What Is Going To Happen In 2025? The future holds both promises and challenges. At WHAT.EDU.VN, we offer insights into potential technological advancements, societal shifts, and economic transformations shaping our world. Our goal is to give you a clear picture of what to expect in the coming years. Discover the future, today. Explore emerging trends, forecast key events, and prepare for the future landscape with what.edu.vn’s expert analysis.
1. What Are the Major Concerns About Technology and Humanity in 2025?
Many experts worry about the widening gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged, the growing power of tech companies, the spread of misinformation, and the rise of mass surveillance. These concerns highlight the need for ethical considerations and regulations in the development and deployment of technology.
The concerns include:
- Increased surveillance and loss of privacy
- The spread of lies and disinformation online
- Health-monitoring and work-surveillance leading to authoritarianism
- Automation shrinking the number of available jobs
- Mental health issues due to isolation
2. How Will the “New Normal” in 2025 Affect the Average Person’s Well-being?
The “new normal” in 2025 is expected to be worse for the average person due to economic, health, and well-being factors. There’s a significant likelihood of long-term unemployment, increased debt, reduced savings, and reduced salary progression. Women with children may face pressure to exit the workforce, and there’s a risk of ongoing disability following coronavirus infection.
3. What Is the Predicted Impact of Technology Companies’ Monopolization on Society?
Technology companies’ monopolization is predicted to have a negative impact on the wider retail sector, with too much reliance focused on a few megacorporations’ platforms. There’s an overemphasis on what tech can do well (convenience) and not what it can’t (the level of quality of the interaction or experience).
4. How Is the Digitization of Everything Separating People and Facilitating Manipulation?
The digitization of everything is separating people from each other, enslaving them, and facilitating mass manipulation and oppression. Technology is becoming far too intrusive, and society has become a surveillance state. While there have always been divisions in society, people are now being manipulated into them artificially.
5. What Are the Potential Failures in Reaching a Genuine Sustainable “New Normal”?
Herd immunity (and diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments) might fail or fall drastically short. Vaccines might not work well, or not for more than a month or two, and individuals can be repeatedly reinfected, perhaps with each bout worse than the last. This could lead to a continually unfolding disaster with no clear exit mechanism other than biomedical breakthroughs.
6. What Are the Potential Catastrophic Events That Could Occur by 2025?
The perfect storm of diminished democratic processes, increased medical vulnerabilities, increased wealth and power disparity, and the confounding effects of climate change could lead to significant changes for the worse for the vast majority of people in the world. The use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons by rogue states is also a possibility.
7. How Can Technology Be Used for Good and Bad, and What Are the Worries About Tech Geniuses?
Tech allows human badness to gain strength and power but can also amplify the ability to do kind acts and do good. There’s concern that there exists a world of tech geniuses who don’t know right from wrong and good from bad, and there is a world of tech users who’ll sell their soul for a giggling emoji.
8. What Are the Potential Economic Catastrophes and Their Impact on Society by 2025?
The upcoming economic catastrophe as government support runs out and rents come due means damage to millions of households who may recover by 2025 but whose children will be permanently changed. There will also be a diminished enthusiasm for full-time working from home.
9. How Will Technology Be Developed and How Will It Affect Human Social Behavior?
Too much technology will be developed by computer scientists and engineers who have little understanding of human social behavior, causing inadvertent harm. Large companies will drown out innovation from academia and small businesses, controlling funding and directing policies.
10. How Are Inequality and Injustice Predicted to Be Magnified by 2025?
A notable share of experts predicts that the pandemic and quick pivot to digitally driven systems will widen divides and expand the ranks of the unemployed, uninsured, and disenfranchised. The power imbalances between the advantaged and disadvantaged are being magnified by digital systems overseen by behemoth firms as they exploit big data and algorithmic decision-making that themselves are biased.
10.1. The Tech Sector’s Role in the New Gilded Age
10.1.1. What Is the Tech Sector’s Contribution to Inequality?
The tech sector has built the new Gilded Age. Inequality has been a problem in our society for a long time, but the relationship between the tech sector and late-stage capitalism is insidious and getting worse. It’s also affecting other sectors.
10.1.2. How Does Tech Sector Wealth Influence Philanthropy and Civil Society?
Tech sector wealth is creating new philanthropists, and endowments are heavily dependent on growth coming from the tech sector. Philanthropy has adopted many of the same logics as tech, from tech solutionism to the fetishization of ‘move fast and break things.’ This weakens civil society, which is crucial for holding tech, politics, and capitalism accountable.
10.1.3. How Will Technology Continue to Amplify Neoliberal Logics?
Technology will also continue to amplify neoliberal logics that put individuals in a very precarious place. Nowhere will this be clearer than in the realm of health care. There is so much technology in the health space, so much knowledge, and yet supply chains are broken, and inequality in access to health care is at an all-time high.
10.2. The Educational and Job Market Disruptions by 2025
10.2.1. What Are the Predicted Disruptions to Education and Job Opportunities?
Many young people will have had extended disruptions to their educational progress, from K-12 to higher education. Many entry-level job opportunities will have vanished simply because of retrenchment in service-oriented industries as disposable income decreases.
10.2.2. How Will Countries Respond to These Disruptions?
This will strongly depend on the availability of a vaccine, highly effective non-pharmaceutical interventions such as air filtration and UV-C lights, and more effective treatment protocols. If neither exists in 2025, many sectors such as restaurants and live entertainment will disappear except in countries that manage to suppress the virus in their population to levels that make indoor gatherings plausible.
10.2.3. How Will New Technologies Impact the Job Market?
Many of the new touchless technologies, e.g., in hospitality, will also decrease the need for entry-level, customer-facing jobs and will likely be made permanent.
10.3. The Entrenchment of the Caste System in America
10.3.1. How Is the Caste System Predicted to Be Entrenched?
The caste system in America will be increasingly entrenched and amplified by technological asymmetries – as access to health services, jobs, and opportunities of all kinds becomes more and more targeted to people who have the money to access the platforms that provide them.
10.3.2. Who Are the Most Vulnerable People?
The most vulnerable people (poor, disabled, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+, women, children, religious minorities, geographically vulnerable) will likely suffer between now and 2025.
10.3.3. How Does the Pandemic Highlight Inequities in Digital Infrastructure?
The pandemic holds a mirror to society, revealing the existing faults in the digital infrastructure and the grave inequities in the distribution of resources and opportunities to make use of them. For example, the difficulties encountered by public primary and secondary schools in attempting an abrupt transition to distance learning due to underinvestment in education, not (generally) poor technology choices by school administrators.
10.4. The Focus on Profit Maximization and Its Impact
10.4.1. What Happens When Technology Companies Focus on Maximizing Profits?
If technology companies focus on maximizing profits – which has been ‘religious’ economic dogma since the 1960s – rather than on demonstrating their trustworthiness to individuals, they can drive the economy down the path to dystopia and they will not even get the profits they seek.
10.4.2. Why Is Trust Important in the Economy?
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is not just a toy thought experiment. Only trust in each other provides a good overall solution. Trying to maximize individual reward leads to an outcome where everybody’s reward is poor.
10.5. The Lack of Accountability of Technology Companies
10.5.1. What Is the Key Issue with Technology Companies?
A key point is a lack of accountability of technology companies and their sheer arrogance at not addressing the identifiable harms caused by their products.
10.5.2. How Do Technologies Exacerbate Social Issues?
Many recent technologies have exacerbated, enhanced, or extended the effects of long-standing social, economic, cultural, and political issues, but they have not fundamentally changed them. Inequality is still excessive in nearly all nations. The benefits of ‘working from home’ accrue to a small proportion of the population. Shifts to new forms of remote access to services (e.g., health) end up excluding those most in need.
10.5.3. What Is the Moral and Ethical Duty of Technology Companies?
As operators of limited-choice platform economies, they have both a moral and an ethical duty to address these issues, to become more transparent and frankly more open and democratic in how they are run. They need to show citizens and consumers greater respect. Rather than cosying up to these platforms, governments should be protecting their citizens from the worst excesses of these companies.
10.6. The Widening of Economic and Social Divides
10.6.1. How Will the Pandemic Widen Economic and Social Divides?
The pandemic will continue to widen economic and social divides around the world. People whose work requires them to be present in physical locations will lose more economically.
10.6.2. How Will Surveillance and Social Control Be Normalized?
The pandemic will also normalize levels of surveillance and social control that previously seemed unimaginable, especially for individualistic Western societies that have traditionally valued individual civil liberties. The impacts of that surveillance disproportionately affecting the least powerful in society.
10.6.3. How Will Online Education Impact Diversity in the Technology Industry?
Because online education tends to privilege students who have access to technology and private spaces, the pandemic will have a lasting impact on diversity in the technology industry. On one hand, tech firms will continue to have a more remote workforce, which will distribute the industry’s wealth more geographically widely. On the other hand, that workforce might become even less diverse than it was before the pandemic due to disparate impacts among the most vulnerable.
10.7. The Effects of Globalization and Interconnectedness
10.7.1. How Does Globalization Affect Economic Powers?
When the U.S. economy was ‘globalized’ over the past 30 years and became intensely interconnected and interdependent, anything that significantly affects one or more of the major economic powers (U.S., UK, EU, and China) has heavy impacts on all of them.
10.7.2. What Are the Challenges in Responding to the Pandemic?
Exactly what they are, how deeply they will penetrate, whether we have the wisdom, tools, and strength to respond positively to the pandemic is not obvious.
10.7.3. What Fits Closely with Predictions of Contagion?
What has occurred in the past five months relative to the virus unfortunately fits in much too closely with predictions of contagion, about a U.S. torn apart by wealth inequality, racial and other critical tensions around competing views of social justice, the difficulty of coping with an incredibly large and rapidly increasing national debt and annual budget that even before the pandemic stimulus was growing more than $1 trillion per year, aging population demographics that Pope Francis has referred to as the ‘Age Curse,’ along with health care issues and underfunded pension concerns facing the federal, state, and local governments (as well as corporate pension and health plans).
10.8. The Five Features of Every Technology
10.8.1. What Are the Different Perspectives on Technology’s Impact?
Rosy predictions of the future don’t have a good track record. In the end, every technology has five different features:
- what the inventor believes the technology will do
- what the buyer of the technology thinks the technology will do
- what interested observers think the technology will do
- what the new, front-line users of the technology think it will do
- what the technology actually does, which is rarely if ever a neat summary of 1 through 4.
10.8.2. How Have Technology Companies Aided in a Cultural and Economic Disaster?
Technology and technology companies have (inadvertently in most cases) aided in the creation of a rolling cultural and economic disaster. The lethal brew involves the connection of technological innovation with governments that have been asleep at the switch for almost 40 years. There is almost no antitrust enforcement. No IRS auditing. Extensive financial deregulation. Almost unbelievable economic concentration in leading sectors.
10.8.3. Why Haven’t Rosy Projections of Technology Come to Pass?
Because of this, almost none of the rosy projections of what technology and technology companies would do, as described in the 1980s and early 1990s, have come to pass. Technology has not rendered the world ‘placeless’ – it has created unprecedented concentrations of economic power in winner-take-all, global cities. Technology has not reduced educational inequalities because educational inequalities are created by families rather than schools and technology increases those family-based inequalities. Technology and tech companies haven’t reduced our dependence on carbon-based fuels (at least not yet). And technologies have to take some of the blame for destroying the labor markets of the middle class.
10.9. Society’s Trust in Digital Decision-Systems
10.9.1. What Is the Concern Over Society’s Trust in Digital Decision-Systems?
I worry over society’s baseless trust in crappy digital decision-systems, with few options to opt out and even fewer options to contest decisions outside of prefab boxes with preformatted complaints.
10.9.2. Why Are AI Systems Running Amok?
There has been major investment in so-called ‘AI’ systems without any evidence for the claims their advocates put forward, and they are running amok and causing widespread frustration, fear, and cynicism in those who employ them and in those subject to them.
10.9.3. How Is Big Tech Enabled by Mistaken Enchantment?
I worry over the further increase of inequality and the ridiculous amount of economic power held by Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Law, Big Finance, all sustained and enabled by a mistaken enchantment with ‘digital,’ ‘AI,’ ‘algorithms,’ or ‘big data.’
10.10. The Impact on Important Institutions and Mental Health
10.10.1. How Will the Pandemic Affect Important Institutions?
Most people will be poorer, and they will have more-precarious jobs. The relatively privileged will work at least part time at home, reducing their social interactions, with serious consequences for their mental health. Important institutions will have been bankrupted in the aftermath of the pandemic. America will have fewer theaters, restaurants, coffee houses, concerts, and universities.
10.10.2. What Will Be the Impact on America’s Isolation?
The U.S. will be much more isolated in the aftermath of COVID-19. Even if Trump is not reelected, other countries will have learned that America both is incapable of keeping its population healthy and is vulnerable to electing unreliable and bizarre leaders. We can expect other countries will take steps to reduce their reliance on and interaction with the U.S. Foreign students who sustain American universities’ science and engineering programs will go elsewhere.
10.10.3. How Will Tech Companies Increase Their Surveillance Abilities?
Tech companies will increase their surveillance abilities. People will spend more time online, reducing their social interactions and making them ever more vulnerable to manipulation by advertisers and extremist politicians and groups.
10.11. The Ethical Considerations and Concentrated Power
10.11.1. How Do Digital Technologies Exacerbate Inequalities?
Digital technologies exacerbate inequalities not only in the U.S. but throughout the world. Addressing the downside, the economic impact of the pandemic and of structural inequality will require major reforms in the political economies of larger countries.
10.11.2. What Is the Result of the COVID-19 Crisis?
The COVID-19 crisis is further centralizing power among the digital elite and among those best able to take advantage of high stock valuations for those companies that are thriving during the pandemic.
10.11.3. What Are the Concerns About Concentrated Power and Ethical Considerations?
My worry is too much concentrated power! While a few powerful companies are seriously interested in ethical considerations, most continue to be primarily focused on their image. The deterioration of privacy is likely to continue as it serves the bottom line. More importantly, surveillance technologies in both democratic and more authoritarian countries will place a damper upon, if not actually suppress, free expression.
10.12. The Need for a Change in Philosophy
10.12.1. What Is Needed to Avoid a Dystopian Existence?
If income inequality, both at the national and global level, persists, then there will be a dystopian existence, with only a few people benefiting from the technological improvements created by clever minds, locked away in their gated communities and hopping from wormhole to wormhole ignoring the majority of people.
10.12.2. What Is Necessary for an Average Person to Thrive in 2025?
If there is to be an ‘average person’ in 2025, then people will need to figure out how to maintain their connections to families, geographies, cultures, and ideologies without squashing others in the process. We need people to speak truth to power, and to have the power to listen. And we need people to cooperate.
10.12.3. How Will Geospatial Technology Be Used?
Without a change in philosophy, particularly in the United States of America, geospatial technology will be used to manage and manipulate people rather than to make their lives better.
10.13. The Essential Power Imbalances
10.13.1. How Will Essential Power Imbalances Affect Discussions About Taxation?
There may be some flow on discussions about taxation and revenue reform, but the essential power imbalances between rich and poor, disadvantaged and advantaged – both within and between countries – will continue to be a strong force that will draw the above changes back to pre-COVID-19 realities and fissures, albeit with a post-COVID-19 hue.
10.13.2. Has COVID-19 Fundamentally Challenged Social Structural Realities?
In short, COVID-19 has not fundamentally challenged these social structural realities.
10.13.3. What Is the Worry About Tracing and Public Health Surveillance Technologies?
I worry that the use of tracing and public health surveillance technologies and the associated supporting legislation necessary to respond to the pandemic will continue to be deployed once the pandemic justification has receded. These will be used by actors who will seek to reinforce control and reinforce preexisting social categorisations of dis/advantaged.
10.14. The Pandemic’s Impact on Policies and Activism
10.14.1. What Has the Pandemic Made Visible?
The pandemic has made visible country-level variances in child care policies, worker rights, health care policies, and economic issues.
10.14.2. What Is the Hope for Technology Activists by 2025?
I’m hopeful that by 2025 technology activists have been able to impact technology design and law in areas like facial recognition and privacy. I’m hopeful that similar advocacy will encourage technology that meets the needs of people with disabilities, reduces harm towards minoritized groups, and prioritizes democratic principles.
10.14.3. What Is the Worry About Technology Companies’ Role?
I’m worried about the unfettered role that technology companies have in people’s lives. Some of it produces good, but it also produces so much harm for people and societies, including harassment, disinformation, and inequity, and those harms seem to be gaining steam rather than losing it.
10.15. The Potential for Greater Equality and Democratization
10.15.1. What Is the Possibility of Transformation?
There is the possibility that this transformation could lead to greater equality, democratization, and a further ‘flattening’ of the world, as described by Tom Friedman in his 2005 book ‘The World is Flat’.
10.15.2. How Is Technology Embedded in a Capitalist Economy?
Technology embedded in a capitalist economy and society is far more likely to reproduce inequality and stratification than to reduce it.
10.15.3. Where Will the Pain Be Felt Acutely?
The pain will be felt acutely in the developing world, where progress has been made in meeting basic needs, but the blow to the global economy will make this difficult to sustain.
10.16. The Need to Shore Up Education and Safety Nets
10.16.1. What Steps Are Needed to Shore Up Society?
I worry that without taking steps to shore up our education, health care, the environment, and safety net or taking action to prevent mass evictions, the closure of small businesses, hunger, unemployment, poverty, etc., the gaps between the wealthiest and the rest of us will grow to intolerable levels.
10.16.2. What Actions Are Needed to End Systemic Racism?
Furthermore, without action to end systemic racism, state violence, and mass incarceration against Black and other marginalized Americans, we will rightly continue to have protests.
10.16.3. How Can We Create Stronger Protections for Workers?
Without making strides toward providing child care and maternity leave, to creating stronger protections and more security for contingent workers, all of the technology in the world will not solve our problems.
10.17. The Focus on Class, Race, and Gender
10.17.1. What Issues Are Exposed by Global Economic Disruption?
Global economic disruption has exposed and exacerbated economic inequalities. The experience of work differs dramatically for those who can protect themselves and get access to preventative care and treatment and those who do not have access.
10.17.2. How Are Mobile Devices and Surveillance Being Used?
Mobile devices linked with place-based surveillance are ubiquitous as contact tracking continues.
10.17.3. What Issues Should Be Focused On?
The focus should be on the issues of division based on class, race, and the many flavors of gender, the clash with the immediate public health needs, which will be exhaustingly present in 2025, and the ever-more-pressing woes of climate change.
10.18. The Acceleration of the Divide Between Rich and Poor
10.18.1. How Will the Virus Accelerate the Divide?
The virus will accelerate the growing divide between the rich and the poor – in this case talking not only about the very rich, but about intellectual workers like me, who may discover that they can avoid the traffic jams going to work.
10.18.2. What Will Happen to the Poor?
Meanwhile, the poor have jobs that can’t be done from home, those of them who still have jobs at all.
10.18.3. What Is Needed for the United States to Develop a Social Conscience?
A possible benefit would be if the United States developed a social conscience and instituted the kind of safety net that civilized countries have.
10.19. The Perpetuation of Injustice
10.19.1. What Will Happen Without a Vaccine?
If we have a non-vaccine new normal, poorer people will continue to do the most COVID-19-hazardous work, while wealthier people continue (as we do now) to work remotely. This situation is unjust.
10.19.2. What Is the Hope for Reducing Injustice?
Our lives are already riven and sickened with injustice. I hope we can find ways to reduce injustice. So far, COVID-19 is mostly making it worse.
10.20. The Worsening of Inequality Worldwide
10.20.1. How Will Life Be in 2025?
Life will be better for some in 2025, but worse for most people within and among nations.
10.20.2. How Is COVID-19 Worsening Inequality?
COVID-19 is clearly worsening inequality worldwide, and the worst impacts of the pandemic are yet to appear due to underreporting in ‘developing’ countries, many of which will be ‘undeveloping.’
10.20.3. How Is COVID-19 Both Equalizing and Unequalizing?
COVID-19 is ‘the great equalizer’ in that anyone can catch it and suffer, but ‘the great unequalizer’ because it will impact the poor in crowded slums and the informal economy who have little or no access to health care and, for many in the near future, food.
10.21. The Systemic Inequities and Three-Tiered Employment System
10.21.1. What Are the Expectations for Working From Home?
Five years from now, I expect that working from home will be normalized for most white-collar industries. The pandemic has shown us that people can be productive without an office environment, and many people who believed they had to live in very expensive metro areas to work in their desired field will opt to live in lower cost-of-living areas while still being active participants in their workplace.
10.21.2. What Is the Three-Tiered Employment System?
However, I do not envision system-wide reforms for some of the systemic inequities that the pandemic made highly visible. The three-tiered employment system of the unemployed/furloughed, the ‘essential workers’ who primarily work in low-wage, low-prestige jobs that require in-person engagement, and professional/white collar workers shows no signs of abating.
10.21.3. How Will Caregiving Responsibilities Impact Employment?
The immense difference in the U.S. between people who have caregiving responsibilities at home and those who do not will not change without systemic investment in child care, elder care and disability benefits. The difference between parents who can afford to hire nannies, teachers or tutors for their children and those who cannot will manifest in greater educational inequality along lines of race, class, and income level.
10.22. The Continued Economic Effects of COVID
10.22.1. What Will Continue to Be Felt Five Years From Now?
Even if we assume that COVID-19 is no longer a threat in 2025, those inequities will remain unless there is a nationwide change in funding priorities and an end to partisan gridlock in Congress. Many of the economic effects of COVID will continue to be felt five years from now, from urban centers that never fully regained their economic vibrancy to long-term salary depression on people who were laid off or entering the workforce during the pandemic.
10.22.2. How Will Privacy Be Impacted Without National-Level Reform?
In addition, without national-level, comprehensive privacy reform, the use of social technologies by the criminal justice system, the police and the government will continue and will further entrench unevenly distributed levels of privacy. Expansion of surveillant efforts of the state and criminal justice system will further marginalize the poor, people of color and political activists.
10.22.3. How Will Algorithms Distribute Social Benefits?
The use of algorithms to distribute social benefits punishes the poor, especially the elderly or those without access to the internet.
10.23. The Continued Entrenched Inequalities
10.23.1. How Has COVID Affected People Differently?
We have already seen that COVID has affected people very differently along existing socioeconomic and demographic lines.
10.23.2. How Will the New Normal Reflect Inequalities?
I think the ‘new normal’ will reflect further-entrenched inequalities. The demand for those with technology-related skills will likely increase as more of people’s lives are conducted virtually. While in-person service jobs have provided significant employment for lower skilled workers, those industries will likely still suffer in 2025.
10.24. The Unreliable Access at Home and Role of Private Equity
10.24.1. What Is Needed to Ensure Everyone Has Reliable Access?
Most of the systems that surrounded our lives before the pandemic – for education, health, work, and beyond – were overly reliant on offline interaction and not made from values or processes that enabled effective shifts to more virtual environments. Building ‘back’ from here will be a very long road and one that will, unfortunately, continue to burden most those already most impacted by these systems. Until there is real investment in ensuring that everyone has reliable access at home, reliable and appropriate devices (not only a smartphone) and the skills to use the internet for their needs, any tech-related changes that may be developed will continue to serve mostly those with more privilege and access to resources.
10.24.2. What Role Does the Private Equity Play?
The very real needs facing our communities during this pandemic present challenges ripe for technical innovation and solutions, however those facing the most needs today are also those most likely without service and devices. We need to have our collective interest in change include bringing everyone online. The role of private equity should worry everyone, as well as the continued monopolization of technology, especially AI tools entering homes.
10.25. The Lack of Interest in the National Digital Divide
10.25.1. What Are the Concerns From Policy and Investment Perspectives?
I worry that, from policy and investment perspectives, the national digital divide will be of little interest to those in power. And that many of our leading technology firms take little or no responsibility in addressing the fact-free narratives that increasingly shape societal attitudes and political decisions.
10.25.2. What Is Needed for Addressing the Digital Divide?
We are facing a perfect storm: levels of civil unrest, extremes in political discourse and lack of faith in our government. I fear it will be long road to recovery not only from the economic damage but the impact to trust and integrity, not to mention the unknown long-term impact from social isolation. The new normal will arise with a transformation of many jobs and of the overall economy. While we have high hopes for technology, COVID has taken the divide between digital inclusiveness and digital inequality to a new level due to the need for home schooling, remote work and telemedicine.
10.25.3. What Are the Key Digital Obstacles?
Key digital obstacles include but are not limited to basic online literacy, language capabilities, understanding of relevancy and access to technical support. Combined with increasing privacy deficits and risks of fraud, these issues are impacting several segments of society more than others.
10.26. The Economic Impact of COVID-19 and Mass Disruption
10.26.1. What Is Expected in Terms of the Economic Impact of COVID-19?
2025 is too soon for us to expect that the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fissures in inequality and health care disparities it exposed, will have receded. 2020-2023 will feature massive disruption to educational attainment and employment that will affect everyone, with a particular blow dealt to teens and young adults.
10.26.2. What Is Expected for White-Collar Workers?
For white-collar workers, the forced mass adoption of collaboration tools will provide some more efficient and better ways to work. With the outlier remote worker reimagined as the norm, entrenched assumptions about ‘facetime’ and acceptance of astronomical rents and outlandish commutes will diminish and improve work life through technology.
10.26.3. What Are the Expectations From 3 Years of Unemployment?
At the same time, three years of unemployment will redirect power into the hands to the corporations wielding those tools. Productivity and connection tools are uncomfortably close to remote-worker monitoring, which is also on the rise.
10.27. The Potential for a Better World
10.27.1. What Is the Expectation?
We will still be in recovery in 2025, but will potentially be building a better world – recovering in regard to economic, psychological and physical health.
10.27.2. What Is Required For Building A Better World?
We probably will have another rise of populism and anti-poor and anti-foreigner sentiment unless a National Health Service-like attitude prevails for a new morality around people being humans who are deserving of humane treatment without regard and despite differences in status and origin and ethnicity and identity.
10.28. The Challenges In Forced Behavioral Changes
10.28.1. How Will The Pandemic Affect Behavioral Changes?
The ‘new normal’ will involve forced behavioral changes that are not internalized for the majority of the population. This pandemic is unprecedented for a humanity that has achieved, thanks to its technological development, degrees of mobility that are a threat to strategies necessary for containing and controlling the virus.
10.28.2. How Is Information Literacy A Danger?
The precarious state of information literacy in all the strata of society is a danger. Rather than creating tools in a way that allows users to solve problems as they wish, technology designers force users to think within the logic of the tools.
10.28.3. What Should Be Declared Similar to Climate Change?
A digital emergency should be declared, similar to that decreed in the face of climate change, in order to take measures that guarantee the individual liberties of each person, including those of information and expression.
10.29. The Implementation Of AI and Big Data
10.29.1. What Impact Will It Have?
When confinement measures were imposed, most of us were forced to rely on digital tools for communication. Our dependence on digital tools is now higher than ever. Those who are equipped with digital capacity are pulling through, but those who aren’t are losing access to basic needs and rights such as access to work, education, and health care. Recent research shows that the digital divide is growing, and that will have an impact on our capacity to achieve the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). COVID-19 is highlighting the unequal distribution of resources and power in the digital economy.
10.29.2. What Are The Considerations?
As the digital transformation is accelerated by COVID-19, the preexisting ethical, social, legal, political, and economic implications of AI and big data are more critical than ever. Yet, [in] society’s haste to prioritize economic recovery, AI’s ethical requirements risk being overlooked.
10.29.3. What Impact Will This Have On Gender?
Given the current distribution of capacity and resources in AI and AI ethics, given the underrepresentation of women in AI, gender equality will take a huge step backwards. For the average woman, that would mean adapting to digital tools designed and deployed by men in all spheres of their lives (employment, economic security, well-being, civic participation).
10.30. The Concerns Over A Venture-Fueled Approach
10.30.1. What Is Of Concern And The Commitment Needed?
My worry is over the increasing power of the winner-take-all tech companies and the lack of viable competition; a venture-fueled, extractive approach to innovation that guarantees the incumbents will win, as they buy startups designed specifically to be purchased.
10.30.2. What Processes are Needed?
There is a lack of collective commitment to default processes that work primarily to the benefit of humans, such as a fundamental right to data ownership and privacy. The continued dependence by many governments on legacy processes and old technology that keep them from nimble response to citizen
