We're living beyond sci-fi!
Wow, can you believe that we’re now a quarter of a century into the 21st century already? We are now officially living beyond the years in which most of last century’s Science Fiction stories took place. Those stories ranged from the literal turn of the millennium to the early 2020’s. Yet here we are, in 2025.
‘Living beyond Sci-Fi’ can also be interpreted another way, namely to the ‘truth stranger than fiction’ nature of so much news these past few years. There’s been plenty of scary stuff of course, but it’s also kind of funny that all these insane ‘you’re kidding me…’ style events have made it genuinely hard for satirical outlets like The Onion to continue existing.
And well, speaking of the unexpected. I had originally intended to publish a bunch of stuff over the course of December, during my ‘workation’ but the funny thing about that is that I’d made the mistake of calling that idea ‘Timpulsive.’ Whilst I’m still rather capricious, all things considered, I’d greatly underestimated how much more disciplined I’ve become over these years of weekly newsletters.
Not only that, I’ve also become more level-headed, patient, and empathetic. December ended up being a month where I did indeed do a lot of work…on myself! Aye, the irony was that with the deadlines of the newsletter absent, and no major commitments short of familial obligations…my backlog of psychological and emotional administration caught up to me instead.
Whilst that sounds heavy…it kinda wasn’t…? It was the opposite, because all the stuff that caught up with me was all the positive and optimistic stuff that I’d denied and run away from for ages. Imagine a tidal wave of positive insights, memories, and new perspectives crashing down on you. That’s basically what this ended up being. Plenty of tough, stressful, annoying things to deal with too, but they were almost tangential to the positives over the course of this workation.
I’d known and acknowledged this to some extent bit by bit the past 4 years, but it only really hit me over the course of that final month of 2024…. Just how much I’ve changed.
All this is to say that I felt no need to keep up my working schedule in the vacation anymore. I was satisfied and at peace with not doing any ‘work’ work in December. And so I didn’t. And it was fine. I was fine. And I’ve carried that feeling with me into 2025. I feel pretty damn ok as I write this.
Despite everything that’s happened SO MUCH. ALL THE TIME. Thus far, we are all still here. We are still fine, relatively speaking. To keep up the good vibes, I’ve got some plans I’d like to share with you! And I’ll be doing that first.
There are plenty of predictions to be had as well though, don’t you worry. This year, I thought it’d be interesting to carefully assemble and neatly organise a whole bunch of insights and predictions for 2025 from across the web. I’m not just cutting, pasting and calling it a day though.
I’ll be adding my own commentary to each prediction as well! I felt like this was the best way to not only help people get a nice big-picture overview of multiple niches within tech, but also to have a more focused and scannable way for people to find my takes on the particular topics and fields that interest them. It’s not covering everything of course, that’s impossible. But it covers enough to be representative of the tech world within the confines of a single 5000-ish word document.
Last but not least, since I didn’t post anything in December, I’ve selected some items for those of you that also didn’t keep up with tech in December or New Year’s week. It’s kind of a Serendipity and ‘At A Glance’ hybrid to help you fully get back in the groove for 2025.
I’ve managed to mostly accept and come to terms with the fact that my ambition will always exceed the measure of my reach. Up until now, I saw this as failure. I thought I wasn’t, smart enough, efficient or bold enough. I feared I wasn’t strong enough or connected enough.
But the reality is that I am quite fortunate to always have something to strive for. Indeed, it pisses me off to no end that I want to draw, yet I can’t even draw a stick figure right. Yet one of the most beloved artists of all time, Matisse had some pretty ‘interesting’ thoughts about realism and what constituted ‘drawing well.’ So I think I’ll be fine if I just stop whining and start drawing.
Am I going to be the next Matisse? Extremely doubtful. But it’s nice to have the ambition, no? I’ve tempered my ambition with a more realistic and forgiving stance towards myself to prevent myself from getting carried away. All things in moderation and all that.
As longtime readers may recall, I’ve long desired to expand beyond purely written content. Examples of this included video content, audio and various kinds of digital art. Stop the presses, but making stuff is hard as hell. More than just being hard, it is also extremely time-consuming. With how tight my weekly deadlines were, it was impossible for me to do more than I was already doing. That’s why I’ve been using AI images all this time. I had the need for speed, and they were the fastest for those needs at the time.
I say at the time, because the solution to my problem was so incredibly simple and obvious that I naturally overlooked it as I wrangled my weekly choice of exceedingly complex and nuanced subject matter. What was the solution then, you might ask?
“Just take however long you need to make what you want.”
Whilst obviously limited to relevant deadlines and project needs when it comes to work, I conflated this with all creative output, both for work and for play. Oops. So anyways, that was another lesson learned. This year, I will be making stuff I like and sharing it when it is done, whether that be through this newsletter, or via other avenues that I’ll share as necessary.
Speaking of which. New Year, new opportunities! I’m going to be doing a whole bunch of cool stuff both solo and with colleagues this year. That necessitates freeing up my work schedule. Up until now, Tech Time by Tim consumed practically all of it. At time of writing, my plans for Tech Tim by Tim are to make it the publication avenue for my personal creative endeavours.
However, this may change based on how things pan out at work. We’re busy cooking right now, so I’ll be publishing as normal over the course of January, at least up until we’ve solidified our plans. I’ll keep you all updated as things progress.
Regardless of what exactly ends up happening though, Tech Time by Tim will be changing for the better. I’m biting my proverbial tongue right now because I don’t want to give away any secrets though. No one respects confidentiality as well as me. So here’s a little teaser to tide you over:
When you think of digital art programs, drawing tablets, computer programs such as Photoshop or Blender. What large umbrella do you think they’d fall under? Or let’s zoom out some more if you don’t know or like any of those things.
When you think of contemporary music production, cinema, or game development…what means do people use to make them? The answer to both is technology. And oh my goodness, what a coincidence, Tech Time by Tim is about technology!
For 2025, I aim to share with you in new and varied ways my tremendous passion for The Art of Technology, and the Technology of Art.
As Promised, here’s some 2025 predictions! I’ve put all the sources at the bottom for your convenience and placed all excerpts in quotation marks. If it ain’t in quotation marks, it’s mine!
“I suspect that in the coming months we’re going to see a lot of dilapidated intellectual property being rebuilt by big publishers as they seek alternatives to the clearly extremely precarious live service merry-go-round.” Keith Stuart, 2025
“This is all very similar to the way the music, film and stage musical industries continually repackage classic albums and movies to create bankable premium experiences for older fans. In these tough, unpredictable times we all need reassurance.” Keith Stuart, 2025
I’ve opted to start things off with Stuart’s item on gaming nostalgia’s economic viability because it fits neatly into my long-held belief of gaming as a barometer for wider socio-cultural dynamics. When talking of how I personally believe 2025 media will handle nostalgia, two primary examples from last year spring to mind.
Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2’s 2024 remakes. Their critical and commercial successes were not self-evident by any means. Expectations for both were very low before they landed. Yet, when they landed these two games struck a well-rewarded (financially and critically) balance between how fans remembered them, and how contemporary sensibilities now prefer games to be.
Beyond cynical cash-ins, high-quality recycling might well be the way forward beyond the ‘live-service’ valley of death that not only games, but also streaming have found themselves in over the course of 2024. Because really, what are streaming services if not the ‘live-service’ of TV?
So CES 2025 is actually happening as I write this special edition. One of the more prominent shows of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is of course Nvidia’s reveal of the Blackwell series of Graphics Processing Units, otherwise known as the 50-series. Nvidia made predictably bold claims about generational performance enhancements.
Whilst initial independent previews do at least seem promising, I don’t think either will matter nearly as much as many might think. Eurogamer’s Cris Tapsell explains why quite nicely:
“Traditional triple-A games - namely, games with high-end, cutting edge graphics and large, ambitious worlds - are now very, very expensive and take a very, very long time to make. That means their success is even more important - but at the same time, that success feels less of a guarantee than ever. Research is showing that the new generation of players, Gen Z and even younger than that, 'Gen Alpha', don't really care about graphics.” Chris Tapsell, 2025
What makes this observation particularly prevalent is that those previews I mentioned had to actually hold back Nvidia’s fancy new DLSS 4. Neither capture cards nor video platforms such as YouTube and Twitch were capable of actually facilitating its full capabilities. So we’ve actually got a representation bottleneck here.
It will be harder than ever in 2025 for consumers to get an accurate grasp of the real-world utility of tech for their particular needs in part because devices such as GPU’s now so far exceed the needs and demands of the market that our technical infrastructure can’t support them anymore.
I’ve split the items into climate tech and biotech. MIT didn’t do that in their list, I did it here for your convenience.
Climate Tech:
The red thread running through each of these items is actually super simple and straightforward: through a combination of financial attractiveness and government mandates, 2025 looks set to continue the climate tech proliferation of 2024. Not because companies necessarily believe in them, but because their investors believe it will make them money.
The geopolitically motivated mining of rare-earth metals is a notable caveat here, but even they will be subject to at least some more stringent and environmentally conscious regulation.
We’ve talked about this plenty in 2024, biotech takes a long, long, looooooong time primarily because of all the due diligence and testing that (responsible governments) put into ensuring this stuff is actually safe and viable.
Whilst I agree with MIT on the importance of their listed items, I disagree on timelines. There will absolutely be more promising experimental breakthroughs again this year, even some limited clinical trials. But at most, we might see some very rare, exceedingly expensive fringe cases of actual patients receiving these treatments.
Cow burps are the notable exception. I agree on this likely having a notable material impact at scale this year. In fact, I’d like some of those pills for the members of certain collation government parties here. It might reduce their harmful emissions in parliament. Who knows?
To be as short and to the point as possible, the military industrial complex and AI companies will be best friends and accomplices in 2025.
To explain what I mean, here’s a short chain of events:
“Retail investors in India are pouring money into defence stocks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push for domestic arms manufacturing drove the sector index up nearly 56 per cent in a year.” Krishn Kaushik, 2025
Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of the alliance’s military committee, fumed to the Financial Times’ Henry Foy about existing restrictions on arms investment both via governmental mandates and financial sector policies. Indignant, he asked
“Why are you not convinced by trillions of dollars? What has happened to your business instinct? Are you stupid? And that’s what I say to pension funds as well. Are you stupid?” said Bauer. “If you are looking at return on investment . . . there’s so much money to be spent over the next 20 years.” Henry Foy, conveying the words of Rob Bauer 2025
Honestly Mr. Bauer, you’re making quite an ass of yourself here with such a shocking lack of decorum. Having said that, I do agree that the rebalancing of power tends to cause seismic shifts. And unless the actual hand of god manifests to slap sense into certain fools, wars will likely remain a part of 2025.
The Guardian’s Jasper Jolly noted that a company called ‘Faculty’ gained particular prominence in the UK after “working on data analysis for the Vote Leave campaign before the Brexit vote. Boris Johnson’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings, then gave government work to Faculty during the pandemic, and included its chief executive, Marc Warner, in meetings of the government’s scientific advisory panel.” Jasper Jolly, 2025
Oh for crying out loud. It’s the Brexit people again!? How does they keep coming back like a boomerang made out of shit? Natalie Bennett, a peer for the Green party, had plenty of thoughts about this, but the one that stuck in my mind was
“That a single company has been both taking up a large number of government contracts to work on AI while also working with the AI Safety Institute on testing large language models is a serious concern – not so much ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ as doing both roles at the same time.” Natalie Bennett, 2025
Over the course of 2025 we’ll see the gradual rollout of so called Co-Playable Characters (CPC’s). Whilst this might be one of the most profoundly stupid gaming terms I’ve heard in a hot minute, the principle is actually really interesting.
The Verge’s Jay Peters suggests a CPC will basically be “an AI teammate you can talk with (in) natural language who’s supposed to be as capable as a human. And a video shows the Ally indeed helping a player find specific loot, bringing over a vehicle, and attempting to flank opposing players (in a PUBG demo). But the video is heavily edited and isn’t live, so I’m sceptical.” Jay Peters, 2025.
I’ve added some clarifications in cursive in that quote for the sake of clarity. And yeah, I too have my doubts about how capable these AI teammates will be. Now, of course this does come with the asterisk that the systems need to not be slur slinging, conspiratorial maniacs. But I don’t actually mind CPC’s going harmlessly awry. I think it would be funny and would add welcome extra dynamism to games! Let the bots be useful partners or funny idiots, I welcome either I you absolutely must put them in.
Speaking of AI developments that have the potential to be fun and/or helpful, Nvidia also unveiled what I’ll call the ‘GeForce Mini’ because it reminds me of the ‘Mac Mini’ and I think the actual name ‘Digits’ sounds dumb and non-descriptive. GeForce is Nvidia’s graphics processing brand, and since they are mostly marketing those to AI companies now, I do think my naming sense is fitting in that regard as well.
Why is it fitting? Well! This not only fits into the ongoing ambitions of Nvidia to swim upstream, but also with its strategic desire to ‘cut out the middlemen’ that have historically used Nvidia’s reference cards to make their own Graphics Processing Units (GPU’s). These manufacturers have seen more and more competition the past few years from their ‘suppliers’ but now, in 2025, Nvidia appears to be moving in for the kill by making the finishing touches to its ecosystem.
As covered by Wired’s Will Knight, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “said during his CES keynote that Nvidia expects companies to build and maintain AI agents using its technology. “In a lot of ways the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future,” the CEO said. “In the future they will maintain, nurture, on-board, and improve a whole bunch of AI agents.”
The hardware-software integration inherent to this approach reminds me a great deal of Apple, which Nvidia will absolutely also be trying to usurp over the course of 2025. And ok, I get it, I’ve gotten quite carried away here without even telling you what Digits even is. It stands for “deep learning GPU intelligence training system.”
Digits is a desktop computer that “will go on sale in May and is about the size of a small book. It contains an Nvidia “superchip” called GB10 Grace Blackwell, optimized to accelerate the computations needed to train and run AI models, and comes equipped with 128 gigabytes of unified memory and up to 4 terabytes of NVMe storage for handling especially large AI programs.” So basically, it’s a GeForce Mini.
Split up across two articles, I’ve listed the most relevant (according to me) points below. Both were written by Data Centre Knowledge’s Christopher Tozzi. All credit to him for the points below, though I have combined the two items and paraphrased them for the sake of brevity.
Fast Company’s Mark Sullivan collected these predictions from tech and venture capital executives. I’ve excluded the majority for the sake of brevity here, but most are fixated on AI agents, and their believability (convincing voice, behaviour, visual fidelity etc.) crossing critical thresholds over the course of 2025.
Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business and Industry Copilot at Microsoft: “By this time next year, you’ll have a team of agents working for you. This could look like anything from an IT agent fixing tech glitches before you even notice them, a supply chain agent preventing disruptions while you sleep, sales agents breaking down silos between business systems to chase leads, and finance agents closing the books faster.”
Sure thing Microsoft, can you take that gun away from my Windows 10 PC’s proverbial head now? No? Fine, guess it’ll see Clippy in hell then… Sarcasm aside, you bet your ASCII that Microsoft will do anything and everything to try and manifest their vision of the Agentic AI future over the course of 2025, spearhead by whatever ways they can think of to force convert as many people as possible to Windows 11.
Andi Gutmans, VP/GM of Databases, Google Cloud: “2025 is the year where dark data lights up. The majority of today’s data sits in unstructured formats such as documents, images, videos, audio, and more. AI and improved data systems will enable businesses to easily process and analyse all of this unstructured data in ways that will completely transform their ability to reason about and leverage their enterprise-wide data.”
I would make some sarcastic comment here, but thus far, Google initiatives such as circle to search and Notebook LLM have been genuinely useful and well implemented. Google’s morality bar is still set so low that the earth’s core is telling it not to trespass on private property. Yet in terms of performance, 2025 seems like the year where Google might finally emerge somewhat confidently from the long string of high-profile humiliations that characterised 2021-2024.
Ritu Jyoti, VP/GM of AI, Automation, Data and Analytics Research, IDC: “High-quality data sets, cost, and talent have been critical inhibitors to scaling AI initiatives. In 2025, enterprises will double down their efforts to build curated data vaults by domain versus focusing on holistic data modernization efforts. Essentially, they will move from “waterfall projects” approach to “use-case” approach, build a minimum viable product, realize ROI, learn fast, and then expand.”
In plain English, he’s saying that companies will purpose build datasets to accomplish specific goals with an eye on ‘return on investment’ for tangible use cases. Instead of you know…just connecting a money printer to a blast furnace and hoping things will work out. Easier said than done mind you, but I do agree with this general trend towards maybe thinking about how and why you’re spending the money before spending it. We’ll definitely see this more visibly over the course of 2025 across the wider tech sector.
Masha Bucher, founder and general partner of Day One Ventures: “AI wearable devices, including form factors like earrings and headbands, will monitor focus, productivity, mental health, and overall mental performance in real-time. Brain tracking will no longer be niche; it will become as commonplace and essential as tracking steps or heart rate, empowering individuals to optimize their mental fitness with the same precision as physical health.”
This one is particularly interesting because the potential public health benefits here are both real and significant. The main problem is that, historically, tech companies simply haven’t been able to control themselves or their greed. “Brain tracking will no longer be niche; it will become common place” sends a chill down my spine. Not because it couldn’t be phenomenal for people that, for example, have full body paralysis. But because the use cases that executives like Bucher are actually excited for are things like next-gen targeted advertising.
‘A Nice Cup Of Serendipity’ style list of some of the items that popped up over the course of December, and this first week of January. None of these are in chronological order, just click the ones that seem interesting you and ignore the rest. Remember just pick what you like at a buffet table, you don’t have to get everything on your plate at once just because you can.
O3 and O3 Mini LINK
Sora Christmas Release LINK
Canva’s 2025 trend Report LINK
Commercialised Space Races LINK
Chip Wars Continue LINK
Clippy Sees All LINK
Uber Labelling LINK
Early December Cybersecurity Roundup LINK
A Talk About Data Monopolies LINK
Digital Dollar Doubts LINK
Google’s Antitrust Update LINK
More Microsoft Antitrust Adventures? LINK
Playable Ads LINK
Chord Cutting Concerns LINK
Social Media In 2025 LINK
Violent Defaults LINK
RTX 5080 Preview LINK
Eagle eyed readers will have noticed something about the images this time. Or rather, about the lack of them. I’ve very consciously opted for only a singular photograph. That’s because it is a photograph that I took myself during a lovely, contemplative walk in the dunes. It has not been edited or processed in any way beyond the computational photography necessary to capture it.
I know of at least a few readers who always read ‘One More Thing’ first, so they’ll also see this recommendation first! For everyone else, well…surprise!
Every time you wish to see an image whilst perusing this special edition of the newsletter, please return to this one. It is the image I have chosen to represent the Japanese concept of meikyōshisui, sometimes spelt in English as meikyō-shisui.
Like many of the most profound Asian concepts, there is no direct translation into English. This is part of the reason why I like it so much, not everything needs to be so clear cut and easily digestible.
What meikyōshisui means to me is the following:
Clean, tranquil waters reflect like an immaculate mirror. Like the mind and the heart, such waters are all too easily muddied. But that fragile, ephemeral nature is also what makes them so beautiful and meaningful. And even when they do get clouded in such a way, the dust eventually settles. Like all things, chaos and disorder are also temporary.
Benches for their part are obviously much simpler, more straightforward. You see a bench and know that it is a place upon which you can rest and recover from a taxing journey. Here we see a bench, submerged within the water. Like the grass on either side of it, the bench is itself mirrored by the water. Moments of reflection can best be had whilst resting after all.
Beyond the mists, you can see the vague outlines of the other shore, opposite the one from where I took this picture. Not to beat you over the head with too much symbolism here, but the ‘other shore’ may also have some interesting further connotations.
All this is to say that it is my earnest wish that both your heart and mind may be clear and serene this year. Even if momentary disruptions might muddy them up from time to time.