The Artificial Intelligence juggernaut rolls on. 2025 was a landmark year; 2026 promises more. More technology – companies designing their own custom chips. More globalisation – the US and China facing off. More value – scalable agents with well-coordinated orchestration. More regulation – the EU AI Act leads the way.
In all of this, I want to focus on the creator and the customer in the middle – that’s us, humans. AI directly impacts us through our livelihood and our social interactions. Think of jobs that are transforming (coding, anyone?) and online videos that may or may not be ‘real’. But, perhaps even more fundamentally, AI is reshaping the contours of what economists and policymakers call human capital.
AI’s own abstracted definition of human capital relates to “the economic value of a worker’s skills, knowledge, experience, health, and other personal attributes…” For now, let me simplify this to two dimensions: education and healthcare. Between them, they define what our bodies and minds are capable of and therefore need care for. Let’s look at a few aspects and see what 2026 may hold for each.
Education for Children
All over the world, children are refusing to do their own school homework; more precisely, avoiding the independent thinking needed for homework. They are simply using ChatGPT or an equivalent to find and write the answers. Teachers are worried. Administrators are concerned about long-term outcomes, specifically for the COVID-impacted cohorts. But there is a point of view that this is a blessing in disguise, provided cultural nuances are respected. For instance, in response to the number of seasons, AI systems respond with ‘four’, whereas in West Africa, there are typically two seasons. In that spirit, RobotsMali is a non-profit creating illustrated school books in the local language of Mali. As this kind of contextual capability grows, AI will make education accessible to more and more children, without necessarily dumbing them down in the process.
Education for Adults
Years ago, Malcom Knowles laid out principles of andragogy, i.e. adult learning, and a central tenet is self-direction. Adults ideally should curate their own learning journeys. This is not easy to enable conventionally. In practical terms, it can mean creating unlimited options as more and more people want to learn. But AI is uniquely suited to this kind of adaptive customisation. Many companies are piloting AI-enabled personalised upskilling. Some of these are simply the advantages of scale, as is the case for Microsoft Learn. By including cloud access and various kinds of certifications, professionals in diverse technology areas can curate content based on their requirements. This trend will only accelerate, as content creation itself gets automated, and more and more professions see the need to upskill in their versions of what it means to use AI.
Physical Health
I recently had to have a CT scan taken. The radiologist put me in a Philips CT 5300 scanner. This machine is positioned in a competitive market as ‘AI-enabled.’ Computed tomography (CT) is a data-rich imaging modality, and the natural use of Machine Learning and AI is to improve the quality of image reconstruction. Computer vision algorithms make connections to clinical outcomes more robust. In my professional life, I have worked on such technology. But as a patient, I saw AI being used a bit differently. An algorithm was involved in moving me around inside the bore, telling me when to breathe in and out. Yes, I am sure an operator was also involved, but the guidance was precise and seemed adapted to my physique and specific internal organs of interest. This is now what AI in medicine is becoming – from a doctor’s aid to a patient’s enabler. I was not being treated by a robot, but a near-future version of me might well be, and not even be directly aware of it.
Mental health
The use of AI chatbots as informal counsellors has been surprisingly widespread. A generation of young are living stressful lives, beset by social media and peer pressure. A generation of the elderly is going through the loneliness of extended lifetimes in nuclear families. But there is disquiet among mental health professionals (and parents, too) regarding confidentiality and safety. Noteworthy is the recent social media ban for adolescents in Australia. But there are situations where AI mediation can help in high-stress circumstances. Israel has been in such circumstances for a while. The Sheba Medical Centre has developed a suite of mental health AI support technologies labelled as LIV. For instance, an AI avatar has been found to improve outcomes for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Expect more such careful AI-driven interventions under medical supervision.
I do not subscribe to a dystopian view of the future. In the short term – say, in 2026 – AI will advance rapidly. Experiments will continue. Some will succeed, many will fail. But if we keep human values front and centre and make sure human capital keeps increasing overall, then we should be all right. As the Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, said in early 2025, “Some people worry about machines becoming superior in intelligence to humans. But no one holds the key to our collective future and shared destiny other than us humans. That sense of responsibility must guide us.”
