Esra'a Al Shafei
VCs Will Face Their Privacy Reckoning in 2025
“2025 will bring about several crucial shifts in the global surveillance technology market. The AI surveillance industry remains heavily driven by profit and power consolidation, and is projected to reach $234.72 billion by 2027. Monitoring continues to be embedded in our communication tools, often disguised as "features" or "improvements" but are, in fact, functioning as sophisticated surveillance systems.”
Paz Peña
Artificial Intelligence will Clash with Environmental Justice
“Artificial Intelligence systems are scaling worldwide, bringing a series of socio-political, economic, and regulatory challenges. So far, these challenges have been viewed mainly from the perspective of democracy and human rights implications, but 2025 will herald an irreversible shift. These challenges will increasingly intersect with demands for environmental justice that rebel against the socio-environmental impacts of AI data centers.”
Louis Barclay
AI Phones Will be Like Horcruxes
“One in ten humans now use AI. That number will grow, but more interesting is how.
The browser is where it all started for consumer AI — its birthing pool. But two years on, Sam Altman’s baby has become a toddler. AI is now grasping for control over the shiny toy it sees in our hands: the smartphone. Early, fumbling attempts have lowered our guard. Apple Intelligence has not blown many minds, and neither have AI offerings from other big smartphone players."
Christo Buschek
Datasets will Become an Object of Investigative Inquiry for Journalists
“For a long time, the discourse around AI has been either “Oh no, we are all doomed” or “Only with AI can we cure cancer.” But behind both narratives are the same people, the same companies, and the same interests. In 2025, we journalists will use dataset reporting to make our AI coverage better and hold the interests behind AI accountable.”
Kristophina Shilongo
Tech Governance in Africa will Grapple with the Same Old Problems… in New Ways
“In 2025, participatory AI policy making in Africa will be different –it will actually be participatory! The African Union, its member states and their assemblage of financial partners will adopt a more inclusive approach to shape technology policy. Why? Because the challenges posed by AI and other emerging technologies are complex - they are economic, socio-cultural, political and span across sectors– they require an all-hands-on-deck approach to governance.”
Sayash Kapoor
In 2025, AI Adoption Will Continue to Lag Innovation
“Advanced generative AI has seen rapid improvements in the last few years. But despite predictions that AI will revolutionize the economy in short order, the adoption of AI will be far slower. AI adoption also runs into institutional hurdles. Even when technical challenges such as hallucination are addressed, improving patient outcomes has other roadblocks: privacy regulations, integrating with existing workflows, and training clinicians in using AI. Such technical and institutional hurdles lead many to incorrectly conclude that AI won't be useful in domains like healthcare; the reality is that adoption simply takes far longer than we typically expect.”
Roya Pakzad
Bringing AI Down to Earth: Evaluation as a Main AI Theme in 2025
“The AI landscape in 2025 will undergo a much-needed transformation, shifting from excitement around general capabilities to a focus on evaluation of real-world, domain-specific performance. While the past few years have been largely about celebrating the potential of generative AI and large language models, the next phase will demand practical answers: How effective are these systems at performing specific tasks in domains such as healthcare, government services, humanitarian crises, or social media content governance?”