AI developments set to produce most disruptive decade in human history

The next decade is set to be the most disruptive one in the history of humanity thanks to the rise of AI.

Speaking at IHIF EMEA 2025 in Berlin, Germany, emerging technologies expert and former communications expert at SpaceX and Facebook Dexter Hunter-Torricke said the last few years have seen massive change largely thanks to the smart phone revolution which has put a supercomputer in most people’s pockets.

However, he argued AI will change everything at far greater speed as the technology snowballs thanks to its increased prevalence and growing intelligence, as the travel industry is already discovering.

Hunter-Torricke said the technology is already worming its way into every part of life, ranging from customer service and helping architects design buildings to easing the operations of law firms and medical practitioners.

He added the film The Brutalist has just become the first AI-enhanced film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, while in the US a new construction machine powered by the technology can lay 400 bricks an hour.

US surgeons are becoming increasingly reliant on the technology too, with 15 per cent of all procedures undertaken in the country now carried out with the aid of AI-assisted robotics.

And the growth is becoming increasingly exponential too, Hunter-Torricke said, as AI is used to help write code, so developing new programmes even more powerful than their creators and which can then drive the next technological revolution.

“All of these things are now moving at a lightning pace,” he said.

“There have been efforts to try and quantify the value of the wave of this on services and while there are all sorts of problems in trying to evaluate the value to these services, even the conservative efforts by some consulting firms show you could have anywhere between $2.2 and $4.4 trillion in economic value [generated] every year starting from this year.”

Looking ahead, Hunter-Torricke said AI could provide the breakthrough required in generating energy from hydrogen which, if achieved, could provide the world with an unlimited supply of free, clean energy.

Meanwhile, the invention of new materials will make new technologies possible, including an aircraft capable of flying at mach 10 and so reducing the flight time from London to Sydney to 90 minutes as opposed to the day it currently takes.

Hunter-Torricke said: “As we get all of these massive breakthroughs and building blocks for the future the changes we can expect are not linear.

“They are not easy things; they are going to be radically different.”

He added the technology will have an impact on a global scale from geopolitics to climate change while he described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the first AI war thanks to the extensive use of drones on both sides.

But he also urged people to focus on the technology’s impact as much as the technology itself while also considering the more mundane changes the technology is expected to have, for instance on how people do their jobs on a day-to-day basis.

“Simply accept that intelligence will probably reshape every single job, every single company and every industry,” he added.

“Adopting the tools is the easy part … understanding that the world is about to be massively reshaped is the very hard part.”