There’s something about 2025 that feels like The Future. Dreamers certainly had a vision for it: a quarter century past the new millennium and halfway to 2050, humanity would achieve great things. Well, now the future is here—and we can judge how well we’ve done. 

For some people “it’s like we’ve crossed a line” into the future, said Kate Maddalena, a researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga who studies science communications and teaches a class for undergraduates on writing about the future.  

“There was a time before when the future was exciting and distant and we could, theoretically, talk about utopia, dystopia.” 

Here are a few of the goals humanity set for 2025—and how close we are to achieving them.

Self-driving, flying cars

In 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted that the company would hit a market capitalization of US$700 billion by 2025, foreseeing a major shift toward electric and autonomous cars. As far back as 2000, the Globe and Mail ran headlines predicting that drivers would no longer need keys thanks to voice-activated smart cars that could alert you to nearby fuelling stations. 

The reality: We may not have retina-scanning, self-driving, flying cars—and most of us don’t even have electric ones—but we do have keyless cars and navigation that anticipates needs like EV charging. While Musk has missed quite a few key deadlines for launching Tesla products in the last decade, he has just about doubled his goal for Tesla’s market valuation. 

Robot assistants

XPRIZE Foundation executive chair Peter Diamandis, whose foundation is backed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, predicted in May 2015 that “the next decade’s generation of Siri will be much more like J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man.” 

Global spending on robots was supposed to quadruple 2010 levels to reach about US$67 billion by now, Boston Consulting Group said in 2014, as giant hunks of smart metal moved “from the factory floor to the personal realm.” 

The reality: Generative AI chatbots have come pretty close to J.A.R.V.I.S., though they don’t always give superhero-worthy advice. And I’m waiting on a personal robot. Musk now anticipates that humanoid robots could go on sale to companies in 2026 or 2027—though he also said in 2022 that Tesla’s Optimus would be ready in 2023.

The overall market for robots has well surpassed US$67 billion. But the big leaps forward have been behind the scenes in places like factories or hazardous areas, said Nikolas Badminton, a Toronto-based futurist and researcher.

Wearable and embedded devices

By 2025 we’d have wearable sensors that could predict diseases or adjust medical treatments on an hour-by hour basis, predicted software developer Aron Roberts, as part of Pew Research Centre’s March 2014 survey, “Digital Life in 2025.” Stowe Boyd, then a lead researcher for GigaOM Research, told Pew that people will be so tied to their “companion devices—the 2025 equivalent of today’s phones and tablets” that they will “have elements of their devices embedded.” 

The reality:  Features like the hearing-aid mode on AirPods, which can test and boost performance for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss,show how far off-the-shelf consumer-grade wearables have come. Some people have credited their Apple Watches with tipping them off to heart attacks (not a use case Apple endorses.)  Embedded computing devices became a small-scale reality this year, after Neuralink put two of its devices in U.S. patients, and Health Canada approved a domestic study. 

Such devices remain experimental. Meta and Apple have made leaps forward with smart glasses and hands-free, mixed-reality computing, but there’s still no “companion device” that supersedes the need for smartphones or tablets. And while we may have more hour–by-hour health data, it’s of limited use given the slow pace of the rest of the healthcare system, which has admittedly been occupied by a largely unexpected pandemic. 

Digital currency

In that same Pew Survey, David Solomonoff, then-president of the New York chapter of the Internet Society, forecasted that digital currencies would be an area “where the roles of government and large commercial/industrial entities will be challenged” in 2025.

The reality: Congrats, bitcoin millionaires. But governments like El Salvador that embraced cryptocurrency are indeed struggling to work with legacy institutions like the International Monetary Fund. 

Bitcoin had dropped under US$400 by the end of 2014, so if you predicted it would rise above US$100,000 earlier this month, I hope you’re enjoying your private island. 

Big banks aren’t exactly obsolete—with three of Canada’s Big Six banks reporting better-than-expected profits this month—but are much more exposed to cryptocurrency, holding US$21 million in U.S. bitcoin ETFs. 

New energy sources

Better fuels and a reliable grid have been a persistent hope for generations. In 1976, in a study commissioned by the Science Council of Canada, physicist Amory Lovins said nuclear energy would be superfluous by 2025 as devices became more and more efficient. 

In 2012, Dutch futurist Marcel Bullinga, said that one of his predictions most favoured by the general public was that the sun would become the major, and cheapest, form of energy.

The reality: Technology is more energy efficient, but we haven’t stopped investing in fossil fuels or nuclear power.

The intensity of the world’s energy usage has fallen over the past decade, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which defines energy intensity as the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP. That means we’re using power more efficiently each year, but it’s far below the four per cent annual improvements needed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Instead, the IEA estimates that AI, cryptocurrency, and data centre usage will suck as much power out of our energy grids as the entire country of Japan by 2026. 

About 15 per cent of the world’s primary energy consumption came from renewables in 2023, up from about 6.5 per cent in 1965, according to Our World in Data and the Energy Institute. Less than three per cent of the world’s energy came from solar power. 

Augmented and virtual reality

As far back as 2001, engineers interviewed by The Globe and Mail predicted that people would be watching hockey games on virtual reality headsets at home, and that, by 2025, they’d be able to buy something they see on TV by clicking on it.

The reality: While most hockey fans aren’t routinely watching their games on Meta VR headsets, they probably could. Pokemon Go and the iPhone’s “Measure” app have made augmented reality relatively commonplace, and there are no shortage of opportunities to click on ads on TikTok, Twitch or YouTube or identify products with Google Lens. Still, the metaverse, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts, is a flop.

Technology advisor Rafeeq Bosch, who is working on a PhD looking at the future of emerging economies, said that the technologies that tend to endure are ones that fill universal societal needs, rather than technologies that provide entertainment value for wealthier regions in North America or Europe. 

The final score

There are of course predictions that, in retrospect, seem absurd: Google Glass would replace TVs; the majority of the adult population would be retired; hackers would bring down the entire internet. Plenty of institutions and companies broke promises they made about 2025 and faced few consequences. 

Bosch conceded that most predictions seem trite in retrospect, pointing to technologies imagined by generations past, like rocketships delivering mail. But the concept—instant communication—was realized in emails, and now seems mundane. A lot of innovation, he said, looks more like “plumbing” than a big transformation. 

Maddalena said that rather than thinking of the future as “all-powerful tech that solves every problem,” it’s better to think about the ways we can improve society today by working with our local communities. 

“If everything was just happily ticking along, then you end up with an air of complacency,” said Badminton. “So there’s pressure, there’s tension, there’s struggle. Ultimately, this is when we’re going to see a lot of very interesting things happen.”