My 2025 tech resolutions: ditching X, avoiding AI, and more

So many of 2024’s tech plot twists defied predictions, but we should have seen one thing coming: The industry would once again pivot away from learning from its mistakes. And while 2025 might be better, it would be a predictable error to expect the tech companies that have profited most from the current state of affairs to change their courses.

We, however, don’t have to click “accept” or “submit” on whatever those comfortable incumbents serve up. The Esc, Alt, and Option keys still work. Here’s how I plan to use those keys, metaphorically speaking, over the next 12 months.

Avoid AI unless it does something actually useful

After another year of tech companies hyping artificial intelligence more insistently than ever, it’s even more important to question that hype. While AI can solve legitimate problems, tech giants can’t seem to resist deploying it regardless of need or interest.

And so far, my experience has left me more skeptical than sold. I keep seeing AI web-search answers serve up wildly incorrect answers (some that erased more than a decade of my own writing), while AI slop now sloshes around in too many of my social-media feeds.

So while I have to keep trying out this stuff to tell you all if it’s any good, what I do on my own time is different. To me, that means keeping AI on a tight leash: declining Google’s invitation to use its Gemini AI in place of Google Assistant on my new phone, ignoring Facebook and LinkedIn’s offers of AI help, never taking an AI search result’s word for it, and not having AI write my stories (not least because that would violate policies at multiple freelance clients).

I’m not ruling out AI delivering value, especially when it exists as small-scale code that runs on my own computer or phone instead of in an electricity-devouring data center. For example, the on-device Apple Intelligence features on my Mac could help me make more sense of my email—especially if Apple can teach this software to digest multiple messages and spit out answers along the lines of “list my dinner invitations at CES.”

Advance the X exodus

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has not only turned that platform into his personal propaganda playground, it’s made X unpleasant and unproductive for journalists and other creative types—why stick around to talk about our work on a platform that devalues links to other sites?

I have instead moved my short-form social output to Bluesky—in the process completing one of last year’s resolutions—but that does not end my part in the X exodus.

For one thing, while I have long since ceased posting anything on X besides reminders to look for me on Bluesky and have also turned off notifications from X’s apps, I still have those apps installed on my mobile devices even as I spend less and less time even reading that platform.

For another, too many of X’s higher-profile users seem to be under the delusion that it’s still early 2022 over there. I can’t do much about some of them—for example, the airlines that have yet to follow the migration of the avgeek community—but I should have more sway with local elected officials.

The formula I’ve followed so far with some of my local and state representatives: email them a request to start talking to constituents on Bluesky, coupled with links to locally relevant starter packs. I need to continue that work, and you are welcome to steal that formula, too.

(Story assignment for every tech pundit who has written a post calling Bluesky a liberal echo chamber: Ask why Republican electeds balk at meeting their constituents on Bluesky and instead hunker down inside X’s conservative confines.)

Retire a fossil-fueled machine at home

Last winter, I followed some useful advice I’d picked up the spring before about the importance of not replacing one fossil-fueled appliance with another. Instead, my wife and I retired a 20-plus-year-old gas range and had an induction range installed in its place.

The results have been pretty great (including the nonobvious benefit of being able to put plates of ingredients right next to a pan on an induction coil), so it’s time to think about what other gas-burning machine we can replace with a more efficient, nonpolluting electric alternative.

The most likely candidate is the water heater, since heat-pump water heaters are relatively cheap compared to the expense of replacing the equally old gas furnace. Or what we’d spend on an electric vehicle to retire our aging but well-maintained Toyota Prius, and which right now would probably not include the Tesla-designed, now-industry-governed North American Charging Standard connector.

Any of those upgrades would come with a tax credit from the Inflation Reduction Act (assuming that the Trump administration and Congress don’t repeal those credits). The IRA credits for EV purchases seem more endangered, but those incentives also have nontrivial industry backing.

How many House Republicans in swing districts will vote to take a tax treat from both constituents and campaign donors? Maybe a generative AI pundit can serve up some forecasts.

Don’t leave quality news up to Google and Meta’s whims

This year has provided pointed and painful lessons about what can happen when people bypass journalism in favor of whatever pops up in a search result or a social feed. It would be great if the likes of Google and Meta could try a little harder to elevate fact-based reporting, but Google’s allegedly greedy rule of the display-ads industry that simultaneously underpins and undermines so many publications—and Meta’s history of bad-faith behavior towards media—leave little reason for optimism.

I don’t have much individual agency in the face of either company (although Meta’s ongoing degradation of the Facebook experience with spammy suggestions about pages and groups has me spending less time than ever there), but I do have ways to support publications directly.

The obvious way is with money—Sunday, I kicked in another annual donation to ProPublica in recognition of that nonprofit newsroom’s history of making giant tech companies and other powerful stakeholders uncomfortable. But giving publications a shortcut to your attention span can help too, because publications, especially startup newsrooms without corporate backing, often find both Google and Meta’s ranking algorithms black boxes.

Many news sites try to work around that by asking you to allow push notifications, then install their apps and enable push notifications from them as well. I’m not keen on overloading my devices with notifications, so instead I’m going to explore two other options.

One is signing up for a publication’s emails—followed by setting up filters to make it easier to scan and delete those messages after reading. But I also need to make more use of a news-reading option that I’ve enjoyed for years: RSS feeds of news sites’ content, which offer quick skimming of headlines without eating into my Gmail storage cap.

RSS also has the advantage of being an open standard that no one company owns. On the downside, the falling behind on a well-curated RSS feed can feel overwhelming, and it might help to get an automated summary of those headlines . . . perhaps one generated by a smartly coded on-device AI, if that’s not too much to ask of 2025.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91246801/my-2025-tech-resolutions-ditching-x-avoiding-ai-and-more?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss