Predictions for 2025, as usual

I can't predict the future, but I do it anyway - Happy New Year

Even 2024 has come to an end. The first January’s day of a new year always seems like a magical date, as if the change of a number born from a convention were a mystical moment in human history. Yet, the transition to the new year happens at different times across the Earth. Even the year itself is relative: we say it’s 2025, but for the Jewish calendar it’s 5785 until September 2025, and for Muslims it’s 1446. So, in reality, there’s nothing magical or transcendental; it’s just a convention we’ve created, differing based on our religious beliefs, the place we were born, and so on.

I usually dedicate the last days of December to organizing my browser bookmarks and the favorites in my RSS feed reader. Before deleting saved posts and URLs, I visit the corresponding website, which often reminds me of things I thought I’d forgotten. And so, in this episode, I’m sharing scattered thoughts, revisiting ideas from posts I had saved and even from those I’ve discarded.

As I was saying, the end of the year. For us, it’s 2025; for Jews, it’s 5785; and for Muslims, it’s 1446. Then it depends on where you are. As I said, it’s just a convention. The first to celebrate will be the inhabitants of an archipelago east of Australia, quite far east—the Line Islands, part of the Republic of Kiribati. Midnight strikes there when it’s just 11 a.m. on December 31 in Italy. There are about 10,000 inhabitants, but when the islands were discovered between the 15th and 16th centuries, they were uninhabited. After Kiribati, the celebrations move to Auckland in New Zealand, Melbourne in Australia, Tokyo in Japan, and then on through the rest of the world, until the cities on the West Coast of the United States, like Los Angeles and San Francisco. The very last to celebrate are the inhabitants of Samoa, when it’s 11 a.m. on January 1 in Italy. The final places on Earth to enter 2025 are a group of islets, the Baker Islands, 1,179 km away from Kiribati, with a 23-hour time difference. Fascinating, isn’t it?

As for the people on this planet, North Koreans celebrate the year 113 of the Juche calendar, counting from the birth of Kim Il Sung. Buddhists are in 2563, and for the Chinese it will be the year 4722 starting in February, the Year of the Wooden Snake. In short, everyone counts the years their own way. But as I was saying about posts I’ve deleted and those I’ve kept, many of those I deleted were about various predictions, trends, and forecasts for the future—in marketing, politics, economics. These were posts from 2018 or 2019, not Nostradamus-like prophecies, so fairly recent. Yet, in the meantime, we’ve had a global pandemic, followed by a war in Europe, a Middle East whose political geography changed in a matter of weeks, the return of Trump in the U.S., tensions in East Asia, particularly regarding Taiwan. In November 2022 OpenAI released ChatGPT for public use, an interface for what everyone calls Artificial Intelligence, but in reality it’s a language model, a statistical one. Since then, major tech companies have developed and released their own interfaces for their language models, the large language models (LLMs).

For wine, it’s been another year—perhaps even a third—of declining consumption, now also affecting production. In Italy, it will now be possible to produce dealcoholized wine, fully or partially, despite Agriculture’s Minister Lollobrigida having previously opposed it. The U.S. and Japan have started experimenting with lab-grown meat, often incorrectly labeled as “synthetic,” which may be approved globally, if not by 2025, then soon after. Meanwhile, in Africa people continue to die of hunger and thirst and in the Mediterranean people continue to perish while seeking better living conditions. From this perspective—looking at the world’s most disadvantaged—it seems nothing has changed in the past 2,000 or 5,000 years.

There’s this post about the double success of SpaceX rockets, when I still though Musk was a nice genius, not a bad one. And, in these AI-times, what about Net Neutrality? And this story, what has happened since then?

I have been reading back this post from Bertrand Russell I saved some years ago, this fundamental post from Nicholas Carr, and this one explaining we’re living in a simulation (I hope so). I know why I saved these posts, but why did I save this? Or this about philosophy (2011!). Of course, there’re many others, in Italian.

And there’re blog no more active since a long time, people I followed on Twitter (on X I don’t follow anyone) and that I interacted with and now are missing (from my radar, I mean). Well, looking back old saved posts make a little bit of nostalgia.

But, I’ve also to do predictions for 2025, so here I am with my easy-to-make prediction: the new year, 2025 in the Western world, will be the Year of Disruption (this remember me that old song, Eve of Destruction, 1965, Barry McGuire, but it’s all another story, doesn’t?). Technologies will break or continue to break established paradigms, like Bitcoin and, of course, Artificial Intelligence. More companies will use AI for their processes, to improve workflows, and speed up repetitive tasks like creating slides. Slides, which aren’t great when made by humans, might actually improve when made by AI. No more stealing photos from the internet; generative AI tools like MidJourney, Sora, and DALL-E will let people create stunning images for their websites directly. There will be a push-and-pull evolution: Google’s Gemini taking the lead, then being caught up by OpenAI’s GPT, Microsoft’s Copilot staying within the Office suite, and others like Claude and Llama competing. These AIs, or rather generative models for language, images, video, and audio, will each excel at specific tasks, and companies will use them based on their needs.

Bitcoin surpassed the psychological barrier of $100,000 in mid-December, and at the time I’m writing this post it’s at $92,000. Between 2025 and 2026, Bitcoin might actually become a widely adopted currency, with the introduction of more accessible systems for registration and storage.

And in geopolitics, USA will leave Europa alone, so finally we (European people) can march without East and without West, and we’ll go in Middle East to build the peace these people are waiting for 5,000 years. Or may be not, Europe will be chopped into pieces, few part here and few part there, and in two yrs no more Europe. China will be the Master of the World, it’s already like that in Africa, and USA will stay to play in its backyard.

Or maybe not, technology will be really the glue to unite the world, to solve problems of famine, thirst, drought in Africa and in other place of the Earth, and a giant AI will be built to help Human Being to live in this planet, in peace.

A giant AI working with a network from Earth to sky.

A Skynet, don’t?