Futurist forecasts convergence of key technologies into “living intelligence”
2024 was all about the artificial intelligence boom. That was true for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also the case on a wider, more practical level, with AI becoming increasingly visible in our schools, offices and social media feeds.
AI advances are sure to remain a massive part of the tech economy, but in the coming year, we could see more sci-fi-like tech becoming reality, according to futurist Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Webb about some of the emerging trends she’s watching for in 2025, including a potential evolution in AI tech that she calls living intelligence.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Amy Webb: This year, everybody has been focused exclusively on artificial intelligence as the next big thing, and the issue is that artificial intelligence is already here, but worse, it’s actually connected to two other critical areas of technology that haven’t gotten as much attention. Those are advanced sensors and biotechnology. Together, artificial intelligence as the foundation with sensors and biotechnology are kind of creating yet another new field of technology, one that I’m calling living intelligence. And basically, living intelligence creates systems that can sense and learn and adapt and evolve, which means that as technology progresses in one of those fields, it sort of creates this flywheel effect. Living intelligence is going to drive an exponential cycle of innovation, of growth. It will disrupt businesses. It will change our reality, and it won’t happen overnight, but we’re at the beginning of a long-term cycle where living intelligence will play a pretty significant role.
Meghan McCarty Carino: Paint a little bit of a picture for me of what this might look like. How is bioengineering and sensors and artificial intelligence all put together in this?
Webb: So there’s a nationwide shortage of nitrile gloves. These are the gloves that you encounter at a restaurant or at a doctor’s office. The problem with nitrile gloves is that they require basically a handful of ingredients that are hard to source, specifically in the United States. There’s just no way for us currently to keep up with the demand. Now, what if there was a different way to produce the substance, the rubberlike substance that goes into these nitrile gloves? In fact, there is, and that’s because of living intelligence. In addition to all of the work that Google has done on artificial intelligence, they’ve also been working in the field of what’s called generative biology to generate molecules or genomes, right? New materials. And that’s exactly what Google has been working on, which means that in the near future, artificial intelligence combined with biotechnology could lead to an abundant supply of nitrile gloves, but even better, inventing a new substance that’s very similar. It’s plausible that we will have any number of new materials that will help us with the current shortages and problems that we have with things like petroleum and plastic. The point of living intelligence is that we’re looking at the different convergences between AI, advanced sensors and biology.
McCarty Carino: All right. Another area that you write about is crypto and kind of the continuing thaw of the crypto winter. We have an incoming administration, an incoming Congress seen as more friendly towards crypto. We have already seen the markets respond to that. But what does it mean for crypto, and you know, kind of the blockchain as technology?
Webb: So the inbound president, President [Donald] Trump, has picked Paul Atkins, who is a self-proclaimed crypto fanboy, as the next chair of the [Securities and Exchange Commission]. Why is this significant? Well, it’s significant because up until now, crypto has kind of been a frontier technology, and it just hasn’t been part of the agenda for the financial agencies and institutions in the United States. But that’s going to change next year, and that’s because we have an incoming administration that’s not just enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies, the president himself has one. World Liberty Financial is itself a very early crypto venture that has the backing of President Trump. So this is incredibly important going forward for a couple of reasons. So first, if you’re a holder of cryptocurrency, you’re probably looking at a good year. But if we zoom out a little bit, you know, a lot of other countries around the world are trying to unhook from the dollar, and they are looking at cryptocurrency and blockchain as a potential way to do that. Some countries have already launched digital currencies, that includes Brazil. So you know, what does that mean in practice? Clarity on regulation. It very likely means that we will have guardrails and specifics and basically regulatory decisions and policies that pave the way for cryptocurrencies to play a significant role in the U.S. economy.
McCarty Carino: Do you think it moves the U.S. any closer to adoption of a digital currency of its own?
Webb: Part of the challenge has to do with traceability. You know, once you are using systems like blockchain, what’s nice is that it gives you the ability to verify, so you can trace and authenticate transactions, but you can also obscure individual people where the transactions originated from, so you need an account, not necessarily a name, which has made cryptocurrency an easy way to launder money. Honestly, we’re going to have to wait and see what happens. There’s quite a bit of opposition against digital currencies, but there is a new administration that appears to be very focused on making cryptocurrencies much more mainstream, and I should note that the MAGA base, a lot of that base is very enthusiastic about cryptocurrency. So there’s a, if not a market pull or a reason, there certainly is one that’s constituent-driven.
McCarty Carino: All right, let’s talk about quantum computing. You note that quantum computing may have its moment in 2025. Remind us where we are with quantum computing and what the potential might be in the next year.
Webb: A couple of things happened at the end of 2024, one of which has to do with a quantum chip called Willow from Google. Willow can reduce the errors below a particular threshold when processing information. Why is this important? Well, it’s important because qubits, which are the basis for a quantum computer, instead of a one and zero, they can flip and be either a one or a zero at the same time, and all you really need to know is that this allows quantum computers to solve certain types of problems way faster than a regular computer. The problem is that these qubits are super-, superfragile, and they respond to any type of noise. Willow, this new chip, it reduces all of that noise so Willow can store quantum information. It can’t perform calculations yet. But this huge breakthrough, I know it sounds superboring, but like it’s a big deal. There is now a clear pathway to make quantum computers a reality in the much nearer future.
McCarty Carino: So what are the barriers that remain between here and there, between achieving kind of functional quantum computing?
Webb: Well, so error reduction is big, and there’s no way to overstate how important that is. Now those special chips have to be put in machines that can be accessed, that can be used commercially, that can scale, and then you have to build applications that work for them. It’s kind of like having the first transistor, now we got something to work with. The next steps that have to happen is, you know, we have to build the systems and tools now on top of this thing.
We asked Amy Webb about what could happen after Elon Musk bought Twitter back in 2022. She thought it could accelerate a trend she was already seeing — internet discourse splintering from social media as the digital town square into smaller, more niche, communities, or what she called the Splinternet.
And with Twitter — now X — coded more politically right, and left-leaning users fleeing to Bluesky, plus the growth of other platforms like Threads and Mastodon, she said that prediction is shaping up to be true. The next important development, she said, could be systems like Flipboard’s app Surf, which bills itself as a browser to view content from various social media apps in one place.
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