Tech Forecasts for 2024 – Any Surprises on the Horizon?

Quantized Inertia is proven when the Barry-1 satellite[1] successfully shifts its orbit using a purely electric thruster (i.e. no propellant)

The laws of physics get re-written a bit, and Mike McCulloch starts looking like he'll get a Nobel prize out of it.

[1] https://db.satnogs.org/satellite/QDDY-8878-5291-1819-3935#ma...

People will accuse AI of interfering with the USA presidential election.

Someone will try to marry an AI.

Something more obnoxious NFTs will be a huge fad, then collapse.

Someone will try to convince people that their AI can predict the stock market.

Somewhere, an author of an image generator will be arrested for "creating CSAM" after the model is used by someone else for that purpose.

Most devs, including myself, will continue to work boring dev jobs while wondering when their job will be replaced by a combination of AI and low cost overseas labor.

Convincing AI with a human voice and evil script is used for scamming, at-scale.

Conversational AI robocalls.

AI finds its way into children's pets--a next-level tamagotchi.

A company releases AI-powered talking pets for the elderly/those with alzheimers. It seems both terribly kind and cruel.

Some terribly formed AI regulation passes.

AI can create whole movies from scripts, and scripts from suggestions.

LLM-based AI's get better at chess.

AI assistant's start to get decent.

Some random predictions:

- OpenAI outages will cause more companies to explore self-hostable models

- US public education buys into AI tutoring or other services. A teacher will say "just ask your AI..." to their student.

- Meta's Metaverse becomes interesting instead of cringe

- People still remain confused on whether to call it X or Twitter

Security predictions for next year:

- Continued information operations by nation states using social media, trying to influence US elections, next year around this time (regardless of outcome) about 40% of the US population will believe the election was rigged

- People will try to shoehorn AI into security ops, with little success due to not having great data

- CISO positions will increasingly become more hostile to accepting organizational risks, because of FTC civil complaint on solarwinds CISO

- there will still be new CVEs

Apple defaults to OpenAI as the default search engine.

A weak form of AGI that while not skynet does a passible job at most tasks.

Quicker than expected, there may come a time that for most people, not a single human has touched, or even seen their food anywhere between growing & when it ends up on their plate.

AI controlled farming + harvesting. Factory machinery to sort / wash / process / package foodstuffs, where the only humans are a few technicians. Fully-automated distribution centers. Self-driving trucks shuttling goods between those. And a 'housemaid' robot that arranges people's shopping & cooks their meals to perfection.

We're not there - yet. But with our existing globalized & industrialized food supply chains, and a bit of 'AI everywhere' sprinkled in, it's not hard to imagine.

- almost all AI startups based on OpenAI will fail (they have no defensibility)

- economic activity of LLM-powered self-governing agents seen in the wild

- copyright reforms lobbied by OpenAI and similar companies

Color eink displays integrated in surprising places will grow a lot. I think we may even finally see eink intersections where the lanes change dynamically depending on the light cycle.

Bitcoin will reach $100,000!!!

HODL! Never stop gambling!

openai will find a reasonable model path between establishing and accumulating its own competitive barriers and building a win-win and mutually beneficial ecosystem with more entrepreneurs and companies. Rather than easily breaking through the projects mounted on it,

I’m waiting for the first AI enabled game. That could be a huge breakthrough in RPG gaming if done right. Just think about the mmo npcs you could have with decent ai

Rewind.ai or Adept.ai will have monopoly over the AI application-layer market