Who shapes the future? Three answers from health, engineering and business

Challenged to test the claim that AI will solve our biggest problems, three speakers offered a shared answer: the future belongs to those who dare to shape it.

Can AI solve our problems of stretched resources, ageing populations and a creaking NHS? Award-winning journalist and Future Forum host Nisha Pillai put that question to three speakers whose answers converged on a common theme: agency.

For Dr Raghib Ali, chief executive of Our Future Health, there is “no path to that happier, more prosperous future without good health”. Yet, healthy life expectancy is falling, and inequalities mean up to a 20-year gap between places in the UK with the highest and lowest life expectancy.

The NHS, he argued, is in many ways “a national sickness service”. His glimpse of the future: a shift to prevention, understanding our risk of disease earlier through genomics, wearables and AI backed by Our Future Health, where nearly 3 million people have volunteered their data in a project he called “globally unique”.

Dame Hayaatun Sillem, founder and CEO of Argentic Associates and former head of the Royal Academy of Engineering, asked what she called the “agency gap” might mean for the future. A self-proclaimed “conditional optimist”, she warned that too much of modern life conditions us “to watch, to comment, to consume”, but generosity helps us “move from consumers to participants”. Her final challenge: keep asking “is this better, and for whom?”

Lord Jason Stockwood, former UK Minister of State for Investment, said Britain’s comparative advantages, including universities, technical expertise and entrepreneurial spirit, need long-term stability to bear fruit. On AI fears, he was blunt: the job protection debate is “the wrong conversation. The sole purpose of human existence is not economic output; it’s about the lives that we want to live and enriched experiences that we want to have.”

Their different perspectives suggested the same conclusion: AI and innovation should improve lives rather than be adopted simply because they are possible.