Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The past year has been a wild ride for the global technology sector, which is already turbulent at the best of times.
Cyberattacks and outages crippled some of the nation’s businesses and healthcare services, generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini wormed their way into Australian schools and workplaces, and crypto had a banner year after the re-election of US President-elect Donald Trump.
Here are five scenarios for what will probably be an even more unpredictable 2025.
Virtual reality flops
At first, virtual reality had so much promise. Enter hyperrealistic virtual spaces and interact with people from all over the world, all from the comfort of your couch. VR remains largely a non-event, however, despite the tech giants’ best efforts over the past decade.
Meta has released a cheaper version of its Quest 3 VR goggles.CREDIT: BLOOMBERG
VR headsets sound fun in theory, but the reality (pun intended) is that they remain unwieldy, fiddly to use, and in some cases, prohibitively expensive: Apple’s Vision Pro retails for an eye-watering $5999. Not to mention the fact that you can’t help but look like a dork when you’re wearing a VR headset. There are some helpful use cases for VR, including in aged care and first-responder training, for example. But the next year will be another year of unfulfilled promise for one of the sector’s most overhyped technologies.
Crypto soars and bitcoin surpasses $US200,000
It was a classic underdog story, like Rocky, the Karate Kid or the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team. Cryptocurrency was down for the count, and had widely been written off as being an irrelevant, highly dubious technology exclusively used by finance and tech bros. That changed with the recent re-election of Trump, who has promised to “end [President] Joe Biden’s war on crypto” and usher in pro-crypto regulations. Australia, too, has picked up on the winds of change with Treasurer Jim Chalmers promising new laws that would ramp up investment and confidence in crypto. That all adds up to a year of validation for cryptocurrency and its true believers, along with a healthy price bump for bitcoin which in 2024 already hit record highs.
Elon Musk quits Tesla
Musk dominated world headlines in 2024 and is by far the technology sector’s most influential (and also its most outspoken) executive. To be juggling leadership roles at X (formerly Twitter), Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company and Neuralink was already unsustainable. Musk now has wormed his way into Trump’s inner circle, and will jointly lead the president-elect’s DOGE – Department of Government Efficiency – in a bid to slash billions in government expenditure. Musk has already found himself at loggerheads with MAGA diehards like Steve Bannon over immigration issues, and the inauguration is still weeks away. He’s also been at loggerheads with the justice system, after a US judge blocked Musk’s $US56 billion ($90 billion) pay package from Tesla.
After constant controversies and distractions, it will all come to a head in 2025, and Musk will be forced to hand over the reins at Tesla, a company many mistakenly think he founded.
The ‘AI winter’ begins
The past year was a veritable gold rush for generative AI companies, as the likes of OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and Apple all touted impressive new features and gushed about how consumers’ relationship with technology would never be the same. That’s been true but only to a point – ChatGPT for example is useful for generating recipes or travel ideas, but still regularly produces inaccurate responses and can’t be trusted with sensitive or personal data.
Apple’s launch of new Apple Intelligence features has also been mixed, and consumers aren’t yet demanding an upgrade to a new iPhone like the company might have hoped. Tech stocks are notoriously fickle, and expect the rollercoaster to veer downwards in 2025, as innovation slows and questions start being asked about just how useful a lot of this tech really is.
Lift-off for flying cars
Flying cars are no longer the stuff of science fiction or the Jetsons, they’re (nearly) here. Chinese manufacturer Xpeng is leading the charge, and its X2 vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) ‘flying car’ is already available to order in Australia for about $200,000.
There are of course a ton of regulatory issues to work through, but the momentum has begun, and Morgan Stanley predicts the global flying-car market will be worth $US1 trillion by 2040.
Expect a range of eVTOLs to be on show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, which this masthead will be reporting on, and for 2025 to be the year that flying cars really do take off.
And a few stray predictions: Australia’s social media age ban is implemented effectively, and other countries follow suit; Trump’s tariffs wreak havoc on electronics prices; an AI deepfake makes waves in the next federal election.
