Predictions for 2024
Looking ahead at what might come
Putting in the effort to make high quality predictions focuses the mind. It forces you to consider not what you want to happen, but what you think will happen. These can be two very different things. You also tend to make better predictions if you are held accountable for them. That's why I revisit my predictions at the end of the year, publicly, to see how I did. For 2024 I'm focusing mostly on AI predictions, with a few climate-related predictions. Below is what I think will happen in the coming year.
Emergence of sunbirds: I'm defining “sunbird” as a "reverse snowbird" - that is a person who travels to cooler places during the summer and returns to where he or she lives for the rest of the year. For instance, the heat, water issues, or electricity costs might be too much for someone in Phoenix or Houston during the summer months. That person would instead travel to New Hampshire for the summer until things cool down.
Proliferation of AI agents: This coming year, I believe the public will move away from interacting with AI models directly and will interact more with AI agents. This is an interaction layer that will be tailored for a class of tasks, similar to other software. This will induce many different agents, which use different tools or are utilized for different tasks, to be created.
Emergence of tool marketplaces for agents: Agents work much better when they have access to tools as opposed to having to figure out how to solve every task from scratch each time. For this reason, I think we will see the emergence of marketplaces for tools that AI agents can access. They will probably be in the form of paid API calls that AI agents can orchestrate together to carry out a designated task. This might change in the future as AI methods improve.
Focus on output verification: This coming year there will be a big focus on verifying the outputs of AI models. The world was taken by storm with the promise of AI in 2023 and started to get a cursory understanding of where all the warts are as they delved into errors and "hallucinations". What I saw this year is that many major companies are reluctant to fully deploy AI models because they can't trust the reliability of the outputs. Companies want to; they salivate at the potential of AI. However, there's too much risk with unreliable outputs. Most generative AI models are used with heavy human hand-holding and guidance. To unlock the true power of AI and to use it at scale, automated verification is needed. In 2024, I see the main focus of AI usage being how to verify the outputs of AI models and if they are off, to prevent those outputs from being further used. This will be a countermovement to the argument "just trust the algorithm".
AI will be blamed for something humans did: This coming year, I believe we'll see AI used as a scapegoat for things that go wrong. Once in the mindset of scapegoating AI, I believe there will be a major event where AI will be blamed but it later comes out the event was fully human driven.
Emergence of voice ui/ux designers: This year, I think we'll see the emergence of individuals who's sole role is to figure out how to craft a voice experience for interacting with AI models and AI agents. They will craft personalities, back and forth sequences, personalized understanding of their users, and proactive actions to create the best experience for interacting with an AI model or agent. I'm not sure what they will be called, perhaps interaction designers or AI spirit makers or something completely novel.
Rise of the AI regulation cottage industry: It's no surprise that AI is swiftly coming under regulatory scrutiny around the world. As I've written before, AI is ultimately about power, and that threat causes regulation. In response, an entire cottage industry will emerge to help companies deal with AI regulation for the systems they deploy.
AI data fighting: Foundation models are data hungry, and large model creators are scouring for ways to get more data to feed their models. At the same time, foundation models are enabling the proliferation of content. I think that the creators of the foundation models will poison their own outputs to affect the training processes of other foundation models that scrape their data. That is, each foundation model will put out modifications to generated content that is invisible to a human but harms an "enemy" foundation model during the training process.
Proliferation of autonomous weapons systems: I think 2024 will be the year when autonomous weapons systems come into the public spotlight. There's been a steady march towards these systems, but with recent advances in AI, I believe we'll see autonomous weapons systems begin to take up more of the battlefield.
Massive heat events: This past year was the most anomalous for heat events, as seen in the pictures below from Copernicus. It was so anomalous that it has climate scientists freaked out (more than they already are) because it might mean ice in certain places isn't coming back. At the same time, climatologists predict a very strong El Niño in 2024. These combined factors make it appear that we will have massive heat events in 2024. This past summer in 2023 was hot, very hot. It appears that 2024 will be even hotter. The phrase that's stuck with me is '2023 was one of the hottest summers ever, but it will be the coolest summer you will experience for the rest of your life'.
Massive political disinformation in the election cycle personalized through AI: This feels like a no-brainer to me, and I even hesitate to put it on this list for that reason. Elections always see candidates use the latest advances in mental manipulation to try and win seats of power. I think we'll see an onslaught of hyper-personalized political content and misinformation in the upcoming elections.
Those are my predictions for 2024. As I did with my 2023 predictions, I'll revisit these predictions at the end of the year to see how I did. I welcome any feedback or to hear your own predictions for the new year. Happy New Year!