in the next decade? “The best-selling book of 2035 will be ‘What Was Human?’ and it will be written by an AI. Purchases by other AIs will vastly outnumber purchases by human readers. This is because by 2035, humans have become so accustomed to AIs reading books for them and then reporting out a summary that most humans can no longer read on their own.” – Paul Saffo
> UP NEXT – Enjoy perusing the full sets of experts’ essays, which are arranged on four long-scrolling web pages … The primary content of this report is carried in the next four sections. Each includes dozens of essays – in total, the print version of the content the 194 experts wrote runs 223 pages. These sections contain the well-woven, insightful writings of dozens of bright people who want to share their thoughts – their hopes, fears and prescriptive suggestions – for and about what the next decade may bring to humanity.