25 things we think will happen in 2025

From tariffs and a Trump/Elon break-up to artificial general intelligence, here’s what could happen in 2025, according to the Future Perfect team.

For the sixth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect convened in December to make predictions about major events in the year to come. Will Congress pass a tariff bill that makes President-elect Donald Trump happy? Will the H5N1 bird flu become an honest-to-god pandemic? Will the war in Ukraine stop? Will a major sports figure get caught up in a gambling scandal?

It’s fun to make predictions about the future, which is part of the reason why we do it so often. But this isn’t just blind guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached to it. That gives you a sense of our confidence (high in the case of, say, Charli XCX’s Grammy chances, less so in the case of Iran’s nuclear plans). And don’t make the same mistake that people seem to make every presidential cycle. Even a probability as high as 75 percent or 80 percent doesn’t mean we’re sure something will happen. Rather, it means we think that if we made four or five predictions, we’d expect three or four of them to come true, respectively.

And as we have every year, we’ll be keeping track of how our predictions fared over the course of 2025, and report back to you at the end of December. You can check out how we did in 2024 here. And we’ve done something new this year in partnering with the prediction platform Metaculus. You can check it out here to see how the community there came down on a number of our predictions — and even compete in a prize pool — and click on the individual questions with links to go directly to them on Metaculus. We’ve also added the Metaculus community’s aggregated forecasts as of December 31 for the questions they’ve taken on. —Bryan Walsh

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