Is This Really Happening?

It seems 2025 will be a transformative year

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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I’ve been writing about emerging technologies and their implications for a decade and more. I can’t remember a time when I felt so convinced — convinced, that is, in the way I am now — that we are living through an axis moment.

A new year is upon us, and all the signs are there: 2025 will be transformative.

First, there’s the strange new alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It means that the Party of Tech Acceleration is about to enter the White House.

Tech platforms are already leaning into the Trump-Musk vibe shift. See Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta will no longer fact check content posted by users.

Speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Zuckerberg liberated a reservoir of anger that has clearly been accumulating for years: over the Biden administration, the broader political treatment of Big Tech, and the (in his view unreasonable) idea that social platforms are responsible for the content they display. The existing Facebook fact checking programme, he said, ‘was like something out of 1984’. It was time, instead, to ‘prioritise speech’.

Zuckerberg can see — we can all see — that the wind has shifted. The apex platforms are ready to flex. Critics, meawhile, say we should be doing more, not less, to rein them in.

But disagreements over content moderation are as nothing compared to what is ahead.

The vibe shift we’re seeing now taps into a deeper framework that I’ve written about often; I mean the creatures and machines framework. An epic clash is coming. It’s between those, on the one hand, who want to accelerate the ongoing technology revolution, and those who want to slam on the brakes. The accelerationist ultras want new technologies to remodel the world around us and even, in the end, we humans ourselves; according to them it is our destiny is to merge with the machines. Meanwhile, the decelerationists say we must protect ourselves against the rabid form of technological modernity we have created; one that wants to eat everything familiar about human modes of living and being.

I believe that soon enough that conflict will be at the heart of our politics. What’s happening with Musk and Trump is only the first act in a much longer play.

The technology that will do most to fuel this clash? It will, of course, be AI. And on that front — in case you hadn’t noticed — vast change is afoot.

Given events that unfolded at the end of last year, it is probable that we’re at the foothills of something we can meaningfully call Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

I’ve long been reluctant to commit to the idea that AGI is near. Not least because AGI has become a term without any clear definition. Still, OpenAI’s new o3 model, announced just before Christmas, has taken huge steps forward when it comes to conquering problems in the Frontier Math benchmark. These are maths problems so hard that most of us can’t even understand them, let alone offer a solution.

How much longer, then, until we say: yes, under any reasonable definition, this is AGI? In 2025, I think there’s a high chance that we reach consensus that AGI is achieved, or at least imminent.

In some deep sense we’ll have handed over the baton to the machines we built.

Vast changes across the economy, science and tech, culture and politics: they will all flow from this. How far back must we go before we find a technology as consequential? The invention of the internet? The printing press? Writing? Yes, writing itself: maybe we have to reach all the way back to that.

Meanwhile, we’re currently amid a stark reminder that while machine intelligence floats free in the cloud, we live here, on a planet called Earth. A planet that is not well.

Sixteen people have died. Pacific Palisades, an iconic suburb of LA, is gone. And at the time of writing the fires are still burning.

How do we orient ourselves amid all this?

You only have to spend five minutes in a newspaper archive to see that every age believes that it stands at a moment of unique, epochal change. You only have to read a history book. Or a religious text, even. We humans are forever saying, this is it, the crossroads moment, the one that changes everything.

So is our sense that we live at such a moment only another such case? Just a trick of the light?

I’m not so sure. Across so many dimensions I feel the old world — the world I was born into — fading away, and something new coming into being.

Maybe my perspective is off. But (of course) it doesn’t feel like it.

So this is the central question I’m carrying into 2025. Is what’s unfolding now — is this moment — really as consequential as it seems? Can that be true? Is this really happening?

I know many of you will be asking the same question, or some version of it.

I’ll keep watching. And via these postcards, and also longer essays, I’ll keep sharing my reflections here. What’s more, we can gather in the monthly Community Salons to share our thinking. As the year advances, the picture will grow clearer.

Right now I’m not sure about much. But I am sure that this year will be intense. I’m so glad that we can keep each other company along the way.

I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, I’m wishing you a great start to the year,

David.