The Future of Human Agency

This report covers results from the 15th "Future of the Internet" canvassing that Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to gather expert views about important digital issues. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about the potential influence of current trends may lead between 2022 and 2035 represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. Pew Research Center and Elon's Imagining the Internet Center sampled from a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, inviting entrepreneurs, professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses and think tanks, as well as interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 29 and Aug. 8, 2022. In all, 540 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded in some way to the question covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the section titled "About this canvassing of experts." Advances in the internet, artificial intelligence (AI) and online applications have allowed humans to vastly expand their capabilities and increase their capacity to tackle complex problems. These advances have given people the ability to instantly access and share knowledge and amplified their personal and collective power to understand and shape their surroundings. Today there is general agreement that smart machines, bots and systems powered mostly by machine learning and artificial intelligence will quickly increase in speed and sophistication between now and 2035.