2025 Antipredictions: Chaos Theory, AI, and the End of Certainty

In our highly volatile geopolitical context, what can we predict for this year?

In 1927, Heisenberg unveiled what has remained until now one of the most revolutionary principles of modern physics: his famous uncertainty principle. Its predicament: in some physical states, the exact nature of the world is inaccessible to us. It can be in multiple states at once (superposed), each part of it being interdependent with the others (entangled).

Superposition and entanglement: This may be one of the best metaphors for the fast-shifting, deeply interconnected world we are living in today.

While 2024 was marked by dystopian reminiscences of 1984, how better to describe our current 2025 state than that of quantum uncertainty everywhere?

• Between growth and collapse - on the edge between growth, stagflation, and recession. Based on all reports from the IMF, the World Bank, and the OECD, growth is decelerating everywhere, and—while the US's tariff strategy fully makes sense in the long run—its chaotic implementation shockwave plunges the world into deep uncertainty (1). Once again, the specter of a lost decade, with possible regional crises or collapse, can no longer be ruled out, especially in the West.
• Between war and peace, with conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East still continuing to fester, and new ones threatening to erupt, such as in Iran. While the most realist factions of Trump's administration strive to disengage from already lost military conflicts in order to focus on America's economic recovery, the neoconservative factions pushing for war have not said their last word. The latest NIS report (2) shows that the level of conflict remains high, with strong entanglement between military, cyber, and economic confrontations.
• Between humans and machines, with the Turing test having been formally broken for the first time in March (3). Everywhere, the rise of agentic AI begins to blur the frontier between human and AI agent. Quite discreetly, large corporations are already planning to replace millions of knowledge workers with software in the cloud (4) without waiting for the long-expected singularity.

As we underlined last year, the risk of falling into a 1984-like world, with its eternal war, propaganda, and surveillance panopticon, is still there. Yet, the shift of the USA towards re-industrialization and innovation acceleration, in answer to the BRICS+ rise, has opened a new era, dramatically widening the spectrum of possibilities.

What can we expect? As we often highlight, while long-term trends can be forecasted, the short term is chaotic.

Detailed predictions are a game for fools. As usual, all we can highlight are antipredictions:

• Contrary to some common claims, globalization is not dead. It's its current rules—the traditional Washington consensus, established in 1989 (5)—that are being reshaped. While the North turns inward, the Global South is opening up and rushing toward the future at full speed. Even if a long period of instability is upon us, it will combine regionalization with a considerable rise in South-South exchanges, notably in Asia (6).
• The risk of dramatic collapse or conflict escalation is not over. Even if the declared will from the new US administration is to displace conflicts from the military to the economic front, we're not immune to unpredictable hazards and human factors. As highlighted by historians, the dramatic escalations of World War I and II were rooted in multiple of these, and could have given way to very different scenarios (7). Let's hope hazards, if any, will turn the right way.
• Being human—and the way organizations work—will be dramatically challenged in the years to come. Already, large corporations have begun to publicly reconsider human hiring in favor of AI, debunking the absurd—and reassuring—fiction promoted by many that AI will create as many jobs as it will destroy (8). And we're not yet at AGI and superintelligence! This could challenge all our economic and social models much sooner than expected, especially in the West.

What will the outcome be?

To illustrate the uncertainty principle, Schrödinger unveiled in 1935 his famous metaphorical sealed-box experiment, where a cat could be both dead and alive, in a superposition state, until we open it.

So, is the cat dead or alive? Are we too living in a moment of suspended reality—a superposed world of multiple possibilities? Will we remain long in this uncertain state, or will a sudden shift collapse our future into a single, defined path?

One way or another, we will find out very soon!

The next post in our new "Future Frontlines: Navigating the Forces of Change" series will be published in early May. Click here to subscribe > 

_{(1) As highlighted by reports from the IMF, the OECD, and the WEF, a majority of chief economists expect the global economy to weaken over the next year, due to headwinds such as persistent inflation, adverse shifts in trade policy, and geopolitical tensions. However, the World Bank forecasts that global growth should hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025–26.}

_{(2) While it focuses on U.S. interests and has clear geopolitical biases, the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community once again demonstrates the interconnected nature of today's military, cyber, and economic confrontations—involving both nation-states and non-state actors such as drug cartels, terrorist groups, and transnational criminals.}

_{(3) The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, measures whether an AI can imitate human conversation well enough to convince a human that it, too, is human. While several AIs have exhibited human-like performance for over a decade, both ChatGPT 4.5 and LLaMA 3.1 formally passed the Turing Test in March 2025, being identified as human 73% and 56% of the time, respectively.}

_{(4) For the past two years, technologies have emerged that enable autonomous AI agents to make decisions and act without human supervision to achieve predefined goals. In various industries, startups such as Manus and major players like ServiceNow are already positioning themselves to capitalize on this emerging 'service-as-a-software' paradigm shift. Many VC firms predict that this capability will disrupt a significant portion of the $10 trillion labor and service market.}

_{(5) Created in 1989, the "Washington Consensus" is a set of neoliberal policies including fiscal discipline, targeted public spending, free trade, privatization, and extensive deregulation, that were imposed on many developing countries by institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Critics argue that these policies ultimately made developing nations reliant on low-income exports and hindered their industrial development. Ironically, today's U.S. protectionism and the EU's efforts to rebuild sovereign industries demonstrate how Western nations themselves can quietly reject this "consensus" when it no longer serves their interests.}

_{(6) Despite "deglobalization" narratives, all major institutions expect trade volumes to continue increasing in the coming years. As highlighted by the World Bank, Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs)—which have contributed about 60 percent of annual global growth since 2000—are increasingly trading with one another. Nearly half of goods exports from EMDEs now go to other EMDEs, compared to just one-quarter in 2000.}

_{(7) It is well known that World War I resulted from diplomatic missteps following the Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo—and likely could have been avoided. Less known is that, despite pro-war pressure from various factions on both sides—including Roosevelt in the U.S.—the outbreak of the Second World War was not inevitable. As British historian A.J.P. Taylor argues in "The Origins of the Second World War," Germany hoped until the last moment to reunify Danzig through intimidation alone, and the invasion of Poland was launched as a last resort. Similarly, French historian Éric Branca suggests in "The Eagle and the Leopard: The Dangerous Liaisons Between England and the Third Reich" that, without Churchill, Britain might not have continued the war after the Dunkirk debacle—a decision that could have drastically altered 20th-century history.}

_{(8) Such public statements have recently been made by companies such as BT, IBM, Klarna, and PayPal, among many others. Shopify's CEO even announced an 'AI-first' policy, requiring teams to justify why a task cannot be performed by AI before hiring a human. This trend strongly reflects NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's bold prediction at the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that Information Technology departments will evolve into the 'HR departments of AI agents' in the future.}