I've Got Questions with Sinead Bovell - AI in 2026 | 8 Predictions About What's Coming

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

In this episode, I share my eight AI predictions for 2026, not just where the technology is heading, but how it will change daily life, culture, politics, and the systems we live inside. This episode is about reading the signals early, understanding what 2026 is likely to unlock, and why the choices made in the next year will matter far beyond technology itself. From the rise of people being more offline and the rise of voice-first technology, to AI glasses, political backlash, and cultural divides in entertainment, I wanted to share where I view the future potentially going. 00:00 – Intro 00:40 – Prediction #1 04:55 – Prediction #2 05:55 – Prediction #3 07:50 – Prediction #4 10:50 – Prediction #5 12:05 – Prediction #6 13:15 – Prediction #7 15:35 – Prediction #8 17:00 – Final Thoughts Follow my work here: Substack: ⁠https://sineadbovell.substack.com⁠ Website: ⁠https://www.sineadbovell.com⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/sineadbovell⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/sineadbovell⁠ Twitter / X: ⁠https://twitter.com/SineadBovell⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/Sineadbovell⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@sineadbovell

I think 2026 is going to be a defining year for artificial intelligence, for social media, human behavior, devices, a tech resistance and technology more broadly. I'm a futurist and strategic foresight advisor, so I spend my days immersed in research and white papers on emerging technologies and their impact on society, but also on businesses and business models, governments, national security. So I'm in this stuff all day. I'm not in the business of making predictions, but today I might make an exception, and we're going to have a little bit more fun, and I'm going to share the trends I'll be paying very close attention to in 2026.

I'm Shea Beauvel, and this is I've brought questions. I think 2026 is going to be the year of the offline renaissance. We're already starting to see in the data that we've reached peak social media. So after 2022, the time spent on social media platforms has started to decline. Between 2022 and 2024 is declined by 10.000. percent, which is significant. Now, this is mainly for younger users. It's not for older adults, but still the signals in this data are meaningful. And there are myriad reasons why we've arrived here, I think, not least of which being the experience on social media, people are maxed out,

whether that's from the polarization, from the doom scroll, from being shown a bunch of content that you can't stop watching, but you never sought that out in the first place. You wanted to connect with friends or family, not being able to see the post from the people who you follow. All of these reasons why the online experience is just draining. And then you add into that the rise of AI generated content and AI slop. So people genuinely don't know if they are filtering between a human generated content or just AI nonsense. So I think the signals are there. What we're also seeing is these social and cultural signals that moving offline is the new flex or is much more socially desirable. So with teens, we're seeing the rise of flip phones and

dumb phones. So these would be phones that you can't, like just the traditional cell phones from the late 90s, early 2000s, where you couldn't actually download any apps or anything. Those are slowly coming back in style for younger users. So that's a big signal about where younger generations are going. And even for Gen Z that are on social media platforms, a lot of them are actually spending time communicating with one another in messaging versus actually on platform. So all of these signals are showing people want to go where their actual communities are. And that tends to be in more offline worlds. And this isn't just with social media.

We're seeing this with other types of digital platforms like dating apps. Year-over-year, dating app usage and paid usage has been declining. And people are now opting for things like running clubs to meet potential significant others. The rise of more speed dating, the rise of matchmakers are coming back in style. So people are really starting to invest in offline worlds. And I think in 2026, investing in an offline life and having a bigger offline presence than an online presence is going to start to be a social flex. And this trend is going to start to gain a lot of momentum. I don't think we're going to stay off light.

I'm going to talk in a couple predictions from now about what I think is going to happen that brings us back in digital worlds in a different way. But what's interesting to me is meta just recently announced that you'll be able to watch creator videos on TV platforms. I think they're partnering with Amazon. To me, this is a signal that they know people are still going to be streaming content on streaming platforms. That's where eyeballs are going to go if people are going to slowly stop spending as much time on social media.

So they are figuring out different ways to bridge their platforms into where traffic is going to move. That's my guess with that signal. But do you know what I think is also going to drive people more offline, ironically, artificial intelligence. The better AI becomes, and the more our phones are powered by artificial intelligence, the less we need to open our devices and do things on it. So the better AI gets and the more reliable it gets, the more I'm going to just say to my device,

order that Uber, refill those groceries and not actually need to take out my phone, further breaking that behavior loop of opening, swiping, clicking, typing, that's all going to start to move away. And I think in 2026 we'll hear from Google with their Android devices announcing the phones powered by Gemini and people starting to use it a lot more. I think Apple is going to have to make some announcement about Siri. I don't know if Siri rest in peace. Maybe Siri will be replaced. Maybe Siri's digital twin comes and saves Siri. Something nice to happen there.

But we will start to be able to talk towards our phones versus needing to use them as much. And that's again going to further move our behavior offline in a way. This leads me to prediction number two that in 2026, it is going to become very apparent that we are rapidly moving towards a voice first society, where we stop typing as much as we used to and we start just talking. Talking to an AI, to order the things that we need to order, sending voice notes. I think we're going to move towards more of a voice first economy. And we're already seeing this, right, the rise of audiobooks, less reading, more listening, more talking. artificial intelligence is going to ramp up those trends because we're not going to need to write those emails or write those text messages or even write those AI prompts. Why write an AI prompt when you can just ask AI to do something?

And this has myriad implications, right? If we're moving to a voice for society, in some ways it's much more natural than typing. But typing was an extension of writing. So there are a lot of implications here and reading and so forth that we're going to get into another episode. But that is my prediction number two. It's going to start to become very apparent. We're rapidly moving towards voice first. My third prediction, 2026 will be the year of AI glasses.

So we saw it from meta, but I think Apple is going to step into the game with their AI glasses and that will make Apple Glass hopefully make more sense. I think Google is going to announce their AI glasses. And this, again, the rise of AI glasses means less and less interactions with a smartphone. It doesn't mean the smartphone is going to go away. It's the same way you have a smartphone and a computer, but you just don't bring your computer on your morning walk to do things, you bring your phone, we're going to start to use our phones less. And then again, this changes what type of platforms make sense because no one's going to be

scrolling TikTok with their eyes or even just social media in general when you have this display, this, you know, that close to your face. So it's going to lead to different types of behavior. And you can imagine if you have your smart glasses on, you would just talk to the AI in your glasses and then maybe take out of phone if you need to see something. but we're moving towards a lot of different behaviors. The privacy implications with smart glasses, the ethical implications of smart glasses, we got into a lot of this in our episode with Nita.

So believe me, we have covered this with one of the leading experts on this topic. My hope is that AI glasses are not a surprise. They've been on the market for years. I think they're going to go more mainstream in 2026, that policymakers are thinking about this and we don't pretend that we didn't see this one coming because we can.

And even if, you know, you might be watching right now or listening right now and thinking that you would never wear smart glasses. And I don't have smart glasses. But we said the same things about smartphones. The iPhone was predicted to fail and fail badly. AirPods were seen as very unattractive pearls that nobody's going to wear. So we tend to say all these things. My philosophy is that we're better to be prepared than scrambling when things do start to take off. So that's kind of my vote there.

My fourth prediction is that in 2026, we are going to hear that artificial intelligence systems, the current AI systems we have built, have reached their limits in terms of what they'll be able to accomplish in terms of their level of intelligence. In other words, large language models is the current architecture that powers chat bots that we interact with. So whether that chatGBT or perplexity or Claude, these AI systems are powered by large language models. these algorithms analyze and read a ton of data, almost all the textual data that's ever been published on the internet. They learn to spot patterns in that data. And then they make predictions about what word should come next in a sentence based on the patterns in the underlying data. The sky is, it would probably say blue, for example, next token prediction. That has been very significant in terms of progress in AI.

But when you think about true intelligence or advancing intelligence, the world doesn't work by reading a bunch of books and then predicting what to come. next in a sentence, the world has physics and all sorts of different types of data that an AI system would really need to be able to understand beyond just text, right? So I think we're hearing some of the biggest voices in AI say we've reached the limit of what this version of AI can give us. The data that AI is learning from, the internet, is now becoming much more sloppy with AI generated data, so it's much more messy, so we don't even have a lot of good quality data to feed into these AI systems. I think we're going to hear much more about we're at the beginning of the end or hitting the capacity for what this current version of AI can do.

But this isn't the end of the AI story. We're going to hear a lot more about something called world models. So AI systems today predict the next word. World models build simulations of reality. They take in all sorts of data, visual video data, sensors, audio. They understand the dynamics of physics. And they predict not what words should come next, but what should happen next. And this is vital if you think about a robot in the world.

It doesn't need to predict the next word. It needs to predict, you know, there's a baby walking, there's a car moving, there's water falling from the sink. The sink wasn't turned off. It needs to be able to predict the scene, not just the word. Drive-less vehicles are many use cases where world models make a lot more sense. But it might not just be world models. There could be AI models that are based much more on biology.

I think we're going to start to hear more and more about what's going to come after large language models. But here is where we have to pay attention to markets. depending on where this next breakthrough comes from in whatever is going to replace large language models or get bills on top of them, if it is not in the Mag 7 or in an American company, it could shake the stock market. We could have another deep seek moment,

like we did last January, where the Chinese AI model Deep Sea came out of nowhere, nobody saw it coming. It was just as performance, as many of the American models, but cheaper, and it knocked trillions off of the U.S. stock market. It recovered. But if there is a breakthrough in AI, and it doesn't come from the American companies leading the stock market, the markets will feel that.

My fifth prediction is that we're going to start to see much more of a resistance towards artificial intelligence in 2026. And this is going to be the combination of many different forces. AI's impact on the workforce, I think, is going to continue to expand or that's going to continue to grow. We talk about all this time on the podcast from what's really happening with, these layoffs, what AI can and can't do, how to prepare. So that's something that we cover a lot. But I think more companies are going to start to downsize and shift and get AI ready. And that's going to impact the workforce. We haven't heard anything from policymakers on how to protect workers through this time. What are the social safety nets? How can people apply for reskilling programs?

What is the general plan? We don't hear anything about that. So I think we're going to start to see a lot more resistance from workers. I think people are going to start to feel like AI is cognitively impacting them. They're not thinking as deeply as before, issues with AI disinformation. I think all of this is going to culminate to some form of a backlash or resistance against artificial intelligence, some sort of movement and some sort of bargaining toward or resistance against AI progress. I do see that happening in 2026. My prediction number six, AI will go mainstream in politics. Up until this point, we have hardly heard anything. from policymakers in campaigns about artificial intelligence in the impact of AI on people,

not the impact of AI on national security, not the impact of AI on driving productivity in the economy, not the need for sovereign AI. The impact of this technology on individual people in society, on their jobs, on their education, I think we are going to see a politician make AI the center of their campaign, and they will talk to all of these points. And I can't tell if this is me manifesting this and hoping that this happens. But I think in 2026, AI is finally going to become much more part of political discourse. And not just kind of these open generic statements from politicians about AI is doing this, but a plan, an actual plan.

This is how I hope to deal with it. And not just we're going to generally stop all AI, something that's much more thoughtful. I think that it's long overdue and I think we see it in 2026. My seventh prediction for 2026 is that there's going to be a massive cultural moment with artificial intelligence in entertainment. So whether that is an AI generated song that genuinely goes viral, not because of the novelty that it's AI, but because the song is well liked or maybe it is a character in a show or in some type of content. And it really splits culture because there are people that are like, you know what, I've accepted it. This song is great or this piece of content is great. And people that say, this is atrocious.

We didn't deal with the copyright. How can we ever accept AI generated content? This is just a mockery of art. I think it could really split forces. And I'm not sure that the content comes even from America. I mean, there's many countries and many artists all over the world working with artists. official intelligence. So it could come from anywhere. But I think in 2026, AI makes a big moment in culture. If we look at the entertainment companies, right, in the moves they've been making,

even in the last couple weeks alone, there's a billion dollar deals between Disney and Open AI record labels that have previously sued AI companies are now partnering with them. To the entertainment industry is showing what they are betting on. And so I think we start to see some of the outcomes of that. But if you've been following me on social media and seeing my writing or you see me kind of talk in public on this stuff, I mean, where I stand, I find it very uninteresting to think about using AI just to create a digital twin of somebody and making content that is just digital copies of existing actors. To me, that doesn't make sense. It would maybe be possible. Yes, not interesting, an ethical nightmare.

What's more interesting to me is the new type of entertainment that gets created. with AI. That is what I'm focused on. But I think in 2026, we see some clashes. And I wrote a piece called the post-reality era. And this speaks directly to it where reality is going to become AI generated and people decide if they think it's real or not. I mean, if you like the AI song, it's real to you. Somebody else may think, this is AI generated music. This isn't real. I'm not subscribing to it. So we start to get into these different types of bubbles. And my eighth prediction is that there is a massive medical breakthrough or a breakthrough in biology

that is driven by artificial intelligence and the world sees that AI is a medical necessity, whether that is how we understand and are able to treat a disease, whether that is a fundamentally different approach to medicine and healthcare altogether. For the last couple years, biology researchers, medical researchers

have been working with customizing AI, models. So building AI models that are relevant specifically for cancer research or neurodegenerative diseases or autoimmune illnesses really focused on data sets relevant to a specific disease and an AI architecture relevant to solving those problems. They have been quietly working in the background for the last couple years. We are going to start to see the result of some of that work. And I think the world is really going to see this is why these parts in particular of AI are worth fighting for. And I think that's where most of us tend to agree on our future with AI, what it could do for healthcare.

I think we all know there's so many aspects of healthcare that are broken that aren't working. Things take so long. Access. It's so expensive. I think this is where AI is going to shine. And I think in 2026, we see the first example of it changing the game in medicine. So those are my predictions for 2026. And again, I'm not in the business of predictions. I'm making an exception for today. I want to hear your predictions. So write them in the comments. If you found this episode interesting, please share it with somebody who also might like it. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. And in terms of thinking about the future of work and some of the other areas that I discussed today, we also write a weekly newsletter where I go in more depth on these topics. So we'll link that below. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. And I look forward to seeing you at the next time. one.