UNDP’s flagship arrives with a warning and a frame. The warning is that human development, as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI), has stalled. The frame is that AI’s effect on that trajectory is a matter of choice, not technological destiny, and that the useful question is not what AI can do but what choices let it work for people.
The headline
Global HDI is projected to reach a record high in 2024, yet the annual gain would be the weakest since the index began 35 years ago, and gaps between the richest and poorest countries have widened for four straight years. Against that backdrop the Report rejects the automation panic. It argues that humans are more than the sum of the tasks they perform, that AI and people can be complements rather than substitutes, and that whether AI augments work or simply displaces it depends on policy choices being made now.
The numbers
- The stall. Global HDI is projected to hit a record high in 2024, but the increase would be the lowest since records began 35 years ago, roughly 4.5 times below the 1990–2024 mean change. The slowdown cuts across every developing region.
- Delayed by decades. A very high HDI world, once on course for 2030, is now projected to arrive decades later; the very high HDI threshold is a value of 0.800.
- Widening divide. Gaps between very high and low HDI countries, which had been shrinking for decades, have widened over the past four years.
- Expected uptake. About two-thirds of respondents in low, medium and high HDI countries expect to use AI in education, health and work within one year, against actual recent use of roughly 14 to 24 percent by HDI group.
- Augment over automate. Nearly 4 in 10 respondents expect AI to both automate and augment jobs; overall, expectations for augmentation (61 percent) edge those for automation (51 percent).
- Uneven access. On average only 35 percent of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics are women, and the survey finds men more likely than women to use generative AI for work regardless of qualifications.
The counting angle
This is a report about a metric written by the people who maintain one. The HDI stall is the headline precisely because the index has counted health, education and income the same way for 35 years, which makes a flatline legible. To read AI, UNDP built a new instrument, the UNDP Survey on AI and Human Development, pooled across 21 countries, and disaggregated every result by HDI group so the gaps are visible rather than averaged away. The sharper measurement claim sits in the recommendations: today’s AI benchmarks reward machines for mimicking humans, so the Report calls for new benchmarks that count AI’s contribution to human development instead. What gets measured steers what gets built.
Watch & read
- Human Development Report 2025, the full report (UNDP).
- Reading AI Readiness Backwards, UNDP on how AI adoption actually lands in public systems.
Figures are as reported by UNDP. Survey results come from the UNDP Survey on AI and Human Development, pooled across 21 countries; HDI projections and trend estimates are the Report’s own.