6 month Checkpoint: My 2025 Technology Predictions!
So am I a superforecaster or just another run of the mill mug shouting into the empty ether? Maybe both?
Before I begin the tallying I must admit I got the rapid development of robotic sports completely wrong. Although these automated mechanical devices seemed overmatched in marathons and boxing, turns out football (world) / soccer (North America) is their forte. Here is one of the many memetic video clips of a recent match. Of course after watching this you can see why sales to next year’s World Cup are well off:
Humanoid footballers stumble through their first tournament in China
A 6 month evaluation on my Ten Technology Predictions for 2025
AI adoption will continue on an uneven course. Unlike others who are forecasting AI to either explode or implode (dubious dichotomous thinking), I see it progressing on an erratic path forward. It’s “intelligence” levels - the focus of so many - will not make any quantum jumps this year. The lack of sustainable business models for the general purpose AI products will likely result in organizational consolidations (mergers and acquisitions). Some specialized use cases will take off (for instance, in the healthcare and medical research fields) while other uses will be remained mired by AI’s structural faults (hallucinations and misinformation anyone). The biggest change will be that more people will try it and adopt it for some tasks, which is the first step to mass adoption.
CHECKPOINT: I think that here I am spot on. It is clear for many now that learning and scaling was an S curve with improvement mostly capped at this point. I do not see how the current marketplace for purveyors of AI is remotely sustainable. As a few tech thinkers have pointed out its rapid adoption is mostly based on it being free. Adapting to “this might be it” for years or longer will be a difficult proposition for most.
Google Search and Wikipedia will be negatively impacted by AI assimilation. The bloated, SEO gamed, over-monetized search tool from Alphabet will see real usage cracks, as more people realize how effective AND efficient the variety of AI tools are to actually find out what you really are looking for. Similar effect for the bureaucratic, overly political Wikipedia. I no longer have to read the latest in political correctness or false controversies in biographies, for instance. Alphabet still has YouTube and a growing cloud business to offset these impacts, while Wikipedia has a huge cash war chest, despite their constant pleading for more money.
CHECKPOINT: Another spot on prediction. There are now reams being written about the new zero click environment and the dying gasps of Google Search. Wikipedia’s visits continue to fall and financially they are a break even proposition. Oddly, as humans visit them less directly, many AI answer engines love serving up Wikipedia as a source of their “knowledge.”
AI will continue to erode human art and entertainment. For reasons I cannot begin to understand, many people seem to not only accept AI generated art forms but actively seek them out. Streamers will increase the amount of AI augmented / created music featured on their AI controlled algorithms. Similarly visual content will be dominated at both the macro (major films) and micro (vid-ettes YouTube, TikTok and others) levels by AI produced imagery. Art and books will also be affected. ChatGPT poems anyone?
CHECKPOINT: Unfortunately I’m right on this. Spotify continues to be over-run with AI music, some of it originated by them. Graphic artists are dying on the vine, voice overs are now often AI, and there are special movie festivals open to those film-makers who can prove there was no AI in involved anywhere in the production.
The first streaming mega bundle will be launched. There will be a mega bundled offering in the film / TV space across different streaming organizations and corporate entities (Disney’s bundle is all their owned properties). Thus we will have successfully recreated something we said we didn’t want but apparently our behaviours say otherwise: cable bundles. Instead of hundreds of irrelevant channels, we will now have thousands of mediocre viewing options with very little high quality content. Not really much different for all our cable cutting.
CHECKPOINT. Here is my first miss. Despite this not having happened yet, the industry is unsettled and I have a feeling we might yet see this occur by the end of the year. So wait and watch on this prediction
There will be at least one major violent incident due to distorted video. Our continued reliance on social media for crucial information coupled with the growth in producing life-like AI visual imagery of anything, will lead to the malicious fabrication of the truth with associated (false) video evidence. Reality will be harder to perceive.
CHECKPOINT: This is a tough one to score but I will take a miss. We have seen our understanding and comprehension of major life events skewed dramatically with fake images and videos, but I’m not sure any of them have directly resulted in a major violent incident. I have one friend who said he will never believe another video again. With that I post this:
Cybercrime will amp up even more and there will be 1 or more major hacks. This will be caused by 3 factors. Our business organizations STILL don’t take cybersecurity seriously in terms of strategy, practices and software to prevent or minimize cybercrime’s impact. The unsettled nature of our world will result in more political driven actors. AI will generate more methods and toolsets for non-political crooks looking to make money. It’s a growth industry!
CHECKPOINT: Two thumbs up on this one. There are now so many hacks they are relegated to the back bytes of the various digital platforms people mostly use. They are reported like this part of our life is inevitable. Just stumbled on a story on how Marks and Spencers - an iconic English store - is in complete shambles since an Easter cyber-takedown and will lose about 300 million pounds getting all things going again, estimated by August.
Tiktok’s outcome will create a domino effect. Despite Trump’s looming meddling with this American law, ByteDance will be forced to divest TikTok. Depending on how it actually happens, this will likely trigger a rippling set of mergers and acquisitions of social media platforms over next 2 years.
CHECKPOINT: Wrong but still in play. Somehow Trump keeps rolling over the deadline when they have to divest. This is apparently his main strategy for everything: announce and defer. However, I believe ByteDance (TikTok’s owners) are rebuilding their app in order to complete the sale so the dominos may yet fall. A new effect is that the “answer engines” have brought Reddit and now Quora back into the game so platform-mania could be a real thing for the rest of the year.
Worldwide commitment to nuclear power will grow. Despite entrenched resistance from some groups in society, nuclear energy - especially small plant infrastructure - will pass a critical threshold. It will be driven by HighTech companies committed to AI who have gigantic mounds of cash, as well as independent thinking nations - from Portugal to Argentina - committing to their own homemade form of green energy.
CHECKPOINT. Another correct prediction. This continues to grow in acceptance, announcements, and the important criterion: investment. Japan has restarted 14 plants and actually announced a mid-2030s fusion powered plant. That one I will not believe in until it happens
We will continue to not make medical progress on Alzheimers. Similar to what happened to cancer research for decades until research breakthroughs like immunotherapy and earlier detection, scientific progress on Alzheimers’s is hindered by too much research based in an ideological rut. We need widespread, diverse investments in research of all types, not just in the same well-furrowed but ineffective path.
CHECKPOINT: I’m proud to take a complete failure here. New research has greatly increased our ability to detect Alzheimer’s early, though often that doesn’t help as our treatment options are poor. The unexpected results of studies linking shingles and RSV vaccines to deferred Alzheimer’s onset brings the immune system into play. So progress but a long way to go as we really don’t understand how it is caused and how to treat it.
Certainly the least important prediction: BlueSky will not be a X killer. Despite the progressives-based growth surge in BlueSky after Trump’s election, it will not bring down the micro-blogging house of Elon (here is the obligatory used to be Twitter phrase). It suffers from an atmosphere of smugness but that isn’t the problem. Despite some feature differences, human behaviour, at its most negative, will limit it as an alternative. It will remain stuck as a relatively unimportant social media platform.
CHECKPOINT: Completely right. Daily users and interactions are falling off of a cliff. It has a very strange vibe: hyper politically correct people who are intensely judgemental yet have the thinest skins themselves. I persist as there are about 5 great AI research theorists / researchers there.
Three new predictions to see us through
Can’t help myself so I will make some new predictions:
Our patience with AI errors will NOT run out by the end of the year: I’m not sure why but we keep giving AI thousands of passes for completely made up or incorrect information. I read an AI researcher today who stated that the inbuilt flattery of ChatGPT has drawn adopters into its web. He claims that earlier versions that did not have this factor in its responses didn’t engage (entrap in my view) users as much. Our cognitive predisposition to anthropomorphic conclusions is a key factor in this problem. Consider just one example among many: the divorce trial in which the husband won based on made-up citations. The verdict went to appeal where he introduced many more inaccurate citations and the wife’s attorney wasted much valuable time refuting disinformation. Fortunately the wife won the appeal but the judge’s tiptoed with the mildest language possible about this “new technology”. He is one representative of tens of millions. Me, I am mad that we continue to waste a terrible scarce resource - judges and court time - with this madness. I say fantastic fines not timid talk!
Tesla’s stock will drop some but it won’t plummet like it should (about 80%). I have never understood how certain firms become investor darlings (Amazon is another) and it seems to take decades to pour the cold water of reality onto them. But it always comes, just not in 2025
Rockets and robots will continue to make us laugh rather than making a lasting economic impact.
It has been a fun and eventful 6 months of 2025 so far. Thanks again to my readers. I likely will be making some big changes to this newsletter as I expand my writing horizons.
A dismal prognosis for our future. Depending on your criteria, your #4 might be here already. Amazon Prime Video offers subscriptions through them to lots of other platforms, and I think Hulu might have a few also.
AI adoption is more like a rickety tram with the occasional explosion.
We are in sync this week topic-wise.