ER 33: 2025 not-predictions
Or, what I’ll be keeping an eye on for you next year.
Welcome back to the Ethical Reckoner. It’s been quite a year in tech (although to be fair, we could say that every year). Regardless, I thought I’d do a bit of an annual wrap-up with some reflections on this year and what I’ll be keeping an eye on for next year. I was going to call these “predictions,” but honestly no one is good at tech predictions—myself included—so they’re more “loosely organized musings on things that might be important next year.”
This edition of the Ethical Reckoner is brought to you by… Rummikub and gingerbread.
But before we get to the not-predictions, let’s take a look at some year-end statistics for the Ethical Reckoner. This year, I wrote ~80,000 words for the newsletter1 across 37 Weekly Reckonings and 12 Ethical Reckoners (including this one). We hit 500 subscribers—it’s still difficult to fathom that people who aren’t directly related to me read this—and I made $70 from our first (and so far only) sponsorship. (No, I don’t want to calculate my hourly wage.) The most-liked edition of the newsletter was WR 13: The ties that bind us… to the Internet:
WR 13: The ties that bind us… to the Internet
This was in January, so I suppose it was all downhill from there.
Ok, on to the not-predictions. I’ll start with the most boring one:
Infrastructure!
Infrastructure is literally defined as “boring things,” but they’re boring things that make our world run. I’m thinking in particular of subsea Internet cables, which have become targets in geopolitical conflict because they’re easy to cut and maintain plausible deniability (“whoops, we just happened to be dragging anchor, shame your cable got in the way.”). This happened again and again in 2024, and if the latest Russian sabotage of a Finland-Estonia cable was truly a “wake-up call” in Europe, 2025 might finally be the year that countries besides New Zealand get serious about protecting their Internet cables.
Subsea cables aren’t the only form of infrastructure that matters, though. I’ll also be tracking Internet access worldwide and in the US (especially after the Affordable Connectivity Program expired in June) and how it contributes to the digital divide.
AI Regulation
The next trend is, unsurprisingly, AI regulation. I’m expecting more countries to explore AI-related laws, likely influenced by the EU AI Act, which went into effect this year. Will the US follow suit? Probably not, at least at the federal level, but individual states are passing a lot of AI-related bills, which will probably continue (watch this space for more this spring…). Still, coordinating those efforts is critical to avoid a patchwork of laws that creates regulatory confusion.
Speaking of the EU, 2025 is probably the year we’ll start to see the AI Act get interpreted. And while the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, and GDPR aren’t directly about AI, tech companies have been complaining that regulatory confusion related to them is holding up their product releases in the EU, so they’ll probably continue to push for regulatory clarity. How these products hold up in other countries and which other countries decide to regulate them will be super interesting—in particular, I’ll have eyes on Brazil, Canada, India, Nigeria, and the UAE. And, of course, China, which will probably pass a law on facial recognition next year.
Child safety
The third broad topic I’ll be thinking about is child safety. There was controversy over laws intended to protect kids online in the UK, US, China, and other jurisdictions, but it’s not a topic that’s going away. In the US, the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA) failed to pass the House, but it might get revived again next year. Beyond legislation, though, discussion has entered the mainstream. There was a lot of discussion over The Anxious Generation, which attributed modern teen troubles to social media, and while the book incurred some criticism, it also definitely brought discussions over teens and social media into the mainstream. And this conversation is only set to grow. In October, a tragic story about a teenage boy who died by suicide after conversing with an AI chatbot brought chatbot companions into the discourse, and we’ll be tracking the lawsuit against Character.AI and parental attitudes towards these bots as the year goes on.
Politics (crypto & antitrust)
Unfortunately, 2025 is the year that crypto is back. Is it useful for anything yet? No. But with the election of Donald Trump, the Silicon Valley crypto tech bro culture that supported him is now tied tightly to the White House, so it’s going to be a topic of conversation, however insufferable.
Another thing that will be affected by US politics is antitrust. There are ongoing cases in the US against most of the Big Tech companies; the EU and UK are also sniffing around them. In the US, the FTC and DOJ are the two antitrust enforcers. Trump’s FTC chair pick is heavily “pro-innovation,” but his DOJ Attorney General nominee supports the assertive antitrust trend of the last few years. Will their approach be split? We’ll find out.
These of course aren’t the only things I’ll be writing about. There will always be new stories, products, and intrigue to discuss, and I’ll continue to cover the tech news you need to care about, coupled with deep dives that will (hopefully) leave us all better informed and with a few new thoughts churning in our brains.
Happy new year! Thank you, as always, for reading, and see you next week.
Could I have written my dissertation instead? Perhaps.
Thumbnail generated by DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT with a variation on the prompt “Please generate an abstract impressionist image with the theme of annual reflection.”