Professor Sheila McIlraith chairs the international committee guiding AI100, a century-long study examining the evolution of artificial intelligence and its impact on society. (photo: supplied)
Just how far has artificial intelligence (AI) progressed over the past five years, and how has it impacted society?
A new report from the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) seeks to answer those questions. Administered by Stanford University, the study is guided by an international standing committee of multidisciplinary AI experts, chaired by Sheila McIlraith, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.
AI Goes Mainstream: The Scaling Era and the Rise of Generative AI, released on November 10, examines advances in AI and their implications for science, the economy, public trust and global security. The report is written by a study panel overseen by the AI100 standing committee.
Unlike studies that capture AI at a single point in time, AI100 takes a century-long perspective.
“What makes this study unique is its longitudinal nature,” says McIlraith, who is also associate director and research lead for the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. “We aren’t simply providing snapshots of the status of AI every five years, but rather contributing to a longer-term understanding of the technology’s evolution and its societal impact.”
The first AI100 report was published in 2016. When the second report was published in 2021, the AI landscape was vastly different. ChatGPT’s debut in 2022 and the subsequent widespread adoption of generative AI ushered in a period of rapid technological advances and profound changes in how AI is used.
“The world has awoken to the extraordinary capabilities of AI systems, and to their surprising and sometimes disturbing failings,” McIlraith notes.
The report’s study panel authors highlighted the difficulty of keeping pace with AI’s rapid development, writing that they repeatedly needed to revisit sections they had believed were settled.
Among the report’s key findings is AI’s growing role in scientific discovery, where advances are accelerating research that once took years into months or weeks. At the same time, AI is transforming fields once considered resistant to automation, including software development, mathematics and the creative industries.
The report also identifies emerging challenges, from the environmental and economic costs of rapidly expanding AI infrastructure to cybersecurity threats and the growing use of AI in military conflicts. It warns that increasingly sophisticated AI-generated images, audio and video are undermining longstanding assumptions about the reliability of digital evidence.
While AI is reshaping the lives of billions of people, the report notes that the public has had relatively little say in how the technology is developed and deployed.
“Rapid change will challenge governments and industry to support and safeguard people, our institutions and our critical infrastructure,” says McIlraith. “Both the benefits and the risks of AI technologies require the same clear-eyed scrutiny.”
A fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), McIlraith has helped shape the field through decades of influential research and leadership in international scientific organizations. Her involvement in efforts to assess AI's long-term societal implications dates to the 2008–09 AAAI Asilomar Study, which helped inspire AI100.
While previous AI100 reports primarily attracted interest from researchers and other specialists, McIlraith expects the 2026 report to reach a broader audience as AI becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life.
She observes that the report will serve as a time capsule, capturing this consequential moment in the history of AI when once-futuristic capabilities were rapidly becoming reality.
Beyond serving as an authoritative account of AI's evolution, McIlraith hopes the report will encourage broader public participation in decisions about how AI is developed and deployed.
“AI will transform many aspects of our lives and society. With it will come immense opportunities but also risks and challenges. We have informed choices to make about how we steward that change to create a world we want to live and work in,” she says.