I thought about making some predictions for 2025. And then I had a look at a detailed report drawn up in 2008 by the US National Intelligence Council on what it thought the world would look like in 2025. It drew on “numerous think tanks, consulting firms, academic institutions, and literally hundreds of experts inside and outside governments here in the United States and overseas”.
But it doesn’t mention the possibility of a banking meltdown or Brexit or a Russian invasion of Ukraine or the mass slaughter of Palestinians by Israel. It suggests 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.” It imagines that “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”.
Needless to say, Russia has not become more self-assured and it has reversed its integration into the global economy. The Israeli-Palestinian “dispute” has become an ever-deepening bloodbath and Iran is not “strengthening” but rapidly declining.
The American futurists were confident that “new energy technologies probably will not be commercially viable and widespread by 2025″. Pessimism about the potential of solar and wind power to replace carbon fuels was part of the conservative orthodoxy in 2008. It was happily misplaced.
Ten predictions experts made about the world in 2025. All of them are wrong
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Here are 10 confident predictions about 2025 made at various points over the last decade by serious experts, all of them wrong:
1. The EU will have broken up by 2025. “The European Union might survive in some sense, but European economic, political and military relations will be governed primarily by bilateral or limited multilateral relationships that will be small in scope and not binding. Some states might maintain a residual membership in a highly modified European Union, but this will not define Europe.” (Stratfor Strategic Forecasting, 2015)
2. We will all be living in a world of augmented and virtual reality. “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.” (CERN, May 2015)
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3. We will all be ashamed of our carbon footprints. “In 2025, carbon footprints will be viewed as socially unacceptable, much like drink-driving is today.” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Alas massive personal carbon footprints – private planes, vast houses, hyper-conspicuous consumption – are still all the rage.
4. Critical thinking about technology will have made great advances. “By 2025 I expect our lives to change dramatically … We will start to be more critical about new things but also learn how to turn this critical thinking into decisions. In short, we humans will stop regressing in regard to applying critical thinking and move on to make better decisions about our uses of digital technologies.” (Marvin Borisch, technologist and author, 2021) Not much sign of this in our age of rampant disinformation.
5. Carbon capture will solve the climate crisis. “A scale-up of negative emission technologies, such as carbon dioxide removal, will remove climate-relevant amounts of CO2 from the air [by 2025].” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Carbon capture technologies remain staggeringly expensive, unproven at scale and have yet to show that they can have a decisive impact on the reversal of climate change.
6. Technological innovations will deliver quick, cheap healthcare to everyone by 2025. “Engineering biology will deliver simple, low-cost diagnostic tests to individuals in every corner of the globe. As a result, morbidity, mortality and costs will decrease in acute conditions, such as infectious diseases, because only the most severe cases will need additional care.” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Billions of people barely have access to basic healthcare and even in the rich countries (like ours) access to diagnosis and treatment is grossly inequitable.
7. There will be a referendum on a united Ireland. “Let’s have an All-Ireland Forum on Unity to plan for all aspects of reunification, including a referendum by 2025.” (Mary Lou McDonald, January 2020). A Border poll is extremely unlikely to happen before 2030, and will be most probably much later.
8. Homelessness in Ireland will be on the way to being “eradicated”. So claims the Government’s Housing For All strategy, published in September 2021. In fact, there were nearly 5,000 households who had been homeless for more than six months in 2024 and there will almost certainly be many more in 2025.
9. Artificial intelligence will have made us all rich. “Improvements in AI will finally put access to wealth creation within reach of the masses…” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) The current evidence, summarised by the World Development Forum, is that AI will “widen income disparities within countries, benefiting highly skilled workers, displacing lower-skilled jobs in repetitive tasks, and concentrating wealth among those who control the technology.”
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10. “Trump is finished. The future of the Republican Party belongs to Ron de Santis.” This is a headline from the Telegraph in November 2022. Or “Donald Trump is finished as a serious contender for high office.” (New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, November 2022). How’s that working out for y’all?
There’s a reason astrologers, soothsayers and prophets are still thriving – they are no worse at prediction than most rational experts. When it comes to the future, only three things are certain. The first is that human beings have an innate need to attempt to reduce the unknown to rational predictability. The second is that we are usually wrong – or, if we do get it right, it is at least as likely to be the result of fortune as of brilliance. And the third is that all we can really do is to keep trying to make the new years better than the old ones.