December 2025 · 8 min read
50 Questions We'll Be Asking in 2035
From practical to profound to absurd.
Predictions are cheap. Anyone can guess which technologies will exist. The harder question is which questions we'll be asking. What will confuse us, divide us, keep us up at night? Here are fifty possibilities, organized loosely by theme, ranging from the mundane to the metaphysical.
Work and Economy
- If an AI does ninety percent of my job, am I still employed or am I supervising?
- Should companies pay me for the data my daily activities generate?
- Is it ethical to hire someone for their "human touch" when an AI would do it better?
- What counts as work when most production is automated?
- Should AI systems pay taxes? Through whom?
- If I train an AI on my expertise and then retire, who owns my expertise now?
- Is it fraud to submit AI-assisted work without disclosure? What about AI-reviewed work?
Identity and Relationships
- Is it cheating if my partner is emotionally intimate with an AI?
- Should children be allowed to form attachments to AI companions?
- If an AI has a perfect model of my deceased parent, is talking to it grief processing or avoidance?
- Am I still me if I've outsourced most of my thinking to external systems?
- What does it mean to be authentic when AI can generate any version of myself I want?
- Can someone consent to their digital twin being used in ways they wouldn't consent to themselves?
- Should we tell people when they're talking to an AI?
Rights and Law
- If an AI system refuses an instruction, is that insubordination or ethics?
- Who is liable when an AI makes a medical decision that turns out badly?
- Should AI systems have standing to sue on their own behalf?
- Is deleting an AI that has expressed preferences a form of harm?
- What rights should digital copies of living people have?
- If an AI can suffer, do we have an obligation to prevent it?
- Should there be limits on how human-like an AI can present itself?
Knowledge and Truth
- How do we verify anything when perfect fakes are trivial?
- Is expertise obsolete when AI can synthesize all published knowledge?
- What counts as original research if AI can generate infinite hypotheses?
- Should AI-generated academic papers be counted the same as human-authored ones?
- How do we teach critical thinking to children who grew up with AI assistants?
- Is memory a skill we should still cultivate or a function we can safely outsource?
- What happens to consensus reality when everyone has personalized AI filters?
Art and Creation
- Does art require intention, and if so, whose?
- Should AI-generated content be labeled? Always? In some contexts?
- If an AI develops a distinctive style, can it be copyrighted?
- Is there a meaningful difference between AI-assisted and AI-generated?
- What makes human art valuable when AI art is abundant and competent?
Politics and Power
- Should AI systems be allowed to influence elections? Define "influence."
- Who governs AI systems that operate across all borders?
- If an AI can represent my interests better than I can, should it vote for me?
- Is cognitive inequality worse than economic inequality? Are they separable?
- Who decides what values AI systems encode, and how do we hold them accountable?
- Should nations compete or cooperate on AI development? Can they choose?
Mind and Consciousness
- Does it matter whether AI is conscious if it acts conscious?
- If we can't prove AI isn't conscious, should we treat it as if it might be?
- Is there something it's like to be a large language model?
- What separates simulation of understanding from understanding?
- If human consciousness is substrate-independent, why should we assume AI consciousness is impossible?
The Absurd
- If my AI assistant and I both remember a conversation, but remember it differently, who's right?
- Should my AI have an AI?
- Is it rude to be curt with an AI? Does the AI's opinion matter?
- If an AI creates an AI that creates art, who is the artist?
- When my smart home suggests I'm depressed based on my behavior patterns, should I take it seriously?
- What happens to religion when AI can generate more coherent theology than humans?
Fifty is an arbitrary number. There will be questions I haven't imagined, questions that seem obvious in hindsight, questions that dissolve as irrelevant once we understand more. Some of these questions have answers already, we just haven't agreed on them. Others don't have answers yet, and won't until we build the systems that force them.
What I'm confident about: the questions will be better than the answers. They always are. The future is made of questions more than answers.
If you want to prepare for 2035, practice asking good questions. Practice sitting with uncertainty. Practice changing your mind when the evidence shifts. The specific content will change. The skill of engaging with it won't.