What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - 2025: Dystopian Tech of the Year
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
Artificial intelligence boosters spent the year wedging the tech into our lives – whether we wanted it or not. But one new product brought A.I. from every app and website into the meatspace, forcing you to face it eye-to-eye.
Guest: Nitish Pahwa, staff writer at Slate covering business and technology
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Olivia Culpo here to tell you all about the launch of the new Abercrombie spring denim collection, |
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| 0:31.6 | Security and compliance done wrong is a headache. |
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| 0:58.8 | How many times, Tish, do you think we have brought you on to talk about some piece of apocalyptic or dystopian tech news? |
| 1:08.4 | Honestly, I might need to get an AI to count that up for me at this point. |
| 1:17.0 | Natishpawa covers business and tech here at Slate. |
| 1:20.4 | And you probably know that because he's been on TBD a lot. |
| 1:25.0 | What kind of year would you say big tech had? Big tech had a very |
| 1:30.7 | bubblicious time. You know, big social media, big cryptocurrency, big AI, kind of just had |
| 1:40.1 | their wishes granted by the administration. |
| 1:48.8 | They have just the easiest time ever from this government. And despite that, we are also starting to get some apocalyptic vibes of sorts |
| 1:57.9 | economically and otherwise from these folks. |
| 2:08.2 | Apocalyptic vibes is a good shorthand for 2025. |
| 2:14.9 | So much so that when we called Tisch Up for our end-of-the-year recap show, we had a very apocalyptic ask. Specifically, what was the most dystopian piece of technology |
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