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The next two sections of this report include additional comments from experts, organized under the most common themes found in their responses. These remarks generally echo the sentiments expressed by the experts whose comments are included in earlier sections of this report.
Many of the comments cited in earlier parts of this report reflect the ideas shared in these themes. What follows are additional overall comments from experts on the harmful or menacing evolution of humans and digital tools and systems by 2035.
Daniel S. Schiff, assistant professor and co-director of the Governance and Responsible AI Lab at Purdue University, said, Some of the more concerning impacts in digital life in the next decade could include techno-authoritarian abuses of human rights, continued social and political fracturing augmented by technology and mis-/disinformation, missteps in social AI and social robotics and calcification of subpar governance regimes that preclude greater paradigm shifts in human digital life. As often occurs with emerging technology, we may see innovations introduced without sufficient testing and consideration, leading to scandals and harms as well as more intentional abuses by hostile actors.
Pillars of societal change such as in-person and digital assembly, sharing of ideas inside and outside of borders and institutions of higher education serving as hubs of reform could disappear in the worst case. To the extent that nefarious regimes are able to track and predict dissident ideas and individuals, deeply manipulate information flow and even generate new forms of targeted persuasive disinformation and instill fear, some corners of the world could be locked into particularly horrific status quos. Even less successful efforts here are likely to harm basic human freedoms and rights, including of political, gender, religious and ethnic minorities.
Another fear imagined throughout subsequent historical waves of technology is dehumanization and dissolution of social life through technology (e.g., radio, television, Internet). Yet these fears do not feel anti-scientific, as we have watched the collapsing trust in news media, proliferation of misinformation and disinformation via social media platforms, and fracturing of political groups leading to new levels of affective polarization and outgroup dehumanization in recent decades.
Misinformation in text or audio-visual formats deserves a special call-out here. I might expect ongoing waves of scandal over the next years as various realistic generative capabilities become democratized, imagined harms become realized (in fraud, politics, violence), and news cycles try to make sense of these changes. The next scandal or disaster owing to misinformation seems just around the corner, and many such harms are likely happening that we are not aware of.
There are other reasons to expect digital technology to become more individualized and vivid. Algorithmic recommendations are likely to become more accurate (however accuracy is defined), and increased data, including potentially biometric, physiological, synthetic and even genomic data may feature into these systems. Meanwhile, bigger screens, clever user experience design, and VR and AR technologies could make these informational inputs feel all the more real and pressing.
Pessimistically speaking, this means that communities that amplify our worst impulses and prey upon our weaknesses, and individuals that preach misinformation and hate are likely to be more effective than ever in finding and persuading their audiences. Fortunately, there are efforts to dissipate in combat these trends in current and emerging areas of digital life, but several decades into the Internet age, we have not yet gotten ahead of bad actors and the sometimes surprising negative emergent and feedback effects. We might expect a continuation of some of the negative trends enabled by digital technology already in the 21st century, with new surprises to boot.
In the next decade, it seems likely to me that we will have reached a tipping point where social AI or embodied robots become widely used in settings like education, health care and elderly care. Benefits aside, these tools will still be new, and their ethical implications are only starting to be understood. Empirical research, best practices and regulation will need to play catch-up. If these tools are rolled out too quickly, the potential to harm vulnerable populations is greater. Our excitement here may be greater than our foresight.
And unfortunately, more technology and innovation seem poised to exacerbate inequality (on some important measures) under our current economic system. Even as we progress, many will remain behind. This might be especially true if AI causes acceleration effects, granting additional power to big corporations or companies due to network/data effects, and if international actors do not work tirelessly to ensure that benefits are distributed rather than monopolized. One unfortunate tendency is for rights and other beneficial protections to lag in low-income countries; an unscrupulous corporation may be banned from selling an unsafe digital product or using misleading marketing in one country and decide that another unprotected market exists in a lower-income corner of the world.
The same trends hold for misinformation and content moderation, for digital surveillance, and for unethical labor practices used to prop up digital innovation. What does the periphery look like in the AI era? To prevent some of the most malicious aspects of digital change, we must have a global lens.
Finally, I fear that the optimists of the age may not find the most creative and beneficial reforms take hold. Regulatory efforts that aim to center human rights and well-being may fall somewhat to the banalities of trade negotiations and the power of big technology companies. Companies may become better at ethical design, but also better at marketing it, and it remains unclear how much the public knows whether a digital tool and its designer are ethical or trustworthy. It seems true that there is historically high attention to issues like privacy, cybersecurity, digital misinformation, deepfakes, algorithmic bias and so on.
Yet even for areas where experts have identified best practices for years or decades, economic and political systems are slow to change, and incentives and timelines remain deeply unaligned to well-being. Elections continue to be run poorly, products continue to be dangerous and those involved continue to find workarounds to minimize the impact of governance reforms on their bottom line.
I am also concerned about junk AI, bioweapons and killer robots. It will probably take at least a decade to sort out hurtful from helpful AI. Full autonomous offensive lethal weapons will be operative long before 2035, including drone swarms in the air and sea. It will be incumbent on us to forge treaties restricting the use of killer robots.
Scott Marcus, an economist, political scientist and engineer who works as a telecommunications consultant, said, Some of what follows on my list of worrisome areas may not seem digital at first blush, but everything is digital these days.
A well-known professor of computational linguistics based at a major U.S. university commented, My fears about digital technology all relate to how they are on a trajectory to overturn civil society and democracy. I am extremely concerned about the difficulties of verifying information from computer-generated content. (Imagine what havoc that can put onto legal proceedings, when doing data collection.) Although ML researchers will solve the problem of generative models producing incorrect information, that will not stop people with bad intentions from using these tools to generate endless incorrect content. Misinformation has become a weapon of destabilizing society, and that is likely to continue. I hope by 2035 we will have collectively come to a solution for how to handle this; both the distribution side (political and social forces needed here) and the detection side.
Another major threat is future use of automated surveillance of individuals. This is already in place everywhere, even in the U.S., and will continue around the world. Since it can also be used to increase physical safety, automated monitoring will become ever more pervasive. The biggest threat of all is how easily a monitored society can be subdued into an autocracy, as well as how easily an individual can lose feelings of their own humanity by having no private space.
The experts whose comments are included in this category said they fear that the technology industry may fail to refocus its planning, design and overall business practices toward serving the common good ahead of profit and influence. Among their worries: human-centered, ethical design will remain an afterthought; tech companies will continue to release new technology before it has been thoroughly tested by the public; the design of AI tools and social platforms will continue to enable bad actors and authoritarian governments to endanger democratic institutions and human rights; and wealth disparity will grow as power and resources are further concentrated in the hands of Big Tech. Some still hold hope that governments, tech companies and other stakeholders might begin to take action sooner than later to better empower citizens and society overall.
Christopher Le Dantec, associate professor of digital media at Georgia Tech, predicted, The next industrial revolution from AI and automation will further advance wealth disparity and undermine stable economic growth for all. The rich will continue to get vastly richer. No one will be safe; everyone will be watched by someone/thing. Every aspect of human interaction will be commodified and sold, with value extracted at each turn. The public interest will fall to private motivation for power, control, value extraction.
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