By Alexander Rose, January 15th, 02025

I predict this year as an emergence.  We stand at a moment of many contradictions.  We have vast access to information, resources, truth, and opportunities, yet we face conspiracy theories, entanglements, contractions, and expansions all at the same time. I have many trepidations as I stare down the barrel of our next quarter century, but I am without question, optimistic about our future.

In just the first few weeks into this year we have seen the emergence of unprecedented fires, figurative and literal explosions in our public squares, intelligence technologies, and radical shifts of governance. We are reaching the skies, stars and ocean depths in a constellation of ways only imagined by science fiction a few decades ago.

Our tools to express creativity and originality have never been more powerful, nor have they ever been more derivative of others’ work and ingenuity. The black art of coding, once relegated to an elite cadre of engineers, has been blown open into something a 5 year old can do to create their first online business within minutes. We are seeing orders of magnitude leaps in computing speed, and cars that can not only drive themselves, but jump over obstacles using their own dynamic suspension. 

Personalities and megaphones are replacing our long venerated institutions and systems. Truth is now a fungible commodity where people seriously debate political parties controlling the weather, UFOs invading New Jersey, or mass mind control through vaccinations. Siloed news eco-systems head toward cliffs like herds of lemmings, with fact checking trying to catch up like a mosquito in the wind.

A new government zeitgeist painted with waste, sloth and ineptitude has emerged, that somehow can only be fixed with modern business acumen. Our ability to speak truth to power has never been greater, but our ability to come to consensus seems to be at an all time low. Corporations have all the rights and freedoms of personhood, with none of the responsibilities or consequences. We are seeing new forms of super-power expansion in both hemispheres, but we are also witnessing new levels of ground up rebellion using all the new tools at their disposal.

The notion that “the internet is forever” is held by many, at the same time publishers are legally laying siege to our bastions of global digital memory like The Internet Archive, and political pressures exerted on our sources of shared truth such as Wikipedia. Media and communications are under a consolidation of new oligarchs.  Simultaneously more free and open than it has ever been, yet also more capricious and slanted since the emergence of the first broadsheets.

We have more interdependence than ever. We have lived through a pandemic in the age of air travel, the internet and the advent of mRNA vaccines. The world learned many lessons from the last pandemic, but those lessons, like much of the future, are not distributed or interpreted evenly. 

At the personal level we are seeing toxic masculinity getting more and more oxygen, as inclusivity and tolerance are mocked and derided even in the mainstream media.  We are once again seeing legislation codifying hate, intolerance, and loss of choice. We continue to see some countries lock down their populations, at the same time more people have the freedom to live and work from anywhere in the world than at any time in human history.

Our cumulative carbon/methane plume is changing the climate at the same time whales are returning to the Hudson, and salmon in the estuaries of California.  We now have the capacity to both make our planet less livable, yet we are seeing the inklings of a fusion powered future. For the first time in our planet’s history we have the technology to live in space, and predict and deter existential threats like asteroid impacts. Our standard of living and opportunity are at an all time high, but that too is distributed far too unevenly. 

So with all this in mind, and I set my next alarm clock to ring in January of 02050*, the things I am most certain of in the next 25 years are:

• Artificial intelligence will not pose anything close to an existential threat, but it will continue to concern and delight us.
  
• We will have a new renaissance in bespoke computing. Keyboards will be as nostalgic as rotary phones. Machines will shift from things we fight to interact with, to things as ambient as the light in our homes.
  
• There will be more natural and man made disasters.  But it will matter less how they are caused, and more how we come together to solve and mitigate them.
  
• That many people who think better governing is only about efficiency and cost, will learn hard lessons. While businesses have one bottom line, governing has a thousand bottom lines.
  
• We will see the re-introduction of a previously extinct species through genetic engineering, and we will love it.
  
• The best solutions in government will not come from firing as many people as possible.  It will come from leveraging the vast knowledge and talent that is already there with new ideas and technologies.
  
• Humans will return to the moon and reach Mars.  Anyone who goes to Mars will most likely not return.
  
• That the emergent toxicity, hate and non-inclusiveness will find itself on the wrong side of history, just as it always has.
  
• The US will return the power of choice to our women.
  
• Fusion energy will go into production, and battery technology will at least triple in density.
  
• Our love of narrative and story will not wane, and may be our way back to a shared truth.

To paraphrase my longtime friend and mentor Danny Hillis: “The challenges we now face are great, but our capacity to solve them has never been greater.”

Alexander Rose, January of 02025

*Back when we were first developing the dials that would eventually adorn the 10,000 year Clock of the Long Now, we realized that we needed to add a 5th digit to years in order to account for the deca-millennium bug.