I have never felt less confident in the future than I do in 2025... and it's such a stark contrast. I guess if you split things down the middle, AI probably continues to change the world in dramatic ways but not in the all or nothing way people expect.
A non trivial amount of people get laid off, likely due to a finanical crisis which is used as an excuse for companies scale up use of AI. Good chance the financial crisis was partly caused by AI companies, which ironically makes AI cheaper as infra is bought up on the cheap (so there is a consolidation, but the bountiful infra keeps things cheap). That results in increased usage (over a longer period of time). and even when the economy starts coming back the jobs numbers stay abismal.
Politics are divided into 2 main groups, those who are employed, and those who are retired. The retired group is VERY large, and has alot of power. They mostly care about entitlements. The employed age people focus on AI which is making the job market quite tough. There are 3 large political forces (but 2 parties). The Left, the Right, and the Tech Elite. The left and the right both hate AI, but the tech elite though a minority has outsized power in their tie breaker role. The age distributions would surprise most. Most older people are now on the left, and most younger people are split by gender. The right focuses on limiting entitlements, and the left focuses on growing them by taxing the tech elite. The right maintains power by not threatening the tech elite.
Unlike the 20th century America is a more focused global agenda. We're not policing everyone, just those core trading powers. We have not gone to war with China, China has not taken over Taiwan.
Physical robotics is becoming a pretty big thing, space travel is becoming cheaper. We have at least one robot on an astroid mining it. The yield is trivial, but we all thought it was neat.
Energy is much much greener, and you wouln't have guessed it... but it was the data centers that got us there. The Tech elite needed it quickly, and used the political connections to cut red tape and build really quickly.