State of the Future 2025 and Beyond
What is this elusive future?
“Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future” said one of my childhood heroes Jedi Master Yoda.
The sci fi writer William Gibson wrote “The future is already here - it’s just not yet evenly distributed”
Is the future some blank canvass, completely dependent on every action now through chains of causality? For time is like an arrow, we were once taught in physics.
Is the future the collective imagination of today?
Or is there any teleology to the universe. Is there a creative evolutionary force? A God or a Creator? Or perhaps in our more secular society today, we could borrow from physics and refer to the strange attractor.
Wikipedia explains that “In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system.” Its almost as if the future is reaching back to us. Imagine a leaf floating on a turbulent river. It can meander its own path downstream but it always stays within the river banks.
In quantum mechanics today there is even a theory of retrocausality, spelt out in a book the Quantum Handshake where photons from the future interact with the now.
My experience is that it is a dance between the individual and the universe, between agents and the strange attractor.
The mega trends that futurists point to are important to discern, of which to be aware. But times of great uncertainty and chaos even, are great moments for transformation, and perfect moments to forge new paths. Just observe nature and ecological systems. Like the chrysalis dissolving to become the butterfly.
Make no mistake 2025 is poised to be a very poignant moment of history.
"Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen."
Lenin
Maybe there are years when centuries happen!
When I used to live in Japan many years ago, it was often said that wild animals had an intuitive sense when an earthquake was poised to strike and would flee. In a similar sense increasing numbers of people sense that big shifts are afoot. I think humanity senses we are living in significant times. I discerned this through various phenomena but one such indicator was the rising interest in books on big history such as Sapiens by Yuval Harari in 2014.
This happens to be my fascination: I am most interested in the bigger context or history through which we are living. In my first career I was blessed with mentors on Wall St and the investment world who looked at cycles of history, people similar to Ray Dalio. Then as a futurist I began to be aware of various historians and futurists who tried to map out where humanity was coming from and going to. Many pointed to cycles. In fact, if one studies most ancient and intelligent civilizations, they observed cycles in both nature and human nature from the Chinese to the Greeks to the Mayans.
From a cyclical perspective we are at the end, and therefore beginning, of multiple cycles. This means we are at a heightened state of uncertainty, and thereby opportunity in my mind. Here are some observations.
End of a 4 year political cycle in the USA with Trump 2.0. Whilst many are aghast at Trumps re-election, some think that a team of Silicon Valley insiders are poised to try to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of the USA through measures such as deregulation, and even embrace new money in the form of cryptocurrency. Wall St certainly has expectations and we will hear some views on this in the podcast.
At the same time, Trump is about to rewrite the post war order and shake up even America’s allies. There will be lots of talk of trade wars, certainly rises in tariffs but hopefully less shooting wars. However, excessive tariffs might cause recessions around the world and thereby affect the US economy
There will be more drilling and less care about the climate debate. However, ecological consciousness of the youth is rising and many powerful trends towards regeneration are in place so I would not give up hope. I am glad to see the climate debate widen out and more talk of biodiversity.
Trump 2.0 also marks a global cultural shift away from the woke extremes on the Left. You are seeing this across the planet from Argentina to Germany to the UK, with Nigel Farage looking as the most popular candidate to be the next PM. The US Democrat Party might split at some point. But I do not think that the US Cultural War is over as I will mention later.
We are towards the end of an extended investment cycle which started in 2009. The SPX500 has risen 800% since its bottom at 666. And all manner of bubbles have materialised across various assets. A poster child might be the crypto billionaire, Justin Sun, who paid for a 6 million dollars for a banana duct taped to a wall. Then proceeded to eat it at a subsequent event in 2024!
John Hussman recently commented that were were in a bubble as big as 1929 or 2000 in the Financial Times.
“As US equity markets trace the contours of the third great speculative bubble in history, investor confidence in a new economic era has reached extreme levels.
“Among several valuation measures setting record highs is one that has reliably been a gauge for the subsequent returns and potential losses of the S&P 500 index over the following 10 to 12 years: the ratio of the market capitalisation of US non-financial companies to “gross value-added” or corporate revenues generated incrementally at each stage of production. Since early 2022, this metric has rivalled and now exceeds the peaks of both 1929 and 2000.”
This does not imply an imminent collapse, just that longer term returns will struggle. In fact, the Trump administration might pump the economy up with tax cuts and deregulation for one last hurrah, as it common at the end of investment cycles.
Private markets are another bubbly area; especially dangerous because of a lack of transparency, which is exactly why some funds are investing in them.
“Private funds, which include venture capital, private equity, private debt, infrastructure, commodities and real estate, now dominate financial activity. According to consultants McKinsey, private markets’ assets under management reached $13.1tn in mid-2023 and have grown at close to 20 per cent a year since 2018.”
Financial Times
These bubbles contrasts with the plight of many working and even lower middle class people across the Western world, which is another reason why all of this is unsustainable and will clearly have political ramifications.
Data from Redfin reminds one how dire the situation is out there for many, if not most, families. Inflation is still an issue and the central bank data does not really factor in basic necessities such as food and housing fully. Shelter costs especially have become unaffordable for many.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of U.S. residents who earn less than $50,000 per year sometimes, regularly or greatly struggle to afford their regular mortgage or rent payments. Many others are eating out less, taking fewer vacations and are even skipping meals.
Credit card defaults in the US also skyrocketed by 50% in the past year. Credit card defaults reached $46 billion in the first nine months of 2024, a level not seen since 2010. The cost of living has surpassed manageable levels for the majority of households.
On the topic of inflation. We are probably at the end of a 40 year cycle which commenced from the early 80s until 2022 as I spelt out in an article here. We remained in a relatively benign time for inflation, although real income was falling across the Western world especially the USA. Various factors accounted for this including the deflationary impact of China becoming the factory of the world.
China is now exporting more deflation. But overall the risks continue to be stacked to the upside if one looks at major trends at the moment. Demographics are an obvious one. Populations are beginning to fall all across the advanced world which I will come to later.
There is also deglobalisation and friend shoring. It has proven to be incredibly difficult to unravel supply chains until now. But with trade sanctions and other measures on the horizon, this might well happen. Even if factories are moved from one nation to another so called friendly one, it all has cost implications.
Then there is the ever present risk of war. As we saw with the proxy war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine, costs has explode higher very quickly.
Then there is the costs of our ecological crisis (wider than a climate crisis). This is inflationary as real costs have to be incurred from insurance to building new factories.
Finally, indebted governments all around the world are incentivised to print money. And this might be the biggest reason for inflation. It is easier to apply an inflation tax than actually balance the budget by raising taxes or cutting services and spending less on wars. Governments do not like real accountability.
Inflation is the mechanism by which many Empires and Civilizations fail. (See later turning points).
The failure of fiat currency through inflation might accelerate innovation in money, which has seen zero innovation for thousands of years. Later we will be speaking with Jeff Booth who is convinced we will eventually move to a BTC based economy, which would allow the breakthroughs in innovation to translate to falling prices to everyone.
Some researchers like Neil Howe talk of the end of an 80 year cycle, called the Fourth Turning, influenced by demographic changes. He foresaw another major crisis for the USA around this era. We are still in the midst of it.
“The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy” got much attention in the 2016 election as Steve Bannon used to refer to it. But its not merely a right wing talking point. The very much Democrat Al Gore gave members of Congress this book 16 years earlier as he was spending a lot of time with futurists and thought it was important.
Looking at demographics primarily Neil Howe discerned 4 phases of a cycle in the US and the UK before that. These phases culminated in a Winter where everything unravelled and old institutions failed before being rebuilt into the next cycle. Historically this converged with the war of independence, the civil war and then the Great Depression and WW2. We are here again.
When of the trends have been confirming this prognosis. Public trust in the US federal government has sunk to a new low. According to Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans, who said they trusted the government “just about always” or “most of the time,” declined from a peak of 77% in 1964 to just 16% in 2023.
Howes model culminates in the early 2030s. It is entirely conceivable that the USA will fracture. When you look at longer futures, it makes sense that nation states give way to new forms of governance. I have been talking about possible civil war in the USA pretty much since the last financial crisis.
We are at the end of a 500 year cycle of Western geopolitical domination.
The era of Western domination is ending and we are clearly moving to a multi polar world which could herald an incredible period of peace and co-operation as the colonial era finishes. Many of the problems in the international order, at least the existential ones, might come from the non acceptance by the West, especially the USA, of that reality.
On a panel of ex ambassadors and foreign policy experts over a year ago I read this quote by Berat Albayrak, a former Minister of Turkiye. It seemed to epitomise sentiment and comments I hear all around the word including Asia and the Global South:
“Before going there, I had thought too highly of the United States. It seemed like a massive structure at the centre of the world that made one feel extremely small. Its size and skyscrapers were intimidating - and its system all controlling. If you failed to catch up, it could swallow you whole. Over time, however, I realised we exaggerated them in our eyes, yet failed to be sufficiently aware of ourselves. That awareness, whose seeds had been planted in my childhood years, thus grew much more rapidly, looking in the mirror of another society. That mirror showed me much more clearly our own power in humanitarian, conscientious, and societal terms. I came to appreciate the depth of our history and the vastness of our spiritual geography….
…..The world is heading toward a great clash between the East and the West. We are beginning to experience the transformation of the world’s 500 year-old ecosystem.”
The USA squandered its unipolar moment when the Cold War ended and it became the sole superpower. It sank trillions of dollars into the endless wars since 9.11, whist other nations like China invested into technology, and this has culminated in a proxy war in Ukraine which I predicted over a decade earlier. Many top experts agree from Professor Mearshiemer to Jeffrey Sachs could have been avoided.
Militarily Russia has some of the most advanced hyper sonic tech on the planet today and from day one I said that NATO would not win. Of course there are no winners in war, with thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians left dead or injured.
The economic sanctions also quite foreseeably backfired. The attempt to kick Russia out of the global financial system and seize its gold was a warning to all nations around the world; look what the US might do if you get on the wrong side. The countries, with the brilliant mathematicians and technologists of Russia in the lead, are actively developing alternatives to Swift etc.
The West’s soft power has also be waning, if not collapsing in recent years as it further reveals its own hypocrisy. The”international rules based order” just seems to mean you follow the rules that we make. And very often the West is promoting democracy on the one hand and then supporting a dictator on the other hand. Just look at the dictator Zelensky, of the most corrupt country in Europe, heralded as a defender of freedom. Or look at the unconditional support for a Genocide in Gaza. People in the West might believe the propaganda, but I assure you the people of the Global South, the majority of the planet, do not.
Economically, I do think that most Westerners quite realise the magnitude of BRICS, which overtook the G7 in GDP PPP terms in 2020. Just contemplate the size of the Chinese economy.
According to the Asia Times “China’s PPP GDP is 25% larger than that of the US….Last year, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million vehicles, almost three times more than the 10.6 million made in the US.
On the demand side, 26 million vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the US. As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spent twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers.”
Not only that. China has already shifted from imitator to innovator although that’s not the way most Westerners perceive it yet. Even the Economist referred to China as a scientific superpower in 2024.
The survey released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in February 2023 also had fairly shocking results.
China leads in 37 of 44 technologies tracked in a year-long project by the thinktank called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The fields include electric batteries, hypersonics and advanced radio-frequency communications such as 5G and 6G.
The report said the US was the leader in just the remaining seven technologies such as vaccines, quantum computing and space launch systems.
It said the findings were based on “high impact” research in critical and emerging technology fields, focusing on papers that were published in top-tier journals and were highly cited by subsequent research.
“Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains,” the report said.
“The critical technology tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US).”
This think tank is funded by the Australian Department of Defence and the US government so it could have an incentive to exaggerate the threat. That said, the trend is clear.
However, this won’t just be the Chinese Century. Their leading academics and visionaries do not really suggest this. It will be Asian, Eurasian or something bigger.
If you take a look at a real world map you will realise how tiny Western Europe is. Russia, China, India and other old civilizations including Turkey, Iran and more are awakening connecting up to become the New Silk Roads.
Japan might be a dark horse, a soft power superpower if it does not over align itself with the USA on confrontational national security issues. There has beena flourishing of interest in its culture in recent years.
This all said, ultimately the chessboard of geopolitics or the war between empires might not need to be played out. The West does not need to die, just transform and move away from colonialism. Europe and the USA can be immense sources of creativity. And besides, the nation state might die to pave way for something more beautiful.
On longer time frames I foresee a gradual shift of power from centralisation to decentralisation, where local villages, towns and cities see a reawakening of community. People will begin to take responsibility beyond merely voting and there is a proliferation of participatory democracy. Science fiction writers like Ursula La Guin agree with me.
Demographics
As mentioned earlier this is the first time since the Black Death of the 14th Century that global population is poised to decline. A number of forecasts are suggesting quite early peaks between 2040 and 2050 such as Jorgen Randers.
As of 2024, 61 countries are experiencing population decline, including China, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy and more.
So essentially this is the first time since so called modern civilization kicked in. As more and more countries begin to see population declines, this will have immense ramifications on social and economic systems based on perpetual growth.
Lets talk about technology cycles, another source of uncertainty and opportunity. I think that most people would agree that we are in a fresh phase, with the advent of AI. It seems at least as significant as the dawn of the internet in the late 1990s or the Industrial Revolution in 1712 with Thomas Newcommen’s invention of the atmospheric steam engine.
But whereas the industrial age employed the power of fossil fuels, the latent power of the sun, and added artificial muscle. Now we are creating machines which augment intelligence and this is some altogether different. No wonder that futurists like Ray Kurzweil are referring to a nearing moment of Singularity, as it has vast consequences:
"Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."
Plenty of experts including Kurzveil, and Yuri Van Geest who will speak later, say this moment is close. Some it might not be an exaggeration to say that the advent of the Singularity will be more significant than the discovery of fire.
In the meantime, in 2025, just remember most companies have only been seriously harnessing Gpt level AI for a year now. So much innovation is guaranteed regardless whether the AI research continues to improve at this exponential rate.
That said, the talk is that the roll out of agentic AI will accelerate. So agents will increasingly be acting on our behalf. This presents huge possibilities in efficiency gains and freeing us all from mundane tasks. But it does present security issues and what if one or two agentic AIs become all powerful. We might drift back to domination by a small number of big tech companies and techno feudalism
However, I suspect that during the course of the year there will be many challenges with implementation. And of course, with all of the excitement of the last 2 years its entirely conceivable that the AI stocks have a breather…or more. We will have to ask Yuri’s take on the AI roll out.
The anticipation might move to robotic AI: the merger between robots and AI. Nvidia is launching a key computer and Tesla is launching its latest humanoid robot, Optimus, this year. Whilst these products will continue to be pricey, one can expect that robot production will proliferate. Imagine a billion or more robots….involved in farming, industrial work and household chores in the future.
Optimus
It is easy to imagine that this will be a bigger industry than the auto industry in the coming years.
“By 2040 there could be a billion bipedal robots doing a wide range of tasks, freeing humans from the slavery of the bottom 50% of really undesirable jobs like assembly line and farm workers. This could be a larger industry than the auto industry.”
—Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures
However, once in a session to a board of directors, I went even further discussing the day robots exceeded human beings!
Eventually, it will be remarkable to see an explosion of intelligence across the planet, with almost every human being having access to personalised AI. Children will have near to free AI tutors and everyone should have access to personalised AI doctors…or even therapists.
If AI disrupts the job markets as they are expected, I think we will have to introduce UBI unless we have successfully transitioned to a Bitcoin centred economy by then. (Jeff Booth will explain this later in the podcast). But this could unleash immense creativity and imagination if people do not have to work for the sake of it. But an overhaul of our education system will be needed.
Of course I do not deny the possibilities of dystopian futures. First there is the simple risk that as we outsource intelligence, it atrophies in humans. Similar to what we have seen in many tech advances: the advent of calculators led to a collapse of numeracy etc etc. Second, there is the censorship potential in AI. However, with the explosion of new media such as podcasts and blogs, I am hopeful.
Regarding sentient AGI going wild and taking over the planet, I am less concerned. I think the larger risk is that AIs make mistakes.
Finally there is AI and drone/robot driven warfare , which already started in the Ukraine War and unfortunately the IDF is testing it out in Gaza. However, this is why we need to harmonise international geopolitics.
Geological Age
If we looking with an even longer lens we could talk about geological ages but these are not forecastable cycles per se. It is said that following the holocene we have entered the anthropocene, as human activity has degraded the planets ecosystems systems and catalysed a 6th Extinction as well as climate change.
Some researchers suggest that the Symbiocene could follow the Anthropocene. This proposed era would be characterized by humans living in harmony with nature and other species, rather than dominating them. All of my longer term forward indicators suggest this is the direction we are travelling. I will go you one example: the nature and ecology sections of book stores have seen exponential growth in recent years.
This might converge with what indigenous wisdom keepers have been saying in their prophecies. In fact one of my public talks is called “The Future is Indigenous”.
Prophecies
On my travels as an investor and then adventuring futurist and spiritual seeker, I have been blessed with encounters with many Wisdom Keepers and Prophecy Holders of indigenous traditions and even met with the Dalai Lama’s seers who advise him on the future in Dharamsala over 10 years ago! I will never forget chatting about the revolution in consciousness but also the future of money whilst sipping tea overlooking the Himalayas.
These wise sages had a grasp of reality and a sense of perspective and history well beyond what I was seeing on Wall St, amongst corporate leaders, economists and often futurists.
It is not just the Mayans who have suggested we are at the end of an epoch or a 13,000 to 26,000 year cycle. I have heard prophecies across Latin America, the Amazon, Japan and elsewhere. I have even seen fairly robust analysis based on ancient scripture suggesting the Kali Yuga finishes exactly in 2025, very significant in the Hindu cosmology. Wherever I looked they seemed to suggest a poignant moment of history and opportunity.
The Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor is rather poetic and speaks to me deeply. My friend John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, writes about it in a great book Touching the Jaguar. One version is that the Eagle represents the colonialists as well as the Northern Americans whereas the Condor represents the people of Latin America. Another version is that the Eagle represents the people of technology, progress and the mind. Whereas the Condor represents the people of the heart, the arts and the indigenous mind.
The prophecy was that from the 1490s the the Eagle would ravage the Condor. But after 500 years and as we entered the 21st century, both beautiful birds would begin to fly together. The tribes of the North and South, the people of the Mind and the people of the Heart.
Here in Peru, the Inca prophecies say that when the Eagle and the Condor fly together, the earth will awaken again. The Inca refer to it as Pachacuti, which means turning the world upside down or turning the world right again." It’s all about balance.
You might want to see this in the context of the masculine and the feminine as well. We need to see a dance between the feminine and masculine. A union between technology and science with the arts; and a harnessing of the human imagination.
Whilst we have more difficult times ahead, I sense we are on the cusp of a much needed cultural renaissance. In fact, literature and academic studies show a rise in references to creativity and imagination.
From the Wastelands to the Luminous Path of the Imagination
The poets like William Blake warned us as we entered the industrial age, that our imagination would be dulled. How right they were.
To forget new pathways to the future, we need new stories. And these stories must come from the human imagination not constrained by the shackles or wounds of the past.
And at the individual level we might need the mythic imagination.
I started off mentioning Jedi Master Yoda and his quote that the future is always in flux. Perhaps I could have been more recent and quoted Harry Potter or Kung Fu Panda!
When I was spellbound by Star Wars in the 1980s, little did I know that I was watching a spiritual or mythological tale. I think it inspired me to embark on my own odyssey, to the Land of the Rising Sun and East Asia where I met real life Zen Masters and teachers. Framing your life in mythic terms can be useful at a time of transition: it captures the imagination, feeds one with inspiration and perhaps activates your intuition.
Whether you are embarking on a Quest for the Holy Grail like Percival, sailing through the unknown seas of the Odyssey like Odysseus or maybe the wise curious Lucy who helps guide her group through Narnia in the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe.
But mythology is more than the simplified Hollywood version of the hero fighting monsters, vanquishing the dragon and collecting the treasure. This can seem ego aggrandising at times. No, mythology is a way to shine the life of truth inwards, and to awaken our inner gifts which we humbly share with society.
Humanity continues its collective journey, and now is the time for us all to find and share our soul-given gifts and leadership.
Do not be victims of the future, especially colonised by others’ futures. Despite all the chaos and uncertainty - possibly because of all the chaos and uncertainty - it is time to become an artisan of the future.
"Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time."
Michael Meade, Story Teller.
