Every year I dedicate the last article of the year to reflect on the year gone by. Seeing as this article goes to print on the very last day of 2025, I thought I'd take the opportunity to look ahead instead — and try and predict what the next 25 years will bring.

This is a link-enhanced version of an article that first appeared in the Mint. You can read the original here. For the entire archive of Ex Machina articles please visit my website.

On the last day of the year 2000, the future looked bright. The world had survived the Y2K bug, and early signs seemed to indicate that the rapid proliferation of internet access points would dramatically benefit society. We ended the year with optimism, hopeful that the impending digital revolution would democratize knowledge, erode authoritarian regimes and enable global prosperity. We believed we were on the cusp of a period of sustained technological acceleration that we prematurely christened the ‘Long Boom.’

Twenty-five years later, it is clear that our optimism was misplaced. Not only did the internet not create a ‘Global Village,’ it weaponized connectivity, leading to a world divided by the Great Firewall of China, European regulations and American corporate silos. Social media made things worse, optimizing engagement over information to the point where, in less than a decade, friends and neighbours were divided along tribal lines and forced to operate in echo chambers that presented divergent versions of the same reality. Rather than coming together, nations have drifted apart, riven by concerns of digital neo-colonialism and the rapacious intentions of technologically advanced nations, as represented by the global corporations that serve as the spearhead of their ambitions.

Given our poor performance, it seems futile to attempt similar predictions today. But this article appears in print on the very last day of 2025 and I couldn’t resist reflecting on how I believe technology will shape society over the next 25 years.

Here, then, are the four axes along which I believe change will occur. By far, the most significant technological shift will be in the biological realm, as synthetic biology starts being used to replace the chemical processes we currently rely on. This means that we will soon be able to ‘brew’ what we need by using precision fermentation and cell-free enzymatic systems, allowing us to ‘manufacture’ on demand whatever chemicals, fabrics, fuels and food we need. This will disrupt the current industrialized production system as we shift to distributed bio-manufacturing ecosystems in which neighbourhood ‘brewers’ produce our pharmaceuticals, fabrics and food. When this happens, our economic growth could finally be decoupled from resource extraction, marking the end of the ‘Age of Oil.’

The second axis of tech transformation is intelligence—not necessarily the large language models that are all the rage right now, but some form of machine intelligence that will permeate everything we do in society. This will accelerate once cognition becomes commoditised and we can get our own personal AI systems. When that happens, always-on medical diagnosis intelligence will be able to detect health concerns well before they become a threat, transforming medicine from a reactive to a predictive science. It will ensure that every student has a tutor who knows exactly how this individual learns best, transforming today’s ‘one-to-many’ teaching environment into a ‘one-on-one’ approach. It will also enable various micro-efficiencies—traffic lights that ‘watch’ roads and coordinate with every other light in the city, devices that negotiate with the grid to buy power when it is most efficient and refrigerators that re-stock themselves—which will allow us to stop worrying about how to do things and focus on what needs to be done.

The third axis of transformation will be space, with technology opening up a brand new dimension in which our planetary civilization can operate. Even if we do not reach Mars by 2050, we would have by then begun to use space for industrial activity, leveraging microgravity for the manufacture of high-value materials that cannot be produced on Earth and augmenting our supply chains by mining asteroids.

This will likely be closely connected to the fourth and final axis of innovation, which is energy. I believe that in the coming years, it will finally cease to be the challenge it is today as we begin to use orbital platforms to access space-based solar power, collecting energy continuously and beaming it back to Earth. Unlike traditional terrestrial renewables, this system would be free of weather, seasonal and land constraints, providing us with uninterrupted carbon-free baseload power.

As transformative as these technologies will be, they will necessitate finding new answers to old questions. Synthetic biology will raise new ethical concerns around engineering life, just as commoditised intelligence will force institutions to determine where human agency ends and automated decision-making begins. And as global superpowers compete to establish dominance in new economic zones beyond the atmosphere, space will cease to be a ‘global commons’ and instead become a new battleground where conflicts over orbital slots and transmission corridors abound.

If the year 2000 taught us anything, it is that we overestimate the speed of technological change almost as much as we underestimate its second-order effects. This means that the real story of the next quarter-century may not be as much about what these new technologies enable as the extent to which we can redesign our geopolitical and institutional architectures to take advantage of them.

Whether this period is remembered as the start of a ‘New Long Boom’ or the moment new sources of abundance further fractured the global order will depend on how our institutions adapt.

Every year I dedicate the last article of the year to reflect on the year gone by. Seeing as this article goes to print on the very last day of 2025, I thought I'd take the opportunity to look ahead instead — and try and predict what the next 25 years will bring.

This is a link-enhanced version of an article that first appeared in the Mint. You can read the original here. For the entire archive of Ex Machina articles please visit my website.

On the last day of the year 2000, the future looked bright. The world had survived the Y2K bug, and early signs seemed to indicate that the rapid proliferation of internet access points would dramatically benefit society. We ended the year with optimism, hopeful that the impending digital revolution would democratize knowledge, erode authoritarian regimes and enable global prosperity. We believed we were on the cusp of a period of sustained technological acceleration that we prematurely christened the ‘Long Boom.’

Twenty-five years later, it is clear that our optimism was misplaced. Not only did the internet not create a ‘Global Village,’ it weaponized connectivity, leading to a world divided by the Great Firewall of China, European regulations and American corporate silos. Social media made things worse, optimizing engagement over information to the point where, in less than a decade, friends and neighbours were divided along tribal lines and forced to operate in echo chambers that presented divergent versions of the same reality. Rather than coming together, nations have drifted apart, riven by concerns of digital neo-colonialism and the rapacious intentions of technologically advanced nations, as represented by the global corporations that serve as the spearhead of their ambitions.

Given our poor performance, it seems futile to attempt similar predictions today. But this article appears in print on the very last day of 2025 and I couldn’t resist reflecting on how I believe technology will shape society over the next 25 years.

Here, then, are the four axes along which I believe change will occur. By far, the most significant technological shift will be in the biological realm, as synthetic biology starts being used to replace the chemical processes we currently rely on. This means that we will soon be able to ‘brew’ what we need by using precision fermentation and cell-free enzymatic systems, allowing us to ‘manufacture’ on demand whatever chemicals, fabrics, fuels and food we need. This will disrupt the current industrialized production system as we shift to distributed bio-manufacturing ecosystems in which neighbourhood ‘brewers’ produce our pharmaceuticals, fabrics and food. When this happens, our economic growth could finally be decoupled from resource extraction, marking the end of the ‘Age of Oil.’

The second axis of tech transformation is intelligence—not necessarily the large language models that are all the rage right now, but some form of machine intelligence that will permeate everything we do in society. This will accelerate once cognition becomes commoditised and we can get our own personal AI systems. When that happens, always-on medical diagnosis intelligence will be able to detect health concerns well before they become a threat, transforming medicine from a reactive to a predictive science. It will ensure that every student has a tutor who knows exactly how this individual learns best, transforming today’s ‘one-to-many’ teaching environment into a ‘one-on-one’ approach. It will also enable various micro-efficiencies—traffic lights that ‘watch’ roads and coordinate with every other light in the city, devices that negotiate with the grid to buy power when it is most efficient and refrigerators that re-stock themselves—which will allow us to stop worrying about how to do things and focus on what needs to be done.

The third axis of transformation will be space, with technology opening up a brand new dimension in which our planetary civilization can operate. Even if we do not reach Mars by 2050, we would have by then begun to use space for industrial activity, leveraging microgravity for the manufacture of high-value materials that cannot be produced on Earth and augmenting our supply chains by mining asteroids.

This will likely be closely connected to the fourth and final axis of innovation, which is energy. I believe that in the coming years, it will finally cease to be the challenge it is today as we begin to use orbital platforms to access space-based solar power, collecting energy continuously and beaming it back to Earth. Unlike traditional terrestrial renewables, this system would be free of weather, seasonal and land constraints, providing us with uninterrupted carbon-free baseload power.

As transformative as these technologies will be, they will necessitate finding new answers to old questions. Synthetic biology will raise new ethical concerns around engineering life, just as commoditised intelligence will force institutions to determine where human agency ends and automated decision-making begins. And as global superpowers compete to establish dominance in new economic zones beyond the atmosphere, space will cease to be a ‘global commons’ and instead become a new battleground where conflicts over orbital slots and transmission corridors abound.

If the year 2000 taught us anything, it is that we overestimate the speed of technological change almost as much as we underestimate its second-order effects. This means that the real story of the next quarter-century may not be as much about what these new technologies enable as the extent to which we can redesign our geopolitical and institutional architectures to take advantage of them.

Whether this period is remembered as the start of a ‘New Long Boom’ or the moment new sources of abundance further fractured the global order will depend on how our institutions adapt.