It is wise not to make predictions. If you know the future, keep it to yourself. Chances are you don’t. Here are some predictions for 2025 that turned out to be wrong.
Making predictions about the future is a mug’s game. If you do know the future, then trade on it. Invest accordingly, or start a business, but keep it to yourself. (This follows the same logic as investment advisers. If you know so much, why aren’t you trading for your own account instead of charging people for advice?)
Yet people love making predictions. It makes them look perspicacious (which is a clever way of saying clever). Predictions make great clickbait. If you don’t know the future (and I sure don’t), well, you can sell wrong predictions to the media any day of the week.
Back in 2010, who would have predicted that Donald Trump would ever be US president? Who would have predicted that David Cameron would call a referendum on leaving the European Union, and who would have predicted that Brexit would actually happen? Who would have predicted the election of the world’s first unashamedly libertarian president in Javier Milei of Argentina? Who would have predicted that Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine?
Plenty people predicted a global pandemic, probably involving a respiratory virus, but who predicted that it would lead most countries to panic and just lock down their economies to ride it out, causing a major global economic crisis?
It’s easy to cherry-pick random predictions from nonentities, so let’s look back at some serious expert predictions from the past, about 2025, and see how they worked out.
Populism and immigration
The US National Intelligence Council published a report in 2008, intended to land on the desk of the incoming president (who turned out to be Barack Obama), with an analysis of trends to 2025. It was the fourth in a series of increasingly influential reports, and drew on the combined knowledge of many experts, in the US and around the world. The Guardian has an archive copy in PDF form.
Most of its predictions are vague and conditional: if this happens, then that could happen, if not, then not. Such mealy-mouthed rhetoric is the stock in trade of futurism.
The report uses the word “populism” once, to refer to the consequences of “growing proportions of Native Americans in several Andean and Central American democracies”. They had no idea that right-wing populism would emerge around the world, in developing and developed countries alike.
They mention immigration only seven times in 120 pages, and almost all of them are about how immigration can soften the impact of aging populations in developed countries. “The annual level of net immigration would have to double or triple to keep working-age populations from shrinking in Western Europe,” the report says.
“If current patterns of immigration and Muslim residents’ above-average fertility continue, Western Europe could have 25 to 30 million Muslims by 2025,” they speculate.
Well, Western Europe had 25.8 million Muslims by 2016, and Europeans didn’t like it much.
Ukraine, the Middle East, and Brexit
The report has no idea that Russia would annex Crimea in 2014, less than six years after its publication, and invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022.
It foresees a strengthening Iran, but not a weakening Iran. It says “resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute could engender some stability as the [Middle East] region deals with a strengthening Iran and global transition away from oil and gas”.
Stability is not a word I’d use for the Middle East, the dispute did not get resolved, Iran did not get stronger, and global demand for coal, gas and oil continues to increase, and is at the highest level in history.
It says that Russia “has the potential to be richer, more powerful, and more self-assured in 2025 if it invests in human capital, expands and diversifies its economy, and integrates with global markets.”
Putin didn’t get that memo.
It says that the EU might expand to include Ukraine, but doesn’t say that Britain might leave.
Korea and South Africa
“We see a unified Korea as likely by 2025—if not as a unitary state, then in some form of North-South confederation.”
Yeah, right. Tell that to Kim Jong Un.
It only mentions South Africa once, saying that “growing demand for electricity in China, India, South Africa and other rapidly growing countries will increase the demand for nuclear power.”
South Africa’s average annual growth since 2008 has been an anaemic 1.3%, and electricity demand is lower now than it was in 2008.
Trump
“Donald Trump is finally finished,” read the headline on a column by Bret Stephens in the New York Times in 2022.
“Trump is finished. The future of the Republican Party belongs to DeSantis,” wrote Allister Heath in The Telegraph only six days earlier.
Variations on this sentiment have been circulating since Trump first stood for election in 2016. He was finished when he called former prisoner of war John McCain a loser and said he preferred people who weren’t captured in war. He was finished when he insulted a Muslim family whose son died on active duty in Iraq. He was finished when the Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the pussy” tape came out. He was finished when he fired James Comey, the director of the FBI who dared to investigate him and his associates, and refused to pledge loyalty to him.
In December 2015, the BBC polled five “political experts” on whether Donald Trump would win the presidency. All said he wouldn’t, or is unlikely to, win the presidency.
$1 000 computer
Peter Diamandis is a doctor, engineer, entrepreneur and futurist. He founded the XPRIZE Foundation, and is the executive chairman of Singularity University.
In May 2015, he made eight predictions about 2025. Let’s see how they panned out.
“In 2025, $1 000 should buy you a computer able to calculate at 1016 cycles per second (10 000 trillion cycles per second), the equivalent processing speed of the human brain.”
In technical circles, computer speed is measured in MIPS, or millions of instructions per second. Alternatively, processor speed is measured in megahertz, which might be closer to what Diamandis means by “cycles per second”.
Either way, the fastest desktop CPU on the market, right now, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, which will cost you $595 without a computer to put it in, has been pushed (by overclocking it using liquid nitrogen for cooling) to 321 970 MIPS, running at 7 548.68MHz. In “cycles per second”, that’s about 322 billion instructions, or seven billion Hertz. We are nowhere even close to 10 quadrillion cycles per second in a $1 000 computer.
The world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, can peak at 2.7 exaFlops (floating point operations per second, which take longer than normal instructions). One exaFlops is 1018 operations per second, so that is faster than Diamandis’s prediction, but it costs $600 million.
Internet of Everything
Quoth Diamandis: “The Internet of Everything describes the networked connections between devices, people, processes and data. By 2025, the IoE will exceed 100 billion connected devices, each with a dozen or more sensors collecting data. This will lead to a trillion-sensor economy driving a data revolution beyond our imagination.”
Actually, this is not far wrong. IoT Analytics reports an estimated 21.5 billion Internet of Things connections in 2025. They probably don’t have a dozen sensors each, but he’s not wildly out of the ballpark.
Perfect knowledge
“We’re heading towards a world of perfect knowledge. With a trillion sensors gathering data everywhere (autonomous cars, satellite systems, drones, wearables, cameras), you’ll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights.”
Not exactly. Most of the Internet of Things devices aren’t (and shouldn’t be) publicly accessible, and most of us don’t have access to all these smart devices and sensors yet. Autonomous cars are in their infancy and aren’t very good.
In the bigger scheme of things, the more information we have available to us, the more misinformation (unintentionally wrong) and disinformation (intentionally wrong) we have, too. We are very far from anything remotely resembling “perfect knowledge”.
Eight billion online
Diamandis: “Facebook (Internet.org), SpaceX, Google (Project Loon), Qualcomm and Virgin (OneWeb) are planning to provide global connectivity to every human on Earth at speeds exceeding one megabit per second.”
Only SpaceX is still really in the business of trying to cover every individual on the planet with fast internet, with Starlink. Facebook (now Meta) dramatically scaled down its ambition to providing very basic mobile internet services for free. Project Loon is dead. OneWeb is still limping along, despite a bankruptcy in 2020, but has changed its focus to governments and institutions rather than individuals.
According to the World Bank, 67% of the world’s population use the internet. It doesn’t say how fast their connections are, but a minimum of 1Mbps is not an unreasonable guess.
Disrupting healthcare
Diamandis said: “Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.”
Some elements of that vision are real, but on the whole, this is probably a better description of 2050. Also, I’m quite skeptical that each of us should be the CEO of our own health. Most of use are idiots, and almost none of us have been to medical school.
Virtual reality
Diamandis predicted: “The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.”
I’m not dictating this column to my glasses. Yeah, no. Screens are everywhere, and smart glasses are few and far between. Augmented and virtual reality remain niche applications.
Early days of JARVIS
Diamandis: “Next decade’s generation of Siri will be much more like JARVIS from Iron Man, with expanded capabilities to understand and answer. Companies like IBM Watson, DeepMind and Vicarious continue to hunker down and develop next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.”
He’s quite right. Opinionated and hallucinating generative AIs are everywhere, and we’re talking to them, and listening to them. To what extent this is a good thing remains to be seen.
Blockchain
According to Diamandis: “You might have heard of bitcoin, which is the decentralized (global), democratized, highly secure cryptocurrency based on the blockchain. This is a protocol that allows for secure, direct (without a middleman), digital transfers of value and assets (think money, contracts, stocks, IP). Investors like Marc Andreesen have poured tens of millions into the development and believe this is as important of an opportunity as the creation of the Internet itself.”
Can’t fault him on this. When he made the prediction, bitcoin traded at $240 dollars. It’s at $96 355 as I write this. That’s a 40 048% increase. It hasn’t yet fulfilled its potential, and isn’t yet quite as important as the internet, but it’s definitely headed that way.
Health expenditure
In 2011, the US Congressional Budget Office forecast that US health spending would rise from 17% of the economy today to 25% in 2025. According to the World Bank, it was at 16.57% in 2022, so Trump had better splash some cash on healthcare.
Brain net
In 2015, the Huffington Post asked seven futurists for some predictions for 2025. Here’s what a few of them said.
Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and author of The Future of the Mind: “In the next 10 years, we will see the gradual transition from an Internet to a brain-net, in which thoughts, emotions, feelings, and memories might be transmitted instantly across the planet.”
Yeah, no, not quite. A lot of anger, paranoia and insanity are being transmitted instantly across the planet, but that’s not what Kaku meant.
“Perhaps even tensions between people will diminish, as people begin to feel and experience the pain of others.”
Tensions are pretty high, last time I checked my social media feed.
3D-printed clothing
Dr. Ray Kurzweil, inventor, pioneering computer scientist, and director of engineering at Google had this to say: “By 2025, 3D printers will print clothing at very low cost. There will be many free open source designs, but people will still spend money to download clothing files from the latest hot designer just as people spend money today for eBooks, music and movies despite all of the free material available. 3D printers will print human organs using modified stem cells with the patient’s own DNA providing an inexhaustible supply of organs and no rejection issues. We will be also able to repair damaged organs with reprogrammed stem cells, for example a heart damaged from a heart attack. 3D printers will print inexpensive modules to snap together a house or an office building, lego style.”
I have yet to see any item of 3D-printed clothing, and the rest is still limited to laboratory experiments. I expect to download a pair of pants by 2050, perhaps.
Access trumps ownership
Jason Silva, host of National Geographic Channel‘s “Brain Games”, predicted this: “The on-demand revolution will become the on-demand world, where biological software upgrades, personalized medicine, artificially intelligent assistants will increasingly transform healthcare and well-being. Additionally, increased automation will continue to make our day-to-day lives infinitely richer. Self-driving cars will be ubiquitous, transportation itself will be automatic, clean, and cheap. We will move into a world in which access trumps ownership and the world is at our fingertips.”
Nope, ownership is still pretty important, self-driving cars are a decade away from being any good; most transportation remains manual, dirty and expensive; personalised medicine is a reality only for the super-rich; biological software upgrades are pure fantasy; and AI has yet to do much for our healthcare and well-being.
Carbon footprint
In 2020, the World Economic Forum asked its intake of Technology Pioneers for their views on how technology will change the world in the next five years. Here’s what some of them said.
Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering was of the view that in 2025, “carbon footprints will be viewed as socially unacceptable, much like drink driving is today”.
This would lead to a “sustainable, net-zero future”, he thought. Wishful thinking on his part. Economically disastrous if it had happened.
Quantum computing
Thomas Monz, Co-Founder and CEO of Alpine Quantum Technologies reckoned that by 2025, “quantum computing will have outgrown its infancy, and a first generation of commercial devices will be able tackle meaningful, real-world problems”.
Well, no. Quantum computers are still extremely limited and unpractical. Researchers have some ideas how they might be used, but none of those ideas are fully developed. It will be years, and probably decades, before quantum computers become commercially available for solving real-world problems, if they ever do.
Carbon capture
Jan Wurzbacher, Co-Founder and co-CEO of Climeworks: “A scale up of negative emission technologies, such as carbon dioxide removal, will remove climate-relevant amounts of CO2 from the air. This will be necessary in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C. While humanity will do everything possible to stop emitting more carbon into the atmosphere, it will also do everything it can in order to remove historic CO2 from the air permanently.”
Humanity isn’t doing either, really.
AI will make everyone rich
Atish Davda, Co-Founder and CEO of Equityzen said: “Improvements in AI will finally put access to wealth creation within reach of the masses. Financial advisors, who are knowledge workers, have been the mainstay of wealth management: using customized strategies to grow a small nest egg into a larger one. Since knowledge workers are expensive, access to wealth management has often meant you already need to be wealthy to preserve and grow your wealth. As a result, historically, wealth management has been out of reach of those who needed it most. Artificial intelligence is improving at such a speed that the strategies employed by these financial advisors will be accessible via technology, and therefore affordable for the masses. Just like you don’t need to know how near-field communication works to use ApplePay, tens of millions of people won’t have to know modern portfolio theory to be able to have their money work for them.”
A few people have tried to use generative AI for advice on how to turn a small amount of money into a big one, but they failed.
With the current state of AI, it would be madness to entrust any significant portfolio to it. It also faces the same problems that human financial advisers and quantitative trading platforms face: they can’t predict the future, and if everyone tries it, profit will be eroded away by competition.
Privacy
Ellison Anne Williams, Founder and CEO of Enveil said privacy will be pervasive and prioritised: “Despite the accelerating regulatory environments we’ve seen surface in recent years, we are now just seeing the tip of the privacy iceberg, both from a regulatory and consumer standpoint. Five years from now, privacy and data-centric security will have reached commodity status – and the ability for consumers to protect and control sensitive data assets will be viewed as the rule rather than the exception.”
More wishful thinking. The only thing that is pervasive is surveillance and tracking, both by the state and by corporations. Privacy remains a chore, and the fact that I wasn’t able to access the World Economic Forum’s article using a VPN just goes to show, privacy is neither pervasive nor prioritised.
Object lesson
If there’s any lesson in all this is that people who predict the future are often just talking their own pocket book. Note how a quantum computing guy said quantum computing would be big by 2025, and a privacy company CEO said privacy would be prioritised.
Even the experts are often, and even usually, wrong about the future. They fail to predict major, world-changing events, and do predict things that won’t come to pass until decades later, if ever.
Technology does move fast, as does geopolitics, but it often doesn’t move in the direction we expect. Meanwhile, inertia is also a thing.
People underestimate how long it takes to turn very large organisations or industries. How many times have we heard about revolutions in banking technology? We’ve certainly seen improvements, but banking is an industry where mainframes and COBOL are still alive and kicking. I predicted the demise of both when I was 17, and about to go to university to study computer science. I’m 53 now, and COBOL programmers are still in demand.
As for what I expect to happen in 2025? Who knows? Anything could happen. Remember that the view through a crystal ball is upside down. The best anyone can do is not to panic and to always carry a towel.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image: A crystal ball reflects an upside-down world. Photo used under CC0 Public Domain licence from PxHere.