Ten expert predictions about the world in 2025. All of them are wrong

When it comes to predicting the future, you might as well ask an astrologer as a rational expert.

Fintan O'Toole

Tue Dec 31 2024 - 07:05

 

I thought about making some predictions for 2025. And then I had a look at a detailed report drawn up in 2008 by the US National Intelligence Council on what it thought the world would look like in 2025. It drew on “numerous think tanks, consulting firms, academic institutions, and literally hundreds of experts inside and outside governments here in the United States and overseas”.

But it doesn’t mention the possibility of a banking meltdown or Brexit or a Russian invasion of Ukraine or the mass slaughter of Palestinians by Israel. It suggests that “Russia has the potential to be richer, more powerful, and more self-assured in 2025 if it invests in human capital, expands and diversifies its economy, and integrates with global markets.” It imagines that “resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute could engender some stability as the [Middle East] region deals with a strengthening Iran and global transition away from oil and gas”.

Needless to say, Russia has not become more self-assured and it has reversed its integration into the global economy. The Israeli-Palestinian “dispute” has become an ever-deepening bloodbath and Iran is not “strengthening” but rapidly declining.

The American futurists were confident that “new energy technologies probably will not be commercially viable and widespread by 2025″. Pessimism about the potential of solar and wind power to replace carbon fuels was part of the conservative orthodoxy in 2008. It was happily misplaced.

Here are 10 confident predictions about 2025 made at various points over the last decade by serious experts, all of them wrong:

1. The EU will have broken up by 2025. “The European Union might survive in some sense, but European economic, political and military relations will be governed primarily by bilateral or limited multilateral relationships that will be small in scope and not binding. Some states might maintain a residual membership in a highly modified European Union, but this will not define Europe.” (Stratfor Strategic Forecasting, 2015)

2. We will all be living in a world of augmented and virtual reality. “The screen as we know it – on your phone, your computer and your TV – will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.” (CERN, May 2015)

[ Trump says Ukraine ‘needs to reach deal’ with RussiaOpens in new window ]

3. We will all be ashamed of our carbon footprints. “In 2025, carbon footprints will be viewed as socially unacceptable, much like drink-driving is today.” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Alas massive personal carbon footprints – private planes, vast houses, hyper-conspicuous consumption – are still all the rage.

4. Critical thinking about technology will have made great advances. “By 2025 I expect our lives to change dramatically … We will start to be more critical about new things but also learn how to turn this critical thinking into decisions. In short, we humans will stop regressing in regard to applying critical thinking and move on to make better decisions about our uses of digital technologies.” (Marvin Borisch, technologist and author, 2021) Not much sign of this in our age of rampant disinformation.

5. Carbon capture will solve the climate crisis. “A scale-up of negative emission technologies, such as carbon dioxide removal, will remove climate-relevant amounts of CO2 from the air [by 2025].” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Carbon capture technologies remain staggeringly expensive, unproven at scale and have yet to show that they can have a decisive impact on the reversal of climate change.

[ Cop29 deal which includes new ‘climate finance goal’ criticised as ‘utterly inadequate’Opens in new window ]

6. Technological innovations will deliver quick, cheap healthcare to everyone by 2025. “Engineering biology will deliver simple, low-cost diagnostic tests to individuals in every corner of the globe. As a result, morbidity, mortality and costs will decrease in acute conditions, such as infectious diseases, because only the most severe cases will need additional care.” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Billions of people barely have access to basic healthcare and even in the rich countries (like ours) access to diagnosis and treatment is grossly inequitable.

7. There will be a referendum on a united Ireland. “Let’s have an All-Ireland Forum on Unity to plan for all aspects of reunification, including a referendum by 2025.” (Mary Lou McDonald, January 2020). A Border poll is extremely unlikely to happen before 2030, and will be most probably much later.

8. Homelessness in Ireland will be on the way to being “eradicated”. So claims the Government’s Housing For All strategy, published in September 2021. In fact, there were nearly 5,000 households who had been homeless for more than six months in 2024 and there will almost certainly be many more in 2025.

9. Artificial intelligence will have made us all rich. “Improvements in AI will finally put access to wealth creation within reach of the masses…” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) The current evidence, summarised by the World Development Forum, is that AI will “widen income disparities within countries, benefiting highly skilled workers, displacing lower-skilled jobs in repetitive tasks, and concentrating wealth among those who control the technology.”

[ Leaving Cert students cleared to use AI in research projectsOpens in new window ]

10. “Trump is finished. The future of the Republican Party belongs to Ron de Santis.” This is a headline from the Telegraph in November 2022. Or “Donald Trump is finished as a serious contender for high office.” (New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, November 2022). How’s that working out for y’all?

There’s a reason astrologers, soothsayers and prophets are still thriving – they are no worse at prediction than most rational experts. When it comes to the future, only three things are certain. The first is that human beings have an innate need to attempt to reduce the unknown to rational predictability. The second is that we are usually wrong – or, if we do get it right, it is at least as likely to be the result of fortune as of brilliance. And the third is that all we can really do is to keep trying to make the new years better than the old ones.

 

 

 

 

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Gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata) fed with polar lipids from olive oil industry by-products: Shelf-life, microbiological and physicochemical characteristics during storage at 2 oC

 The Microbe

Available online 7 December 2024, 100222

Highlights

• •
  enriched seabream fed with lipids from olive-oil industry by-products
• •
  microbiota profile of conventional and enriched fish fillets
• •
  both fish exhibited similar microbiological and physicochemical changes

Fintan O’Toole on his career: ‘You had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you’

From the Irish Times

The Irish Times columnist has made a new documentary about his life for RTÉ. Here he looks back on a career that he began as the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex

Sometimes, if I was having a bad day at The Irish Times, I would look out of the window of the offices on Tara Street and gaze for a while at the ugliest building in Ireland. Hawkins House, a grey 12-storey pile that embodied the vandalism inflicted on Dublin in the 1960s, has since gone to its grave unmourned. But it was for me a kind of memento mori. If I was tempted by the lure of self-pity, I would remember the many evenings I had spent cleaning the toilets in Hawkins House. I would tell myself again that, whatever the occasional frustrations of journalism, it sure beats working.

As it happened, our family’s main connection to the world of newspapers was through my mother’s job as an office cleaner at the Irish Press, just down by the Liffey at Burgh Quay. She would get up at 5am and cycle in there to empty the overflowing ashtrays and hoover the floors and, I presume, clean the toilets. She would usually be gone before the reporters arrived for the early shift. Though she did sometimes have to wake the great sports writer Con Houlihan when he slept under his desk after a hard night. She had made the mistake on her first morning in the job of calling the security man to say that a tramp had broken in, but Con – a gentle, shy, dishevelled bear of a man – perfectly understood the reasons for her confusion and was not in the least offended.

As well as contributing to our daily bread, the Irish Press, Fianna Fáil’s semi-official journal, was our daily newspaper. My grandfather, who lived with us, was a de Valera man, so it was the Press and its sister papers, the Evening Press and the Sunday Press, that informed us of the happenings of the world. They were read from cover to cover with an intense interest that did not waver between the death notices, the hurling reports and the epic events of global history. In memory, I seem to have moved seamlessly from the children’s page in the Evening Press to David Marcus’s New Irish Writing page on Saturdays, which is where I first read contemporary Irish poetry and short stories.

It was natural, I suppose, for my mother to hope that I might get a job on the Press. No one in my family had gone to university – my parents did not even go to secondary school – so the world of the white-collar professions was very distant. But the newspaper was familiar territory, and it seemed like an obvious possibility for a son who was patently useless at almost everything.

I edited a newspaper at school. I wrote reports for the Irish Union of School Students. (My first publication was a survey we did on the use of corporal punishment.) I got a small prize for an essay submitted for a Council of Europe competition. At University College Dublin I edited the student newspaper imaginatively titled Student. I was obviously on some kind of trajectory, but I had no idea how all of this could become a career or a way of life.

My only real thought was that I would somehow make a living from writing, and, as I didn’t write fiction, this must have meant some kind of journalism. My mother mentioned my proclivities to Vincent Jennings, who edited the Sunday Press, and he offered to see me. He was very nice, and, as my mother and I sat across from him in what I remember as a rather dingy office, he asked me some questions about what I wrote. I babbled something. He looked at my mother sadly and said, “I’m afraid it’s too late. He’ll be too old by the time he leaves UCD.” I should, he said, have gone instead to the College of Commerce in Rathmines to learn shorthand and typing.

It was obvious that he thought I had already acquired too many notions to ever be any use on a newspaper. I remember he used the word “wordsmith”, which I had never heard before, to suggest what he thought I thought I was. I could tell he did not mean it as a compliment. He stood up and shook my hand and wished me luck in the future.

He was quite right too. I never learned shorthand, and I still practise the hunt-and-peck method of typing. Back then I wrote everything out in an appalling scrawl before transferring it, slowly and laboriously, to the page on the huge old second-hand typewriter my parents had bought me for my 18th birthday. My best friend was the little bottle of a white liquid called Tipp-Ex that you brushed on to the page to blot out your mistakes. I was the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex.

And the truth was that, although my poor mother was very disappointed that I was not good enough for the Press, I would have been much more worried if the editor had told me that, as soon as I got my BA from UCD, there was a job waiting for me as a reporter for de Valera’s papers. Beneath my diffidence and shyness I was an arrogant young pup. I had no clear idea of what a life in journalism could look like for me, but I had a pretty clear idea that it wasn’t that.

The problem really was the journalism that me and my friends were now reading. It was mostly American – Joan Didion’s The White Album, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic. But it was also Irish: Nell McCafferty and Maeve Binchy, for example, were writing journalism in The Irish Times that was something other than news reporting, that had the voice and the sensibility and the individuality of good fiction. Vincent Browne had established Magill magazine and Gene Kerrigan was writing riveting long-form pieces that fused scrupulously detailed reportage (usually of stories the newspapers did not cover) with the wit and rhythm of hard-boiled detective novels – Philip Marlowe on the mean streets of Dublin.

Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly

I was far from such levels of accomplishment, but I was lucky in that I did have a calling card: drama criticism. I had been going to plays since I was 13 or 14, and I liked to write about them, initially just as a way to define my tastes for myself. It was an endeavour where reporting (this is what I saw) could meet opinion (this is what I felt about it). I felt at home on that crossroads because I could never really write anything that did not have a point of view. Words always arrived from an emotional hinterland of deep feelings about life, especially Irish life in all its absurdities and hypocrisies.

I was fortunate, too, that there was a place where these impulses could be pursued in print. John S Doyle and David McKenna were turning In Dublin from a basic listings bulletin into a current-affairs and cultural magazine. I wormed my way in as drama critic and also wrote longer features about social changes, not least the great surge in religious reaction in the 1980s. The money was terrible, but it was a great place to be. The stable of critics – myself, Aidan Dunne, Michael Dervan, Michael Dwyer – would eventually migrate en masse to The Irish Times. The regular writers included Mary Raftery, arguably the most consequential Irish journalist of her generation, and Colm Tóibín. It was a better school in which to learn the ropes than the College of Commerce – at least for the kind of vessel I was interested in sailing.

Theatre criticism also toughened me up. It was actually harder than writing about politics. Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly. Some of them – Hugh Leonard, for example – had much more widely read newspaper columns of their own from which to launch furious counterattacks. In the late 1990s I spent three years as drama critic of the Daily News in New York, where the stakes on Broadway were ostensibly higher. But the job was infinitely softer than it was in Dublin, where WB Yeats’s “great hatred, little room” retained its salience and you had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you. That is an essential part of the education of any serious journalist.

[ From the archive: Fintan O’Toole on Mary Raftery – The woman who opened our eyesOpens in new window ]

For a few years, at least, it was possible to make a kind of living as a journalist in Dublin without writing for the newspapers at all. Magill and In Dublin were thriving – as indeed were Hibernia and Hot Press. Nobody was making a fortune, but Ireland did have a genuinely independent and alternative media. Browne in particular was full of missionary zeal and vibrant mischief, and he was willing to give space to anyone who seemed interesting to him, regardless of age. When he relaunched the Sunday Tribune he gave me my first permanent job. At 25 I was simultaneously arts editor, literary editor, feature writer and drama critic. It was as exciting as it was insane.

The excitement was not just professional. It was also generated by the strange state of Ireland. On the one hand, it was stultifying – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had more than 80 per cent of the vote between them, and the Catholic Church still had a lock on all legislation concerning sexuality, education and healthcare. On the other, things were patently falling apart under the pressure of the Troubles, an imploding economy and mass emigration and unemployment. It was not a great place to live, but it was – with its endless ambiguities and contradictions, the gaping distance between official rhetorics and daily realities – a great place to write about.

[ Fintan O’Toole: My personal history of modern IrelandOpens in new window ]

By 1988, when I was 30 and had a spouse, a child and a mortgage, I was ready to become semi-official myself. I had written a pamphlet called The Southern Question for Dermot Bolger’s Raven Arts Press, a most disobliging piece of work about Charles Haughey and the hollowness of faux patriotism that had been read with a certain relish by Dick Walsh, The Irish Times’ redoubtable political editor. He recommended that I be brought in as a columnist, critic and feature writer, and Conor Brady, the paper’s editor, took a chance on me.

There’s also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens

This too was lucky. It meant that I have enjoyed the enormous privilege of never having to work for a media mogul, an egomaniacal tycoon or a political propagandist. Over 36 years I have never had a column spiked or seriously altered for any reason other than the rulings of libel lawyers. A lot of things I’ve written have undoubtedly seemed wrong-headed to editors, but the right to be wrong-headed is part of the paper’s unwritten constitution. Exasperation has never led to threats of expulsion.

This security has also meant that when I’ve written for publications outside Ireland I’ve had the luxury of not working for those I despise. It has been very easy for me to have principles. Bertolt Brecht’s dictum – “food first, then morality” – is the brutal truth. But I haven’t had to choose between feeding my family and writing what I believe.

 

There’s also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens. Until the mobile phone killed the habit, it was not unusual for me to find myself sitting on a bus behind someone reading one of my columns and commenting on what rubbish it was to the companion beside them. Or, occasionally, meeting people for whom something I had written meant a great deal because it gave voice to feelings they had long held but had not felt free to express.

That intimacy mattered because Ireland was shifting, not just on the large scale of economics and identities and national narratives but in the nature of the conversations we were having with ourselves. What could be seen and said and acknowledged and recognised was changing. Reality itself – the specific gravity of our lived and local truths – was being redefined. It was possible to imagine as a journalist that you were taking part in that conversation, even if it was only by making people so cross at you that they had to articulate for themselves what they were so cross about.

I often wonder whether anyone will again have such freedom, such privilege. Newspapers are under such pressure now, in terms both of money and of the nonstop demand for immediacy, of time, that their capacity to indulge arrogant wordsmiths is increasingly limited. But there will always be those of us for whom journalism beats working.

Fintan O’Toole: A Life in Our Times, which draws on his book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, is on RTÉ One on Wednesday, December 11th, at 9.35pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Progression in education system and deprivation linked to smoking

 

Study from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland highlights socioeconomic inequalities in smoking rates

 From the Irish Times

Shauna Bowers

Thu Nov 21 2024 - 06:00

 

 

People who have primary-school as their highest educational qualification are 11 times more likely to smoke daily compared to those with postgraduate degrees, new research has found.

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) on Thursday published a new study which highlighted the socioeconomic inequalities in smoking rates.

The researchers analysed Healthy Ireland survey data from between 2015 and 2022 with the participation of more than 52,000 adults in Ireland.

According to the analysis, about 20 per cent of people who did not attain further educational qualifications after primary school smoked daily, compared to about 5 per cent of postgraduates — making them 11 times more likely to take up this habit.

The researchers also found those in the most deprived areas are four times more likely to be daily smokers than residents in affluent areas.

Although overall smoking rates in Ireland have declined, socioeconomic inequalities persist and are worsening among the least educated groups and residents in the most disadvantaged areas, the research found.

Prof Frank Doyle, principal investigator of the study, said one of the “most fascinating” findings was if you don’t have friends or family who smoke, then it is “very unlikely you will smoke”.

However, he highlighted how there was a need to not have a one-size-fits-all all approach to reducing smoking rates in the State.

“The overall prevalence is coming down with the interventions such as increased taxes, but it’s not coming down as quickly in lower socioeconomic groups,” he said.

“It’s [smoking] an addiction. It’s probably one of the most addictive substances and a lot of smokers say they want to quit. But things don’t become a rational financial decision when you’re in an addiction.”

Dr Gintare Valentelyte, lead author of the study and Postdoctoral Researcher at Converge: Centre for Chronic Disease and Population Health Research, said the findings show that while smoking rates are falling, those from less advantaged backgrounds are not benefiting equally.

“For tobacco control policies to be effective, they must account for the unique challenges faced by these groups and offer tailored support that addresses the barriers they encounter in quitting,” she said.

Smoking-related harm remains the leading preventable cause of ill health and premature mortality in Ireland, accounting for more than 5,000 deaths annually and a cost to the hospital system of €460 million each year.

The research was funded by the HSE Tobacco Free Ireland Programme, as part of a collaboration with the RCSI School of Population Health.