2025: The Year of AI Everywhere

Every so often, the arc of history bends sharply within a single year, a concentrated collision of technology, conflict, convulsions in civic life and the unequal distribution of risk and reward. 

The year 2025 was one such moment. 

It felt as though the gaps in our institutions, economies, and social contracts widened visibly, no longer latent seams but open fault lines. Technologies were everywhere; however, their presence often accentuated rather than perfected the fractures already coursing through human societies.

The brutality of war everywhere

War has ceased to be an interruption in our time; it has become its background condition. It unfolds on frontlines but also within kitchens, classrooms and clinics, insinuating itself into the most ordinary acts of human life. In Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine, war is no longer an event that arrives and departs. It is now a structure within which people are compelled to live. 

Sudan’s renewed war since 2023 exposes another dimension of modern brutality: the scale at which human beings can be rendered surplus. The displacement of more than twelve million people, a number larger than the entire population of Belgium, is a moral indictment of our world. A world that normalises mass suffering as background noise buried in occasional news pieces. Those innocent civilians – women, children elderly, fleeing violence confront choices that are no choices at all, between hunger and disease in makeshift camps, or danger and disappearance along uncharted routes. War, here, strips agency down to its barest form.

Also read: Why Artificial Superintelligence Might Be Humanity’s Best Hope

In the occupied Palestinian territories, war manifests through sudden and double-tap explosions as well as through unrelenting deprivation. The BBC reports that Israel demolished more than 1,500 buildings in parts of Gaza that have remained under Israeli control since the ceasefire with Hamas began on 10 October 2025. 

The deepest harm lies in what escapes measurement in statistical term: interrupted educations, untreated illnesses, the silenced recalibration of hopes to ever-narrower horizons. These are the lived substance of conflict. 

As Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, observes, the term “ceasefire” has become illusory. It is used to cover slow killings, pacify anger, and temper global concern.

Feminism, rights and the human toll

Though the New York Times published an opinion produced by a man – “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” And if conversative feminism fix it. One can almost hear the sigh behind the headline. However, in contexts of conflict and instability, the burdens borne by women and marginalised genders have been acute. Globally, women’s labour force participation hovers around 48 per cent – a deceptively neat number that conceals gaping inequalities. In war-torn societies, rates of gender-based violence spike and access to reproductive health services diminishes, amplifying suffering. 

Despite these conditions, movements for women’s rights persisted with determined energy. In Europe, the grassroots campaign My Voice, My Choice mobilised women to successfully petition the European Parliament to safeguard access to safe abortion across the EU. In Iran, Sudan, Colombia, Mexico, and throughout the Caribbean, women’s coalitions continued to challenge embedded hierarchies, demanding dignity, security, and the simple decency of a life worth living.

What is striking is how insistently these movements tie rights to material reality, that is decent work, safety in public spaces, equitable healthcare, and education. Rights without the means to live them remain a cruel jest.

Climate stress and social fractures

There was yet another COP in Brazil. COP means Conference of Parties, but these parties do not seem to conference much. Conference is a noun; it means discussion, consultation, alliance, forum. But the parties seem to be allying for themselves, not for the people, not for endangered species, but for who can get more concessions on how much oil they can drill. So, the slogan “drill, baby, drill” might be accurately attributed to Trump, but a significant number of Trump’s peers will chant the same slogan.

Also read: AI’s Future Should Be Measured in Wisdom, Not Just Intelligence

The World Meteorological Organisation reported that the past decade has been the warmest on record; 2025, following on from 2024’s heatwaves and unprecedented droughts, sits among the highest average temperature years ever measured. These changes have contributed to crop failures in the Horn of Africa, intensification of wildfires in Southern Europe and water stress in megacities from Delhi to São Paulo.

For subsistence farmers in Burkina Faso, erratic rains can mean the difference between food security and the humiliations of hunger. For fishing communities in Bangladesh, rising seas and saline intrusion erode livelihoods that have sustained families for generations.

Climate stress has not been evenly distributed. Richer nations, with broader safety nets and resilient infrastructure, have buffered some shocks. Regions with fewer resources have been less fortunate; here, people shoulder the consequences of global emissions they played little part in producing.

But Elon Musk is building a sprawling AI supercomputer in Memphis, a historic Black community. The air and water are choking with pollution. Progress, they are told, is inevitable, necessary, exciting and still its costs are never shared.

Freedom, democracy and the rising tide of dissent

On several continents, young people took to the streets in waves of protest. In Nepal, students, galvanised by corruption, burned down the parliament. In Madagascar, protesters forced the president to flee. In Bulgaria, youth-led marches compelled an entire government to resign. In Georgia, people have been fighting for freedom and fair elections for two years, only to be met with banned chemical weapons, according to reports. 

The young everywhere are juggling precarious work, struggling to find jobs that match their qualifications, and watching friends emigrate as viable futures grow elusive. AI has further pushed them into isolation.

Inequality and the new pinnacle of wealth

In the midst of these upheavals, the top echelons of global wealth expanded further. World Inequality Report 2026 found that fewer than 60,000 people, or 0.001 per cent of humanity, hold three times the wealth of the entire bottom half of the global population.

In 2025, one individual’s ascent to an unprecedented level of wealth crystallised this divergence. Elon Musk moved closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire, but narratives in Europe and the United States would have you believe that migrants fleeing war and persecution are stealing jobs. 

This juxtaposition, extraordinary wealth beside chronic insecurity, is not merely provocative. It shapes political economy: who gets a voice in policy debates, whose interests are reflected in fiscal priorities, and whose distress is relegated to footnotes in economic reports.

Aftermath and reflection

If 2025 was a year in which technologies became ubiquitous, it was also one in which human vulnerabilities became harder to ignore. The promise of better tools and platforms felt distant when measured against the persistence of hunger, displacement, poverty and political marginalisation.

What endures from this year is neither despair nor simplistic optimism, but a clearer view of the work still required: prioritising human wellbeing and social protections, revitalising democratic institutions, addressing climate vulnerabilities, and insisting that the gains of prosperity extend beyond narrow elites. If our democratic systems are to work, they need to be re-imagined for young people to believe in them — that they can work for them, that democratic structures are committed to lives made meaningful by dignity, security, and the capacity to shape one’s own future. 

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and an international media studies scholar at the Deutsche Welle Akademie.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.