Experts Say the ‘New Normal’ in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-Driven, Presenting More Big Challenges

A new canvassing of experts in technology, communications and social change by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. Asked to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak of the global pandemic and other crises in 2020, some 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded. Their broad and nearly universal view is that people’s relationship with technology will deepen as larger segments of the population come to rely more on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions and essential social interactions. A number describe this as a “tele-everything” world. Notable shares of these respondents foresee significant change that will:

• worsen economic inequality as those who are highly connected and the tech-savvy pull further ahead of those who have less access to digital tools and less training or aptitude for exploiting them and as technological change eliminates some jobs;
• enhance the power of big technology firms as they exploit their market advantages and mechanisms such as artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that seem likely to further erode the privacy and autonomy of their users;
• multiply the spread of misinformation as authoritarians and polarized populations wage warring information campaigns with their foes.

At the same time, a portion of these experts express hope that changes spawned by the pandemic will make things better for significant portions of the population because of changes that inaugurate new reforms aimed at racial justice and social equity; more flexible-workplace arrangements; and produce technology enhancements that could lead to smarter, safer, more productive lives.