Education & Career Trends: November 18, 2024
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Article by Bernard Marr Published on Forbes.com
The biggest trends go beyond mere buzzwords. They identify the direction of travel of the most transformative technologies, set to drive significant change in the way we live and work, as well as how we understand and interact with the world around us.
These are the “big picture” ideas that every individual and business that wants to be ahead of the curve should have on their radar. Each of them presents significant opportunities but also creates risks and ethical challenges that can’t be ignored.
Here is an overview of the most important upcoming trends.
1. The Convergence Of Machine And Human Intelligence
So, in 2025, AI is no longer the future; it’s firmly in the here and now, but the truth is we’re still in the very, very early days of the intelligence revolution. From generative video to autonomous AI agents and perhaps even quantum-powered AI, we will continue to see developments that break new ground in ever more amazing and sometimes frightening ways.
The most impactful use cases for AI in 2025 might be those that involve fostering the symbiotic relationships developing between humans and machines. This means AI tools that are more closely aligned with helping us in our day-to-day work while also augmenting our human skills and capabilities.
But behind the scenes, the trend will be towards AI that enhances our lives in more subtle, seamless ways. AI tools and applications will become more integrated into the way we live and work, letting us make better, more data-informed decisions and augmenting our creativity as well as our productivity.
2. The Biotech Revolution
In 2025, biotechnology—which harnesses the power of biological science to advance health, agriculture, and environmental sustainability—will continue to reshape our world in profound ways. Breakthroughs such as CRISPR-based gene editing will find increasingly mainstream applications, offering personalized treatments for genetic disorders like muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia, while tailored therapies will create new cancer treatments with reduced side effects and improved outcomes.
Besides healthcare, biotech breakthroughs will continue to drive new advances in agriculture, enabling the development of disease-resistant and climate-resilient crops that reduce the need for harmful pesticides. Innovations such as lab-grown meat will also gain traction, offering sustainable alternatives to traditional meat production and helping to address global food challenges. Advances like these promise not only to extend our lives but to enhance our quality of life, as biotech continues to play an ever more impactful role in how we live, work, and care for our planet.
3. The Climate Tech Challenge
Technology designed to reduce or even reverse the damage that humans have caused to the environment, as well as assist with progress toward reducing carbon emissions, will be a key growth area in 2025.
During 2023, investment in this area dropped due to economic slowdown. However, this has picked up during 2024, and analysts expect growth to continue throughout the next year. This is undoubtedly driven by a growing sense of urgency as evidence of the real-world impact of climate change continues to mount. In recent years, we’ve seen significant advances ranging from the growing popularity of electric cars to groundbreaking developments in carbon capture and storage. 2025 might be a pivotal moment as these innovations and many others are scaled and integrated into everyday life. Of particular impact will be an acceleration in the development and adoption of clean energy storage, with breakthroughs in battery and grid-based technologies set to improve reliability and efficiency.
4. Cybersecurity At Global Scale
In 2025, the threat posed to global businesses by hackers, data theft and other cyberattacks is immense. But it’s quickly becoming dwarfed by the threat posed to society, national security and public safety. In recent years, there has been a surge in attacks against critical infrastructure, with cybercriminals targeting energy grids, healthcare infrastructure, and even electoral systems.
These attacks have the potential to disrupt the essential services we rely on day-to-day, destabilize economies and undermine our trust in those whose job it is to keep us safe. The solution will involve increased national investment in cybersecurity infrastructure as well as collaboration between states to share intelligence and develop collaborative defence strategies. Newly developed AI systems will be critical when it comes to detecting and preventing attacks, but the same technology is also likely to be harnessed by attackers to make life difficult. Increasingly, this will be done in pursuit of political aims. For this reason, 2025 might be the year when we come to see cybersecurity as not just a technical issue for businesses to solve, but a critical element of national and global security.
5. A Quantum Leap In Computing Power
The UN has proclaimed that 2025 will be the International Year Of Quantum Science And Technology. And while quantum computing may not have yet hit the mainstream in a way that’s visible to many of us, 2024 saw the emergence of several important real-world use cases. These include drug discovery and solving optimization problems in finance and logistics.
It leverages the unusual properties of particles when observed at the sub-atomic level, such as superposition and entanglement, to carry out certain computational tasks hundreds of millions of times more quickly than traditional computers.
With new developments in cloud-based quantum computing potentially making the technology available to many more businesses and organizations, 2025 could be the year that its impact on our lives becomes dramatically more tangible.
After all, experts predict that it will revolutionize many fields, including climate modelling, material discovery, genomics, clean energy and encryption in the near future.
Some also believe that it will profoundly affect the evolution of AI, as quantum algorithms process data required for natural language processing, autonomous driving and computer vision applications at unprecedented speed.
However, some also predict that 2025 could mark the arrival of “Q-Day”. This is a theoretical point in time when quantum computers become powerful enough to render many methods of encryption redundant – with severe consequences for privacy and security.
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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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