Release date April 2, 2025 – A majority of global technology experts say the likely magnitude of change in humans’ native capacities and behaviors as they adapt to artificial intelligence (AI) will be “deep and meaningful,” or even “fundamental and revolutionary” over the next decade.

This new report covers the results from the Imagining the Digital Future Center’s 18th “Future of Digital Life” canvassing of a large set of global technology experts. These experts wrote detailed accounts predicting the future of humans in 2035.

Many global tech experts are concerned that our adoption of AI systems will negatively alter our sense of purpose and affect how we think, feel, act and relate to one another. Some hope for a positive influence on humans’ curiosity, decision-making and creativity.

Source: ITDF Webpage

Stephen Abram, MLS is CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Inc. He is the past executive diretcor of the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries. He has been an executive with Gale Cengage Learning, SirsiDynix, the SirsiDynix Institute, ProQuest, Micromedia, IHS, and Thomson.

He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association, SLA and the Canadian Library Association. In June 2003 he was awarded SLA’s John Cotton Dana Award. He received the AIIP Roger Summit Award in 2009 and Outstanding Teacher Award from the U of Toronto iSchool in 2010. He is the author of Out Front with Stephen Abram and Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.

Source: Internet Librarian

Gary A. Bolles is a globally recognized thought leader and consultant focused on the rapidly evolving landscape of work, education, and organizational transformation in the post-pandemic era driven by exponential technologies. He provides invaluable guidance to individuals, companies, communities and nations looking to navigate uncertainty and flourish in the years ahead.

– Chair for the Future of Work for SU
– Partner at the consulting firm Charrette LLC
– Co-founder of eParachute.com
– Currently focus on strategies for the future of work, learning, and the organization. Deeply committed to helping catalyze inclusive capitalism.
– Formerly, co-founder, SoCap:SocialCapitalMarkets and a dozen other impact initiatives.
– Former editorial director of six technology publications
– Former VP Marketing and COO.

Source: Singularity webpage

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing.

Dyson is also an angel investor focused on health care, open government, digital technology, biotechnology, and outer space. Dyson’s career now focuses on health and she continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Source: Wikipedia

Tracey Follows is a professional futurist and works with clients on long-term strategies, including Telefonica, Google, Sky, Farfetch, Conde Nast, and Virgin. She writes and speaks on Futures, appearing in a global list of 50 female futurists in Forbes.

She has spoken at UN HQ, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and at events such as Think With Google. She has appeared on BBC Business Matters, is a go-to futurist for many national press titles, and is a contributor columnist in Forbes.

She was an Adage ‘Woman to Watch’ 2017, Women in Marketing Award Winner for Outstanding Contribution to Marketing 2016, and Inaugural Creative Strategy Jury President at Cannes Lions 2019. In 2018, she was listed by Business Cloud as a Trailblazing Woman in Tech. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, World Futures Studies Federation, and a Fellow of the RSA.

Source: Google Books

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he contributes to global policy development and continued standardization and spread of the Internet. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

From 1994 to 2005, Cerf served as the senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Source: Internet Hall of Fame

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is also the former President of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Additionally, he is the host of a podcast series titled “Untangling the Web,” where he engages in conversations with thought leaders to explore how the Web is shaping society, and how society in turns is shaping the Web.

Source: Kellogg School of Management webpage

Dave Edwards is a Co-Founder of the Artificiality Institute.

He previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai, an artificial intelligence market research firm that was acquired by Atlantic Media. Following the acquisition, he continued his work at Quartz, a subsidiary of Atlantic Media.

Before co-founding Intelligentsia.ai, Dave Edwards worked at companies such as Apple, CRV, Macromedia, Morgan Stanley, and ThinkEquity.

The Artificiality Institute, which Dave Edwards co-founded, is described as a non-profit research organization focused on shaping the human experience in a world increasingly influenced by synthetic intelligence. The institute aims to explore the co-evolution of humans and AI through research, design, and public storytelling.

Charles Ess is a distinguished Professor in Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo.

He is known for his extensive work at the intersection of philosophy, computational technologies, applied ethics, comparative philosophy and religion, and media studies.

Lee Rainie is a prominent researcher who has extensively studied the social impact of the internet and technology.

He is the Director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University (since early 2024). In this role, he leads an initiative focused on exploring the future impacts of digital change.

For 24 years, he was the founding director of Internet and Technology Research at the Pew Research Center. During his tenure, his team produced over 850 reports on the social, political, and economic effects of the internet, mobile connectivity, social media, and artificial intelligence revolutions.

Dennis M. Bushnell is a NASA scientist and lecturer who retired in 2023 after 60 years of service to NASA. As chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center for more than two decades, he was responsible for technical oversight and advanced program formulation. His work focused mainly on new approaches to environmental issues, in particular to climate issues. Bushnell has received numerous awards for his work. Bushnell has promoted research at NASA into LENR (low energy nuclear reactions, or cold fusion).

In 1998, Bushnell was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for viscous flow modeling and control, turbulent drag reduction, and advanced aeronautical concepts.

Source: Wikipedia

Timothy William Bray (born June 21, 1955) is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification.

He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

Source: Wikipedia

David A. Bray is Chair of the Accelerator at the Loomis Council and a Distinguished Fellow with the Stimson Center. He is also a non-resident Distinguished Fellow with the Business Executives for National Security, and a CEO and transformation leader for different “under the radar” tech and data ventures seeking to get started in novel situations.

He is Principal at LeadDoAdapt Ventures and has served in a variety of leadership roles in turbulent environments, including bioterrorism preparedness and response from 2000-2005.

Dr. Bray previously was the Executive Director for a bipartisan National Commission on R&D, provided non-partisan leadership as a federal agency Senior Executive, worked with the U.S. Navy and Marines on improving organizational adaptability, and aided U.S. Special Operation Command’s J5 Directorate on the challenges of countering disinformation online.

Source: Stimson Center

Greater NYC UX Design Lead at JPMorgan Chase, as well as Medidata, Fidelity, Atmosphere Proximity [BBDO], H4B Chelsea [Havas Health] & Razorfish

Special Interest in AI and machine learning, model visualizations & interfaces (UX designer for JPMC 2019 data science hackathon team, a group I later joined permanently), as well as data-driven, dynamic designs and dashboard analytics displays.

Driven toward innovation through 15 years of NYC industry research projects.

Source: Website

Avi Bar-Zeev has been a pioneer, architect and advisor in Spatial Computing (AR/VR/MR/XR) for nearly 30 years, behind the scenes in the world’s largest tech companies and at large.

In early 2010, he helped found and invent the HoloLens at Microsoft, developing the first prototypes, demos, patents, plans and UX concepts, sufficient to convince his leadership. At Bing, he built first prototypes for developer-facing aspects of AR, sometimes called the “AR cloud.” At Amazon, he helped create PrimeAir as well as Echo Frames. From 2016-2019, he helped Apple on undisclosed projects. In 1999-2001, he co-founded Keyhole, the company behind Google Earth, and helped define Second Life’s core technology. Back in the 1990s, he worked on novel VR experiences for Disney, including “Aladdin’s Magic Carpet” VR Ride, the “Virtual Jungle Cruise” and “Cyberspace Mountain.”

Source: Reality Prime website

John Linwood Battelle (born November 4, 1965)  is an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle helped launch Wired in the 1990s and launched The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom. In 2005, he founded the online advertising network Federated Media Publishing. In January 2014, Battelle sold Federated Media Publishing’s direct sales business to LIN Media and relaunched the company’s programmatic advertising business from Lijit Networks to Sovrn Holdings. He later started NewCo Platform, an “inside out” events company that allowed attendees to visit “new kinds of companies” in more than a dozen cities around the world. In 2019, he co-founded The Recount, which was sold to The News Movement in 2023.

Battelle is the chairman of Sovrn Holdings as well as board director at LiveRamp. He taught at Columbia SIPA from 2018 to 2022, and is currently a Professor of Practice at Northeastern.

Source: Wikipedia

Professor Victoria Baines FBCS is a leading authority in the field of online trust, safety and cybersecurity. She frequently contributes to major broadcast media outlets on digital ethics, cybercrime and the misuse of emerging technologies, including Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Her areas of research include electronic surveillance, cybercrime futures, and the politics of security.

Victoria has published on cyberspace governance, online surveillance, the future of cybercrime, and the politics of security. Drawing on her Classical education, her book Rhetoric of Insecurity (Routledge, 2021) sheds light on 2000 years of security speak and is a toolkit for understanding why security issues always seem to be so novel, urgent and divisive. She also provides research expertise to a number of international organisations, including Interpol, UNICEF and the Council of Europe.

Source: Gresham webpage

Walid Al-Saqaf is a Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm where he specializes in the use of the Internet and media technology for journalism, access to information, freedom of expresssion and public good. As a dual Yemeni/Swedish citizen, his passion is in promoting a strong and open Internet that netizens can build bridges between cultures and promote democratization and free speech across the globe.

As a computer engineering undergraduate student in the mid 1990s at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, Walid designed YemenTimes.com as the first news website in his home country Yemen. In 2007, he launched YemenPortal.net as the first news aggregator and search engine of its kind in the Arab world to provide Internet users with the ability to get a wide spectrum of perspectives from various news sources on Yemen in Arabic and English. When the website was blocked by the Yemeni government in 2008 due to its open platform that allowed dissident voices to be heard, he developed Alkasir website censorship mapping circumvention solution, which was initially used to access YemenPortal.net, but which soon became widely used by Internet users in many states such as Iran, Syria, China and Saudi Arabia to bypass website filtering in those countries.

Source: Internet Society

Dr Micah Altman is a social and information scientist at MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. (Previously, he served as Director of Research for the MIT Libraries, Head/Scientist for the Program on Information Science, Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution; and at Harvard University as the Associate Director of the Harvard-MIT Data Center, Archival Director of the Henry A. Murray Archive, and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences.)

Dr. Altman conducts research, provides public commentary, and collaborates in initiatives related to how information technologies change politics, society, and science. He is the author of over one hundred scientific and scholarly articles – as well as a spectrum of books, opinion pieces, databases and software packages. His recently published research establishes requirements for reliable information anonymization and privacy; evaluates the alignment of artificial intelligence and trustworthy science; examines bias in scholarly communication and peer review; critiques the evidence-base for open science; and examines the role of public participation and institutional design in constraining redistricting.

Source: Website

Full member of the Club of Rome, President of the Copenhagen based think tank Nordic Bildung, and co-founder of the Global Bildung Network.

I am an economist, author, futurist, philosopher and bildung activist. After studying business economy for three years, I worked as a substitute teacher before I studied theology. During my studies, I wrote entertainment for Danish television until I decided to quit theology, become a fulltime writer and focus on technological development, big history and the future of humanity.

Since 2005, I have written 20 books and received two Danish democracy awards: Ebbe Kløvedal-Reich Democracy Baton (2007) and Døssing Prisen, the Danish librarians’ democracy prize (2012).

Among my books are The Nordic Secret (2017; new edition January 2024), Metamodernity (2019), relaunched 2023 as Polymodernity, Bildung (2020), What is Bildung? (2021), and Libertism (2022).

Source: Website

Dr Greg Adamson is a global expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence, he researches eXplainable AI, and is an authority on Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics. As a health informatics specialist he is an honorary Associate Professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. His day job at the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning is Chief Information Security Officer, a field he has worked in for more than three decades. His PhD from RMIT University was on Internet adoption.

He has a Master of Commercial Law from Melbourne Law School, and was an early pioneer in blockchain. He chairs the IEEE Standards Association initiative Dignity, Inclusion, Identity, Trust and Agency. His current projects include a committee on power relations and AI, health informatics, and writing a biography of Justice James Staples of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. He is the Technical Activities vice president of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.

Source: Find an Expert

Dr. Lior Zalmanson is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the Technology and Information Management Program, Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University.

His research interests include social media, user engagement, internet business models, human-AI interaction, and algorithmic management. His research has won awards and grants from Fulbright Foundation, GIF (German-Israeli Foundations), Grant for the Web, Dan David Prize, Google, Marketing Science Institute, Social Informatics SIG, among others. His works were published in top venues such as MIS Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Information Systems, and MIT Sloan Review.

His studies were covered in The Times, Independent, HBR, PBS, Fast Company, including numerous mentions in the Israeli media. In 2021, he received the Association of Information Systems Researchers’ Early Career Award, acknowledging a combination of research, teaching, and service to the community. He also received multiple teaching awards for his experiential courses in user engagement and online communities. Formerly he was an assistant professor at the University of Haifa, a postdoctoral Fulbright fellow at NYU, and a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum Media Lab. Lior is also the founder of the Print Screen Festival, Israel’s digital culture festival, which connects internet researchers, activists, and artists. Furthermore, he is a grant and award-winning digital artist, playwright, and screenwriter. His most recent VR work (about the bystander syndrome) debuted at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.

Source: Coller webpage

Stephan Adelson is the president of Adelson Consulting Services. Based on his publications and presentations, he appears to be an expert in digital public health, particularly in the application of internet-based interventions for health promotion and disease prevention, including HIV and STDs.

He has also been involved in developing national guidelines and providing consultation to various health organizations.

Source: Gemini

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her prescient writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure has been lauded as “remarkable and persuasive” (Library Journal); “deeply compelling” (Kate Bowler); “incisive and timely-triumphant” (Dan Pink); and “both surprising and practical” (Gretchen Rubin).

Nominated for a National Book Award, Uncertain was chosen as the 2024 “Nonfiction Book of the Year” by the Independent Publishers of New England and a Top 25 Nonfiction Book of 2024 by the Next Big Idea Club led by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant and Dan Pink. Uncertain also was named a Top 10 book of the year by Greater Good magazine, the Artificiality Institute, and Library Journal, and a Top 10 Summer Read by Nautilus magazine. The book has been featured in media worldwide. Jackson’s recent lead New York Times opinion piece on uncertainty and well-being drew a quarter-million views.

Source: Website

Manager of the Public Service Broadcasting and Media with 30 years’ experience in the news, sport and international relations sectors. Trained as a journalist, with a great deal of experience in international companies and organizations (RAI, Euronews, Eurosport, and since 2002, at EBU European Broadcasting Union member of the WBU World Broadcasting Union).

Has worked for all traditional media (press, radio, general interest TV) but also new media (all-news channels, Internet portals). Expert in European and multilateral negotiations.

Jerry Michalski is an American technology consultant, futurist, and thought leader known for his work on the impact of technology on society and business, particularly in the areas of trust and relationships.

In essence, Jerry Michalski is a visionary who explores the profound ways technology shapes human interactions and societal structures. He challenges conventional thinking about consumers and trust, advocating for a future where relationships and genuine connections are central to a thriving economy and society.

Source: Gemini

Danil Mikhailov, Ph.D. is a computer scientist and social scientist and a world-leading expert in the application of technology and data innovation for social impact. Danil’s main research interests are in Science and Technology Studies, including social media, AI, and misinformation; technology and AI ethics, particularly where informed by non-western cultural context; development of methodologies of responsible data science and AI programs, particularly in lower-and-middle-income countries and settings; and the anthropology of interdisciplinary science and technology teams. A second, unrelated area of research interest is the history, philosophy, and practice of traditional Chinese martial arts.

In parallel to his research Danil serves as the Executive Director of data.org, where Danil launched global data for social impact programs in climate, health, and financial inclusion to build digital public goods, train a new generation of purpose-driven data practitioners, and design sustainable data ecosystems in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the US.

Source: Data.org webpage

Alexandra Samuel is an authority on the digital workplace. A speaker and data journalist, she is the co-author of Remote, Inc: How To Thrive at Work….Wherever You Are (Harper Business, 2021) and the author of Work Smarter with Social Media (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).

Alex’s keynotes and trainings help organizations navigate the transition to the new hybrid workplace, which combines remote + office, and humans + AI.  Her writing on the workplace, business and technology appears frequently in The Wall Street Journal and The Harvard Business Review, and she is the AI columnist for JSTOR Daily.

The co-founder of groundbreaking digital agency Social Signal, Samuel creates data-driven flagship reports and workshops for companies like Google, Discovery and Sprinklr. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and works remotely from Vancouver, Canada.

Source: Website

Eric Saund is a researcher in Cognitive Science and a consultant in AI and Machine Learning.

Previously, Eric spent nearly 30 years working at Xerox PARC as a senior researcher and is an expert in natural language processing and cognitive architecture.

Eric has a degree from CalTech, and a PhD from the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT.

My mission is to advance the science of consciousness, and to use its insights for the benefit of society, technology, and medicine.

I am Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where I am also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. I am also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness.

I  was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press), a role I served from 2014-2024. I currently serve on the Editorial Board of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B and on the Advisory Committee for 1907 Research and for Chile’s Congreso Futuro. I was Conference Chair for the 16th Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC16, 2012) and was an ASSC ‘member at large’ from 2014-2022.  I previously co-directed the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness, and I was an Engagement Fellow with the Wellcome Trust (2016-2020).

My research has been supported by the EPSRC (Leadership Fellowship), the European Research Council (ERC, Advanced Investigator Grant), the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).  Check out these profiles of me and my research in The Observer, The New Statesman, and Quanta.

Source: Website

David Weinberger (born 1950) is an American author, technologist, and speaker whose work explores how technology, particularly the internet and machine learning, shapes our ideas.

Trained as a philosopher with a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Weinberger’s career has spanned academia, technology consulting, and writing. He taught philosophy before transitioning to the tech industry, where he held marketing and executive roles.

He is perhaps best known as a co-author of the influential Cluetrain Manifesto (2000), which offered early insights into the social nature of the internet.

Weinberger has been affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society since 2004, holding positions as a Fellow, Senior Researcher, and member of the Fellows Advisory Board. He has also been involved with the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.

More recently, his work has focused on the philosophical and ethical implications of machine learning, resulting in his 2019 book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

Source: Gemini

Rabia is an expert on digital commerce and developing thought leadership relating to this dynamic and increasingly significant subject.

In addition to insights-based content, Rabia works as an internal expert on research design and innovation and has been global project lead for travel and digital consumer research, where she has crafted and managed various sector indices, ensured global data quality and driven thought leadership.

With experience in strategy, research, and insights, Rabia advises clients on digital commerce strategy across a wide range of industries, including retail, fmcg, travel and consumer finance. Her interest in digital technologies and innovation as a denominator to transform and accelerate wider industries enables her to offer cross-vertical strategic insight.

Source: Euromonitor

Frequency is a blockchain designed to support decentralized social networks to give people control over their online presence. With Frequency, users can freely choose and connect on social apps while retaining ownership of their data.

Built on the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), Frequency offers scalable tools for message discovery, flexible storage for social and identity data, and a unique cost-sharing model that allows apps to deliver smooth, secure experiences that put users in charge.