2025 was the year intelligence became infrastructure. This review traces how AI moved beyond software into energy-bound, agentic, and industrial systems that now shape work, capital, governance, and global power—marking a permanent shift in how societies organize cognition and decision-making at scale.

In the span of a single week, laboratories delivered breakthroughs that capture zero-point vibrational dynamics, stabilized quantum states at room temperature, and unlocked magnetically mediated topological qubits; condensed terahertz systems to chip scale and demonstrated femtojoule all-optical logic; and enabled volitional thought decoding alongside safer cortical interfaces. Together, these results redefine what is feasible in quantum physics, photonics, and neurotechnolog