What Will Happen In 2026? Year-ahead predictions are easy to produce and easy to ignore. What makes the UCLA faculty roundup worth taking seriously is not the fact that academics made it — it is that each contributor is working from a specific domain of expertise and speaking to the mechanisms behind their predictions rather than just the outcomes.
Six perspectives, six different areas of concern, and a shared sense that 2026 carries unusually high stakes across all of them.
What Will Happen In 2026?
The AI spending question is one Bohr is watching carefully. Seven companies account for roughly a third of all Wall Street wealth, a concentration that raises bubble concerns. His counterargument is that these companies hold enough cash reserves to absorb downturns and maintain infrastructure investment regardless of short-term market volatility.
The longer-term math is more demanding: AI-related revenues currently run around $60 billion annually across the sector, but Bohr projects that by 2030, sustaining the required chip infrastructure and computing capacity will require between half a trillion and a trillion dollars in annual revenue. The gap between those numbers and current reality is significant.
His sharpest concern sits elsewhere entirely. A pending Supreme Court decision on whether a president can remove Federal Reserve board members could fundamentally compromise the Fed’s independence. Bohr is direct about what that would mean: every economist across the political spectrum agrees that subjecting monetary policy to electoral cycles is destabilizing. Nixon’s experience demonstrated this domestically.
Turkey’s recent history — interest rate cuts producing 87 percent inflation, with rates now hovering around 38 percent — demonstrates it internationally. Even a credible signal of lost Fed independence, Bohr argues, would rattle bond markets in ways that would make the rest of 2026 considerably harder.
Technology: The Unglamorous Costs of AI Growing Up
Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, acknowledges AI’s continued expansion into biomedicine and research while pushing back on the framing that treats it as straightforwardly beneficial.
The resources AI consumes — land, water, electricity — are real costs that do not appear in most coverage of the technology’s capabilities. The social justice and psychological dimensions are real costs too.
Governments have not demonstrated particular capacity or willingness to manage AI’s downsides at the speed they are emerging. Srinivasan thinks 2026 may be the year that gap between capability and governance becomes undeniable rather than theoretical.
His more optimistic note involves what he calls “punk” technologies — low-cost innovations built by communities working outside corporate and government frameworks. He points specifically to groups that have repurposed ham-radio technology into privacy-first communication networks, particularly in the 91 countries currently classified as autocratic regimes where mainstream digital infrastructure is monitored or controlled.
Public Health: The Return of Eradicated Diseases
Robert Kim-Farley, medical epidemiologist and professor-in-residence at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, names misinformation as the dominant public health challenge of 2026 — not a specific disease but the ecosystem that allows already-addressed diseases to return.
Measles is his primary example. A disease largely eliminated from American life through vaccination has returned as vaccine hesitancy, driven by debunked theories linking vaccines to autism and other conditions, has eroded herd immunity. The political promotion of these theories represents a different kind of health threat than a novel pathogen — it works against the tools that took decades to develop and deploy.
Rising healthcare costs, compounded by reductions to the Affordable Care Act, are pushing the American healthcare financing conversation toward a reckoning that Kim-Farley sees as overdue. How the United States pays for healthcare is a structural question that 2026 may force into sharper focus regardless of whether policymakers are ready for it.
On a more positive note, he sees genuine potential in the current generation of anti-obesity medications if distribution can be expanded through agreements with pharmaceutical manufacturers that bring prices down to realistic levels. His caveat is characteristic of good epidemiology: medical science continues learning, and what appears clearly beneficial now may reveal complications that are not yet visible.
Climate: Holding the Line While Losing Ground
Glen MacDonald directs UCLA’s White Mountain Research Center and holds the title of Professor of California and the American West. His 2026 assessment is not alarmist — it is something closer to sober resignation about the gap between where things are and where they need to be.
Global climate attention fell sharply in 2025, reflected in poor attendance at COP30 in Brazil. MacDonald sees 2026 as requiring reflection rather than continued escalation of ambition. The 1.5 degree Celsius threshold is his specific technical concern.
He believes global temperatures are very close to this marker and that 2026 is likely to be hotter than 2025. For California specifically, the pattern of erratic precipitation represents a compounding vulnerability that sits alongside the wildfire risk the Pacific Palisades and Paradise disasters made visceral for a national audience.
Law: A Supreme Court at an Inflection Point
Joseph Fishkin, constitutional scholar at the UCLA School of Law, describes the current Supreme Court as the most conservative since the late nineteenth century. His concern for 2026 is specific: the Court will face decisions that involve genuinely unsettled constitutional questions, and he expects it to use those decisions to advance the current administration’s political interests.
The 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provisions are one such question. Fishkin notes that a year ago most observers would have treated a serious challenge to birthright citizenship as implausible; today the outcome is genuinely uncertain.
On the limits of this, Fishkin identifies what he sees as a practical constraint on how far legal norm-breaking can go: the administration faces a shortage of lawyers who are both ideologically aligned and willing to risk professional consequences for their participation.
Disbarment and reputational damage within the legal profession represent costs that cannot be pardoned away. Whether this constraint proves meaningful in practice is one of the more interesting questions 2026 will answer.
Popular Culture: The Sound Nobody’s Watching For
Tiffany Naiman, director of music industry programs and assistant teaching professor at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music and a former band manager, brings a practitioner’s perspective to trend forecasting.
Her specific prediction for 2026 involves a geographic shift in popular music. While Hollywood and TikTok increasingly lean on AI-generated content, she expects popular music to move in the opposite direction — toward authenticity and physical instrumentation.
Electronic dance music is fading among her students, who are returning to guitars and acoustic instruments because they want genuine human connection with their music and the people making it.
The incoming wave she identifies is M-pop — Mandarin-language music from China. She names Jay Chou, G.E.M., Jolin Tsai, and Singaporean artist Stefanie Sun as acts positioned to break into the American market in 2026. The three major record labels — Universal, Sony, and Warner — are signing the biggest names in this space, and high-production shows are being prepared.
The Common Thread
Across six domains, the UCLA experts share something beyond their specific predictions: a sense that established frameworks are under unusual stress simultaneously. Economic institutions, public health infrastructure, legal norms, climate agreements, and cultural production models are all navigating disruptions that arrived faster than the systems designed to manage them can adapt.
Whether 2026 becomes a year of stabilization or further disruption depends partly on decisions being made right now in courts, legislatures, and laboratories — and partly on whether public attention can sustain focus on structural questions long enough to produce meaningful responses.
Frequently Asked Questions
What will happen in 2026?
Expert see gradual improvement after a slow start, driven by fiscal and monetary stimulus.
Why is the Federal Reserve independence question so significant?
Every school of economic thought agrees that subjecting monetary policy to electoral cycles produces inflation and instability.
What does the UCLA technology expert think about AI in 2026?
Ramesh Srinivasan expects AI to continue advancing, particularly in biomedicine, but argues the resource costs and social consequences are being systematically underexamined.
What is the biggest public health threat in 2026?
Robert Kim-Farley identifies medical misinformation as the primary threat — not a new pathogen but the erosion of trust in established science.
How close is the world to the 1.5 degree climate threshold?
Glen MacDonald believes the world is very close and that 2026 is likely to be hotter than 2025.
