A survey of ~305 experts on their expectations for digital advances by 2035, like AI systems and smart eyewear and earbuds, and concerns over the darker sides
They have deep concerns about people's and society's overall well-being. But they also expect great benefits in health care, scientific advances and education LinkedIn: Lee Rainie . Twitter: @ejhudson LinkedIn: Lee Rainie : Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining The Internet Center just released a capstone report with hundreds of expert predictions … Twitter: Eric Hudson / @ejhudson : Terrific @pewinternet survey of and interviews with experts on the impact digital technologies will have on us by 2035. Important for educators thinking about how to talk to and work with colleagues and students on AI: https://www.pewresearch.org/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center have folded years of expert canvassing into a single capstone report: ~305 specialists predicting what AI systems, smart eyewear, and earbuds will do to daily life by 2035. It extends a series that includes their earlier panel split on the immersive metaverse by 2040 and the 2020 survey where 49% of 979 tech experts said tech would mostly weaken democracy by 2030. The headline finding is a double verdict — large expected gains in health care, scientific research, and education, set against deep concern for individual and societal well-being.
First-order effects
- Educators get a citable baseline: the report's own promotion targets people who need to talk to colleagues and students about digital change, consolidating scattered Pew findings into one document.
- The expert consensus frames AI and wearable devices as simultaneously beneficial and destabilizing, forcing health care, research, and education institutions to plan for both outcomes rather than pick a side.
Second-order effects
- The report sharpens an expert-public perception gap that later polling makes measurable: 56% of AI experts expect AI's impact to be positive while only 35% of US adults do, giving skeptics concrete evidence that the people building these systems see them differently than the public.
- Workforce-facing institutions inherit the darker-side numbers: 52% of US workers already worry about AI's workplace impact, so unions, employers, and newsrooms can anchor bargaining and retraining arguments in expert-endorsed concern rather than speculation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, recurring expert panels like this become standing infrastructure for technology policy debates — the same way the democracy-weakening majority from the 2020 panel fed later governance arguments.
- Well-being moving from activist critique to expert mainstream raises the bar for makers of smart eyewear and earbuds, whose products sit closest to the always-on digital life the panel worries about.
The trend: Expert-panel forecasting of digital futures is consolidating into a recurring benchmark, and its persistent gap between expert optimism and public anxiety is becoming the central fact shaping technology legitimacy debates.