Will 2025 bring new solutions to familiar challenges?

The desire to solve problems is ingrained in human nature. But we know that our solutions often create new problems. It’s a cycle that will likely never end.

So if you want to know what’s coming in 2025, the short answer is nothing we didn’t already know. Important trends will include, of course, more AI spreading from cloud to edge, as well as developments in commercial space exploration and sustainable technologies. Each of these presents exciting opportunities while also being the subject of dire warnings if things were to go wrong.

Elon Musk recently suggested that the chances of AI turning out badly are about 10-20%. That sounds alarmingly high. Without delving more deeply into his comment, a logical, if slightly facetious, response is that the chances of AI working in our favor must then be 80-90%. That sounds more encouraging. In practice, however, we must be prepared for good and bad outcomes. Legislation is beginning to arrive as technology acts proposed in the US and Europe put forward restrictions on the use of the AI, including prohibiting undesirable practices like deception, social scoring, biometric categorization and untargeted facial recognition.

Wise use of AI could be the key to our sustainability and survival.

AI is the technology of the day, and I have commented positively on its properties and potential many times in this column. Building AI into new products and services has become a marketing prerequisite. AI applications in the cloud offer easy access and fast answers to complex computing challenges, delivering great value for commercial organizations and novel services for consumers. And in devices such as PCs, smartphones and wearables, AI is the critical ingredient to enable the kinds of intuitive, human-like interactions people want to have with their tech today.

The AI in our smartphone cameras knows what our photographs should look like and adjusts the settings accordingly – a process that would take experts several minutes using Lightroom now happens inside our phones in milliseconds before we even see the picture. We even have bicycles that can warn the rider of a puncture with a tiny inertial sensor that integrates machine learning to monitor handling, giving the safety of a tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS) without the expense of tire-pressure sensors.