Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans

The hopeful experts in this sample generally expect that AI will work to optimize, augment and improve human activities and experiences. They say it will save time and it will save lives via health advances and the reduction of risks and of poverty. They expect it will spur innovation and broaden opportunities, increase the value of human-to-human experiences, augment humans and increase individuals' overall satisfaction with life.

Clay Shirky, writer and consultant on the social and economic effects of internet technologies and vice president at New York University, said, "All previous forms of labor-saving devices, from the level to the computer, have correlated with increased health and lifespan in the places that have adopted them".

Jamais Cascio, research fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote, "Although I do believe that in 2030 AI will have made our lives better, I suspect that popular media of the time will justifiably highlight the large-scale problems: displaced workers, embedded bias and human systems being too deferential to machine systems. But AI is more than robot soldiers, autonomous cars or digital assistants with quirky 'personalities'. Most of the AI we will encounter in 2030 will be in-the-walls, behind-the-scenes systems built to adapt workspaces, living spaces and the urban environment to better suit our needs. Medical AI will keep track of medication and alert us to early signs of health problems. Environmental AI will monitor air quality, heat index and other indicators relevant to our day's tasks. Our visual and audio surroundings may be altered or filtered to improve our moods, better our focus or otherwise alter our subconscious perceptions of the world. Most of this AI will be functionally invisible to us, as long as it's working properly. The explicit human-machine interface will be with a supervisor system that coordinates all of the sub-AI – and undoubtedly there will be a lively business in creating supervisor systems with quirky personalities".

Mike Meyer, chief information officer at Honolulu Community College, wrote, "Social organizations will be increasingly administered by AI/ML systems to ensure equity and consistency in provisioning of services to the population. The steady removal of human emotion-driven discrimination will rebalance social organizations creating true equitable opportunity to all people for the first time in human history. People will be part of these systems as censors, in the old imperial Chinese model, providing human emotional intelligence where that is needed to smooth social management. All aspects of human existence will be affected by the integration of AI into human societies. Historically this type of base paradigmatic change is both difficult and unstoppable. The results will be primarily positive but will produce problems both in the process of change and in totally new types of problems that will result from the ways that people do adapt the new technology-based processes".

Mark Crowley, an assistant professor, expert in machine learning and core member of the Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, wrote, "While driving home on a long commute from work the human will be reading a book in the heads-up screen of the windshield. The car will be driving autonomously on the highway for the moment. The driver will have an idea to note down and add to a particular document; all this will be done via voice. In the middle of this a complicated traffic arrangement will be seen approaching via other networked cars. The AI will politely interrupt the driver, put away the heads-up display and warn the driver they may need to take over in the next 10 seconds or so. The conversation will be flawless and natural, like Jarvis in 'Avengers,' even charming. But it will be tasks-focused to the car, personal events, notes and news".

Theodore Gordon, futurist, management consultant and co-founder of the Millennium Project, commented, "There will be ups and downs, surely, but the net is, I believe, good. The most encouraging uses of AI will be in early warning of terror activities, incipient diseases and environmental threats and in improvements in decision-making".

Yvette Wohn, director of the Social Interaction Lab and expert on human-computer interaction at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said, "One area in which artificial intelligence will become more sophisticated will be in its ability to enrich the quality of life so that the current age of workaholism will transition into a society where leisure, the arts, entertainment and culture are able to enhance the well-being of society in developed countries and solve issues of water production, food growth/distribution and basic health provision in developing countries".

Ken Goldberg, distinguished chair in engineering, director of AUTOLAB's and CITRIS' "people and robots" initiative, and founding member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, said, "As in the past 50+ years, AI will be combined with IA (intelligence augmentation) to enhance humans' ability to work. One example might be an AI-based 'Devil's Advocate' that would challenge my decisions with insightful questions (as long as I can turn it off periodically)".

Rich Ling, a professor of media technology at Nanyang Technological University, responded, "The ability to address complex issues and to better respond to and facilitate the needs of people will be the dominant result of AI".

An anonymous respondent wrote, "There will be an explosive increase in the number of autonomous cognitive agents (e.g., robots), and humans will interact more and more with them, being unaware, most of the time, if it is interactivity with a robot or with another human. This will increase the number of personal assistants and the level of service".

Fred Davis, mentor at Runway Incubator in San Francisco, responded, "As daily a user of the Google Assistant on my phone and both Google Home and Alexa, I feel like AI has already been delivering significant benefits to my daily life for a few years. My wife and I take having an always-on omnipresent assistant on hand for granted at this point. Google Home's ability to tell us apart and even respond with different voices is a major step forward in making computers people-literate, rather than the other way around. There's always a concern about privacy, but so far it hasn't caused us any problems. Obviously, this could change and instead of a helpful friend I might look at these assistants as creepy strangers. Maintaining strict privacy and security controls is essential for these types of services".

Andrew Tutt, an expert in law and author of "An FDA for Algorithms," which called for "critical thought about how best to prevent, deter and compensate for the harms that they cause," said, "AI will be absolutely pervasive and absolutely seamless in its integration with everyday life. It will simply become accepted that AI are responsible for ever-more-complex and ever-more-human tasks. By 2030, it will be accepted that when you wish to hail a taxi the taxi will have no driver – it will be an autonomously driven vehicle. Robots will be responsible for more-dynamic and complex roles in manufacturing plants and warehouses. Digital assistants will play an important and interactive role in everyday interactions ranging from buying a cup of coffee to booking a salon appointment. It will no longer be unexpected to call a restaurant to book a reservation, for example, and speak to a 'digital' assistant who will pencil you in. These interactions will be incremental but become increasingly common and increasingly normal. My hope is that the increasing integration of AI into everyday life will vastly increase the amount of time that people can devote to tasks they find meaningful".

L. Schomaker, professor at the University of Groningen and scientific director of the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering (ALICE) research institute, said, "In the 1990s, you went to a PC on a desktop in a room in your house. In the 2010s you picked a phone from your pocket and switched it on. By 2030 you will be online 24/7 via miniature devices such as in-ear continuous support, advice and communications".

Michael Wollowski, associate professor of computer science and software engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and expert in the Internet of Things, diagrammatic systems, and artificial intelligence, wrote, "Assuming that industry and government are interested in letting the consumer choose and influence the future, there will be many fantastic advances of AI. I believe that AI and the Internet of Things will bring about a situation in which technology will be our guardian angel. For example, self-driving cars will let us drive faster than we ever drove before, but they will only let us do things that they can control. Since computers have much better reaction time than people, it will be quite amazing. Similarly, AI and the Internet of Things will let us conduct our lives to the fullest while ensuring that we live healthy lives. Again, it is like having a guardian angel that lets us do things, knowing they can save us from stupidity".

Steve King, partner at Emergent Research, said, "2030 is less than 12 years away. So … the most likely scenario is AI will have a modest impact on the lives of most humans over this time frame. Having said that, we think the use of AI systems will continue to expand, with the greatest growth coming from systems that augment and complement human capabilities and decision-making. This is not to say there won't be negative impacts from the use of AI. Jobs will be replaced, and certain industries will be disrupted. Even scarier, there are many ways AI can be weaponized. But like most technological advancements, we think the overall impact of AI will be additive – at least over the next decade or so".

Vassilis Galanos, a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant actively researching future human-machine symbiosis at the University of Edinburgh, commented, "2030 is not that far away, so there is no room for extremely utopian/dystopian hopes and fears. … Given that AI is already used in everyday life (social-media algorithms, suggestions, smartphones, digital assistants, health care and more), it is quite probable that humans will live in a harmonious co-existence with AI as much as they do now – to a certain extent – with computer and internet technologies".

Charlie Firestone, communications and society program executive director and vice president at the Aspen Institute, commented, "I remain optimistic that AI will be a tool that humans will use, far more widely than today, to enhance quality of life such as medical remedies, education and the environment. For example, the AI will help us to conserve energy in homes and in transportation by identifying exact times and temperatures we need, identifying sources of energy that will be the cheapest and the most efficient. There certainly are dire scenarios, particularly in the use of AI for surveillance, a likely occurrence by 2030. I am hopeful that AI and other technologies will identify new areas of employment as it eliminates many jobs".

Pedro U. Lima, an associate professor of computer science at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, said, "Overall, I see AI-based technology relieving us from repetitive and/or heavy and/or dangerous tasks, opening new challenges for our activities. I envisage autonomous mobile robots networked with a myriad of other smart devices, helping nurses and doctors at hospitals in daily activities, working as a 'third hand' and (physical and emotional) support to patients. I see something similar happening in factories, where networked robot systems will help workers on their tasks, relieving them from heavy duties".

John Laird, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, responded, "There will be a continual off-loading of mundane intellectual and physical tasks on to AI and robotic systems. In addition to helping with everyday activities, it will significantly help the mentally and physically impaired and disabled. There will also be improvements in customized/individualized education and training of humans, and conversely, the customization of AI systems by everyday users. We will be transitioning from current programming practices to user customization. Automated driving will be a reality, eliminating many deaths but also having significant societal changes".

Steven Polunsky, director of the Alabama Transportation Policy Research Center at the University of Alabama, wrote, "AI will allow public transportation systems to better serve existing customers by adjusting routes, travel times and stops to optimize service. New customers will also see advantages. Smart transportation systems will allow public transit to network with traffic signals and providers of 'last-mile' trips to minimize traffic disruption and inform decision making about modal (rail, bus, mobility-on-demand) planning and purchasing".

Sanjiv Das, a professor of data science and finance at Santa Clara University, responded, "AI will enhance search to create interactive reasoning and analytical systems. Search engines today do not know 'why' we want some information and hence cannot reason about it. They also do not interact with us to help with analysis. An AI system that collects information based on knowing why it is needed and then asks more questions to refine its search would be clearly available well before 2030. These 'search-thinking bots' will also write up analyses based on parameters elicited from conversation and imbue these analyses with different political (left/right) and linguistic (aggressive/mild) slants, chosen by the human, using advances in language generation, which are already well under way. These 'intellectual' agents will become companions, helping us make sense of our information overload. I often collect files of material on my cloud drive that I found interesting or needed to read later, and these agents would be able to summarize and engage me in a discussion of these materials, very much like an intellectual companion. It is unclear to me if I would need just one such agent, though it seems likely that different agents with diverse personalities may be more interesting! As always, we should worry what the availability of such agents might mean for normal human social interaction, but I can also see many advantages in freeing up time for socializing with other humans as well as enriched interactions, based on knowledge and science, assisted by our new intellectual companions".

Lawrence Roberts, designer and manager of ARPANET, the precursor to the internet and Internet Hall of Fame member, commented, "AI voice recognition, or text, with strong context understanding and response will allow vastly better access to website, program documentation, voice call answering, and all such interactions will greatly relieve user frustration with getting information. It will mostly provide service where no or little human support is being replaced as it is not available today in large part. For example, finding and/or doing a new or unused function of the program or website one is using. Visual, 3D-space-recognition AI to support better-than-human robot activity including vehicles, security surveillance, health scans and much more".

Christopher Yoo, a professor of law, communication and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, responded, "AI is good at carrying out tasks that follow repetitive patterns. In fact, AI is better than humans. Shifting these functions to machines will improve performance. It will also allow people to shift their efforts to high-value-added and more-rewarding directions, an increasingly critical consideration in developing world countries where population is declining. Research on human-computer interaction (HCI) also reveals that AI-driven pattern recognition will play a critical role in expanding humans' ability to extend the benefits of computerization. HCI once held that our ability to gain the benefit from computers would be limited by the total amount of time people can spend sitting in front of a screen and inputting characters through a keyboard. The advent of AI-driven HCI will allow that to expand further and will reduce the amount of customization that people will have to program in by hand. At the same time, AI is merely a tool. All tools have their limits and can be misused. Even when humans are making the decisions instead of machines, blindly following the results of a protocol without exercising any judgment, can have disastrous results. Future applications of AI will thus likely involve both humans and machines if they are to fulfill their potential".

Joseph Konstan, distinguished professor of computer science specializing in human-computer interaction and AI at the University of Minnesota, predicted, "Widespread deployment of AI has immense potential to help in key areas that affect a large portion of the world's population, including agriculture, transportation (more efficiently getting food to people) and energy. Even as soon as 2030, I expect we'll see substantial benefits for many who are today disadvantaged, including the elderly and physically handicapped (who will have greater choices for mobility and support) and those in the poorest part of the world".