It’s not just venture capitalists and billionaires making important predictions about A.I. A new, elaborate 232-page report from the Pew Research Center canvassed more than 300 experts across industries about the changes they predict by 2035 from technological developments.
The report compiles the views of researchers, developers, and business leaders in global organizations, technology companies, and research labs to organize a wealth of perspectives on current technological trends. From economic industry experts like Alon Halevy, the director of Meta’s Reality Labs, to Eileen Donahoe, the executive director of Stanford Global Digital Policy Incubator, the combined predictions of these artists, authors, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, and academics sketch a look into the future.
While there’s an overarching message gleaned from the report, there’s also a variety of personal, philosophical, religious, and political ideologies at play in the individual responses.
So what does the future hold for humanity? Well, four out of 10 experts said they were just as concerned as they were excited “about the changes in the ‘humans-plus-tech’ evolution,” according to the report.
“We have been collecting experts’ thoughts about the rising impact of digital networks for 20 years now, in more than 40 reports, and their fears have never before been so profound,” Janna Anderson, an author of the report and professor, told Fortune in an email.
She added that while the report predicts significant new benefits in the future, 79% of experts said they have concerns about how digital trends—especially the rapid evolution and spread of A.I.—will exercise influence over people’s lives.
That majority comprises the 42% of experts who said they are equally excited and concerned and the 37% who said they are more concerned than excited about the changes they expect in the “humans-plus-tech” evolution by 2035.
The report synthesizes a warning: Our future depends on the “good or ill intent” of the next generation as they build the knowledge ecosystem, to either serve the public good or serve the current highly extractive iteration of the web, Anderson said.
The bad: Skynet or something worse?
Today, it’s pretty difficult to read about A.I. without coming across predictions for humanity’s demise. Experts, while nuanced and varied, certainly didn’t stray from this in Pew’s report.
The commonly discussed fears are present: plutocracy and dictatorial reign, social collapse, a mental health crisis due to isolation, losing a sense of “truth” and scientific accuracy, and, of course, the Skynet future of total domination through autonomous warfare of the nuclear and cyber variety.
Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, sees the future as reminiscent of a piece from author and activist Wendell Berry. Berry wrote that “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
“This is my greatest fear. From the point the technological Singularity was first proposed, the marriage of man and machine has proceeded at a pace that even worries the boosters of artificial general intelligence (AGI),” Taplin writes.
It might come as no surprise that one of the more pervasive themes in the report is the fear of profit and power-driven incentives in economics and politics.
Jim Fenton, an Internet Engineering Task Force leader and 35-year veteran of the digital industry, says human rights will become an oxymoron. Science will be “hijacked” and serve only the interests of a potential ruling dictator class, and health and well-being will be exclusively reserved for a privileged few, he writes.
“Censorship, social credit, and around-the-clock surveillance will become ubiquitous worldwide; there is nowhere to hide from global dictatorship,” Fenton writes. “Human knowledge will wane and there will be a growing idiocracy due to the public’s digital brainwashing and the snowballing of unreliable, misleading, false information.”
The report also brings up a world of specific—perhaps more frightening—hypotheticals that in some ways are already playing out.
Howard Rheingold, an internet sociologist and author, along with others, wrote that their worry is less about generative A.I.’s ability to create 40,000 chemical weapons in six hours or a Wired magazine essay he recalls from 23 years ago—“Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”— about affordable desktop wetlabs that are capable of creating malicious organisms. It’s more about how online hackers and the like will use the incredibly powerful technology that is coming.
“A good way to think about a proposed technology is to ask: What would 4chan do with it? Connecting computational biology to wetlab synthesizers is just a matter of money and expertise. What will 4chan do with LLM tools?” Rheingold writes, referring to the online message board that’s home to many hackers.
The bright side: It could be a techno-topia, the “golden age of collaboration”
Many experts in the report temper their fears with already ongoing proof of a positive future.
Deanna Zandt, writer and public speaker, is hopeful. The future of technology will provide freedom from the “totalitarian capitalist systems we live in.” People will be able to connect and find meaning to life in unprecedented ways.
“My own first love of the internet was finding out that I wasn’t alone in how I felt or in the things I liked and finding community in those things. Even though many of those protocols and platforms have been co-opted in service of profit-making, developers continue to find brilliant paths of opening up human connection in surprising ways,” Zandt writes.
Zandt and other experts say people could be able to engage in higher thinking, social and political interactions more regularly.
These experts also paint a picture of a future with the tools and smarts to fix many of humanity’s greatest issues, like wealth inequality, climate change, and cybersecurity. Industries like health care will be completely revolutionized through innovations and wonder drugs from A.I. and supercomputing. Diseases like cancer or antibiotic resistance will be curable.
“These types of utopian or techno-solutionist predictions have been made before. However, deployment, adoption, and adaptation to these technologies will finally start to occur,” Isabel Pedersen, director of the Digital Life Institute at Ontario Tech University, writes.
It’s safe to say that even the most damning voices are predicated on the fact that it’s not already too late. With the proper regulation and effort, the future can be what humanity dreams. Even in the future, it might not be too late to change.
“When we awake from this transhumanist fever dream of human perfection that bears little resemblance to the actual world we’ve managed to create, I think steady efforts at preserving the core values of the humanities will have proved prescient. This massive and imposed technological infusion will be seen as a chimera. Perhaps we’ll even learn how to use some of it wisely,” Tom Valovic, a journalist and author, writes.
