Part of being a planner or designer is to think about the future. We just have to take a look at what’s emerging and develop early signals about what might next happen next.
In covering some of the occurrences in December and January, there have been so many surprising things that caught people off guard, that I wanted to update some predictions and keep kind of a bingo card of it in real time. So, what follows is a set of things that I think might happen and have already happened. If they already happened and I didn’t predict it, those are marked with a green check box. I’ll find another marker to see if I get close with the other things.
I will expand the definitions of each of the Bingo entries in updated, augmented 2025 Bingo Card Edition 🎈
- China Takes the Lead in the AI race, fleetingly (grey swan) ✅
- Cease Fire in Israel/Gaza ✅
- End of War in Ukraine/Russia
- Ontario has snap Election ✅
- Trudeau Resigns ✅
- Conservatives in Canada don’t win (a majority)
- AGI announced and then redefined to not be AGI.
- The first AI agentic systems operates as a business and has a ARR forecasted at > $1M
- An AI character joins the cast of a popular streaming/TV series as a recurring character
- A celebrity is outed for lying about the use of AI in writing or some other matter
- Crypto Crashes of Meme Coins
- Microsoft attains 2% more of open AI for controlling interest and official merger
- The first AI born commercial software images.. fully generated by AI tools.
- A super huge wave of layoffs in technology companies as business is retool for AI impacts.
- Oh yeah it’s time for the largest mass killing in US history
- The US begins to export criminals and paying for concentration camps in other countries ✅
- Mass deportation only hits 10% of the target and victory is claimed.
- The US reduces Federal account of employees by >10%.
- Elon Musk is hit by a scandal he can’t get out of and has to step back from the government.
- The Wegovy or Ozempic daily pill arrives.
- Award program starts for AI genned video shorts to popularize this new form of artistry.
- China embraces open source hardcore everywhere to dump free software into the world to destabilize things.
- A record number of data centers are built in China and in the US.
- Mega Merge across two AI Foundation companies… to block an acquisition from one of the distributors.
- Apple emerges as an AI foundation leader and everyone says they predicted it.
- Nvidia recovers its stock price at its high in January.
- Intel is acquired by hedge fund to get itself re-capitalized… it’s far better off in private life.
- Snapchat is acquired by Apple and not Meta, but maybe somebody else. It also needs to be re-capitalized.
- Humanoid robots go to production at the scale of hundreds in new companies. Thousands of pilots.
- Tarrifs are used all year to negotiate things other than the tariffs.
- 5 or 10 applications are created that replace current office automation software feature feature in the core of the systems are AI agents. The companies to build them have less than 10 people in them.
- Romantasy is exposed as a massive AI text generation operation run by very few people.
- The cost of air travel reaches record numbers.
- An AI generated novel hits the New York Times bestseller list but is argued off the list. A new best seller for AI generated content emerges.
- Hollywood indeed has a Blockbuster Summer with another super double feature even.
- More than 5 US Federal departments or agencies will be shut down.
- AI generated movie script will be developed into a movie (streaming first then distributed on the big screen). It would be a cult phenomena.
- Canada tourism slows way down to the US.
- Canadian Tire and other All-Canadian Brands are winners
- Humans find something interesting on the moon.
- There is a bad space collision.
- The stranded astronauts come home.
- Soft Power move. China replaces the funds for WHO not paid by the US this year.
- Global Pandemic false alert… ebola? H1N1?
- A AI generated game ends up in the top 10 on the app store (eg ai flappy bird).
- A disease is cured by an AI identified drug; in vitro not in vivo.
- Fentanyl deaths are cured.
- AI wins another one or two Nobel prizes this year, in a new area of interest. Not literature. I am looking at you Economics.
- A major newspaper that is world-known fails, is sold or is merged with another newspaper.
