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.
This snippet from my contribution was featured (with those from eight others) in the Executive Summary (p. 5):
Over the next decade we will be at a tipping point in deciding whether uses of AI as a tool for both individual and social (collective) intelligence augments humanity or de-augments it. We are now being driven in the wrong direction by the dominating power of the ‘tech-industrial complex,’ but we still have a chance to right that. Will our tools for thought and communication serve their individual users and the communities those users belong to and support, or will they serve the tool builders in extracting value from and manipulating those individual users and their communities?
… If we do not change direction in the next few years, we may, by 2035, descend into a global sociotechnical dystopia that will drain human generativity and be very hard to escape. If we do make the needed changes in direction, we might well, by 2035, be well on the way to a barely imaginable future of increasingly universal enlightenment and human flourishing.
My full contribution is in the full report (p. 112) -- with these snippets in sidebars:
While there is increasingly strong momentum in worsening dehumanization, there is also a growing techlash and entrepreneurial drive that seeks to return individual agency, openness and freedom with the drive to support the human flourishing of the early web era. Many now seek more human-centered technology governance, design architectures and business models.
...Human discourse is, and remains, a social process based on three essential pillars that must work together: Individual Agency, Social Mediation, Reputation. Without the other two pillars, individual agency might lead to chaos or tyranny. But without the pillars of the social mediation ecosystem that focuses collective intelligence and the tracking of reputation to favor the wisdom of the smart crowd – while remaining open to new ideas and values – we will not bend toward a happy middle ground.…We need to return to how society once relied largely on self-governance that avoided the sterile thought control of walled gardens, centrally managed ‘public’ forums and the abuses of company towns. We relied instead on a social mediation ecosystem of individuals participating in and giving legitimacy to communities of interest and value to set norms and socially construct our reality.
I hope you will read my full contribution -- and of course the very insightful other contributions from the many eminent contributors.
