2025 Will Be the Strangest Year

Yesterday I had a spur-of-the-moment coffee chat with Eunseo Seol of EO, a Korean startup and tech media company. She shares broad, deep insights on social media, and I wanted to hear in person how she thinks and what picture she has of the future.

We talked about a lot of things over two hours at Starbucks, and the topic that stuck with me most was how power shifts.

Early on, power came from military strength. Think Genghis Khan or the Roman emperors. Then capitalism arrived, and the people who held capital started holding power.

But capitalism is built on the assumption that workers will always be needed.

Suppose AGI advances dramatically over the next five years and AI humanoids replace all labor. Capital would gradually lose its meaning, which leaves the question of who holds power after that.

This matters because the people with military power fell behind the people with capital, and in the same way, people with capital could get pushed aside by groups that control AGI unless they evolve fast.

The main people holding AGI are Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. Eunseo predicted that Elon Musk will come out on top in the long run.

Sam Altman has been building AI since 2015 and leads on the software side. But replacing human labor means expanding into hardware, and Elon Musk has been building computers that move, through Tesla, since the early 2000s. His mission is to combine xAI and Tesla into humanoids that free humans from intellectual and physical labor.

After smart cars, the world will likely move step by step to smart homes, smart cities, smart countries, and a smart planet. If Starlink covers the whole globe, that era could come sooner than we think.

If it does come quickly, we need to think about what to prepare for now. Money runs on trust. The moment everyone realizes it's just numbers stored in a database, currency could lose its meaning, hyperinflation could hit, and its value could collapse.

That's why Eunseo is focused on social influence: the power to move public opinion with a single tweet, and to use it to lead people where you want them to go, sometimes for business and sometimes for politics.

Under capitalism, everyone gets an education to become a skilled worker. She said that in the future, everyone will try to become a creator and build their own media power, and that this will create another round of polarization.

If so, the opponent Elon Musk finds hardest to deal with might be a mega creator like MrBeast rather than a president. Staying close to MrBeast might even pay off more than staying close to the president.

So the creator economy is going to get even more powerful. And in the middle of all this, 2025 will be a year that's both very exciting and very hard to predict.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, December 25, 2024.