{"id":209469,"date":"2026-02-03T07:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T12:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/03\/opinion-where-is-a-i-taking-us-eight-leading-thinkers-share-their-visions\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T07:15:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T12:15:09","slug":"opinion-where-is-a-i-taking-us-eight-leading-thinkers-share-their-visions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/03\/opinion-where-is-a-i-taking-us-eight-leading-thinkers-share-their-visions\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Where Is A.I. Taking Us? Eight Leading Thinkers Share Their Visions."},"content":{"rendered":"

Opinion | Where Is A.I. Taking Us? Eight Leading Thinkers Share Their Visions.<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2026\/02\/02\/opinion\/ai-future-leading-thinkers-survey.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-03 07:12:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

People have been working on artificial intelligence for decades. But five years ago, few were predicting that A.I. would break through as the most important technology story of the 2020s \u2014 and quite possibly the century. Large language models have turned A.I. into a household topic, but all areas of A.I. have taken great leaps forward.<\/p>\n

Now, we are inundated with chatter about how much A.I. will transform our lives and our world. Already, companies are trying to find ways to offload tasks and even entire jobs to A.I. More people are turning to A.I. for social interaction and mental health support. Educators are scrambling to manage students\u2019 increased reliance on these tools. And in the near future A.I. may lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery and energy; it could allow more people to create art and cultural works \u2014 or turn these industries into slop factories.<\/p>\n

As society wrestles with whether A.I. will lead us into a better future or catastrophic one, Times Opinion turned to eight experts for their predictions on where A.I. may go in the next five years. Listening to them may help us bring out the best and mitigate the worst out of this new technology.<\/p>\n

Melanie Mitchell<\/h3>\n

Computer scientist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute<\/p>\n

\"Yuval <\/p>\n

Yuval Noah Harari<\/h3>\n

Historian, philosopher and author<\/p>\n

\"Carl <\/p>\n

Carl Benedikt Frey<\/h3>\n

Professor of A.I. and work at the University of Oxford<\/p>\n

\"Gary <\/p>\n

Gary Marcus<\/h3>\n

Founder of Geometric.AI (acquired by Uber) and author of \u201cTaming Silicon Valley\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nick <\/p>\n

Nick Frosst<\/h3>\n

Co-founder of Cohere, an A.I. start-up<\/p>\n

\"Ajeya <\/p>\n

Ajeya Cotra<\/h3>\n

A.I. risk assessor at METR, a research nonprofit<\/p>\n

\"Aravind <\/p>\n

Aravind Srinivas<\/h3>\n

Co-founder and chief executive of Perplexity, a chatbot search engine<\/p>\n

\"Helen <\/p>\n

Helen Toner<\/h3>\n

Interim executive director of Georgetown University\u2019s Center for Security and Emerging Technology<\/p>\n

What is your biggest bet about the future of A.I. in five years?<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

\"Yuval <\/p>\n

Yuval Noah Harari<\/span> Historian<\/span><\/p>\n

Within five years, A.I. agents are likely to become legal persons in at least some countries.<\/p>\n

\"Melanie <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opinion | Where Is A.I. Taking Us? Eight Leading Thinkers Share Their Visions. https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2026\/02\/02\/opinion\/ai-future-leading-thinkers-survey.html Publish…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":209470,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/02\/02\/opinion\/02aisurvery-still\/02aisurvery-still-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[172,57],"class_list":["post-209469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-perplexity","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209471,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209469\/revisions\/209471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}