This is the time of year when everyone offers their list of the year’s bests, and I will probably emit one of my own by and by, but today’s topic is the Person of the Year. And my response every year is the same: Hasn’t this dubious tradition run its course?

Is Time still in business? Didn’t Barbara Walters retire? The trouble with Person of the Year, or Most Fascinating People or Sexiest Man is its total subjectivity. It isn’t as if there’s any agreed upon criteria for making such a choice, nor any chance the judges are competent to decide. Did they check out all 3.5 billion men for sexiness? It’s like picking best restaurant in the world. That’s a lot of eating out.

And assuming there actually were sensible criteria for determining Person of the Year, Time could hardly have been following them to have come up with past winners like Haile Selassie in 1935, Wallis Simpson, 1936, Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai-Shek, 1937, Queen Elizabeth II, 1952, Harlow Curtice, 1955 (I’ll save you the trouble of Googling, he headed GM), and Angela Merkel for 2015.

Clearly Time’s Person of the Year was once the result of Henry Luce’s anti-communist, Sinophile biases and is now the work of a committee. And such lists are always lagging indicators. By the time Barbara Walters finds someone fascinating they are either over-exposed flashes in the pan or yesterday’s news.

These days winners of such phony accolades are often dictated by corporate synergies. They are fascinating because they are appearing in a TV show or movie or record for a company owned by the same media conglomerate that’s making the list. Crony Acclaimism.

And of course it often takes no acumen whatsoever to make the choice of Person of the Year. Between 1938 and 1949, Time’s Person was Hitler, FDR and Ike once each, and Stalin, Marshall and Truman twice each. But other years the Time editors simply throw up their hands and punt, naming The American Fighting Man in 1950, Baby Boomers in 1966, Middle Americans in 1969 and The Computer in 1982. What a cop out.

I know what you’re thinking. If you’re so smart who do you think the Person of the Year for 2015 was? And I’d have to say, I haven’t a clue. Since history never stops unspooling and isn’t really divided into neat years and decades and eras, any such decision is artificial.

If Donald Trump goes on to win the presidency or wreck the Republican Party’s prospects, maybe he was 2015’s most important person, rather in the same way Caligula was the most important person of 40 AD. Or it might be argued that the head of ISIS deserves recognition for 2015. But aren’t we already depressed enough?

I think that, in the long view of the matter, it is almost certain that the most important person of 2015 will turn out to have been a person whose name we don’t yet know. Probably someone working in an academic, corporate or government laboratory who has invented the next polio vaccine or iPhone, and is about to change the course of the world. We just won’t understand it has happened or appreciate the magnitude until 2016 or 2026.

In December of 2001, Rudy Giuliani looked like Person of the Year to the New York-centric editors at Time, whereas Osama bin Laden or Dick Cheney may have been the person most worthy of recognition in connection with the altered world after 9/11.

In 1953, Time thought Konrad Adenauer was the Person of the Year. Maybe, but this was the year that Watson and Crick deciphered the structure of DNA. As a result the world will never be the same in ways spanning everything from human health to engineered crops, from genetic history to crime detection, which probably can’t be said of Herr Adenauer.

Of course, the group nature of scientific and technical enterprises and the long lapse of time between eureka moment and practical application means it’s difficult to identify those who ought to be dubbed Person of the Year in a timely manner. Did anyone think Edison was Person of the Year in 1879? Probably not, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is these kinds of people who are increasingly in a position to alter history.

In 1938 the reality of nuclear fission was discovered by Hahn, Meitner and Strassmann. Only a few of their fellow scientists noticed. Then, seven years later, everyone noticed Hiroshima. One of the biggest changes in human history can be traced from the transistor in the 1950s to the microprocessor in the 1970s to the Worldwide Web in the 1990s, but it took Time until 2010 to name, of all people, Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year.

The Nobels in the sciences celebrate world-changing discoveries, and the fear of jumping to conclusions before the science is airtight means there is often a lag or ten or twenty years between the work and the recognition of it. So, I believe we are just going to have to wait and see who the Person of 2015 was.

Or perhaps this tradition will come to an end because of work now being done. We’ll figure it out when the cyborgs come to our door in a self-driving van to tell us our time is up, because Skynet has decided that persons are no longer necessary.