AI & society
The same questions. A different year.
Why returning to a question can tell us more than asking for another prediction about AI.
Beyond the next prediction
Conversations about AI often turn towards what comes next. Which jobs will change? Which companies will survive? What will a model be able to do a year from now? These questions matter, but they are not the only way to understand a changing world.
There is another question worth asking: how does it feel to live through this? A person can be hopeful about what a tool makes possible and uneasy about the conditions under which they will use it. A useful record needs room for both.
We are interested in that experience as it develops, rather than only in whether someone correctly predicted an outcome.
Five questions to carry forward
The five questions move from the present to the future: how AI makes us feel today, the future we imagine, what we hope it will make possible, what we should never give up to it, and what people in thirty years should understand about this moment.
These are deliberately broad questions. An answer can begin with an ordinary working day, a conversation at home, a new opportunity or a feeling that is difficult to name. It does not need a technical vocabulary.
Keeping the questions consistent gives future contributions a shared starting point. It does not mean that the context stays still. The context is part of what we want to understand.
Let earlier answers remain earlier answers
Looking back can tempt us to edit our own history. We remember a more coherent version of what we believed, or judge an earlier concern using information we did not have at the time. Dated answers offer a different possibility: leave the original words alone and add a new moment beside them.
Our invitation is to return every year. You can also contribute when an experience changes your view. Your private account keeps your dated contributions together. Sign in with your email to return to your history, download your words or delete a contribution. Each new answer adds to the record without replacing an earlier one.
The annual review will look for themes and changes across contributions without publishing individual responses. These are voluntary contributions, not a representative survey. Describing those limits is part of making the analysis useful.
