It's Going to Be a Long, Strange Year....

2023 was an unsettled year, a brewing year, a pivot point. AI stole the show in some ways, with its seemingly sudden leap in capabilities—and its obviously insufficient controls. Governments, companies, and people worldwide scrambled to adjust to a world that evolved faster than expected. Conflict continued and broke out across the globe, and we broke the wrong kinds of records on the climate front. Hype about room-temperature semiconductors didn’t pan out—for now. 

What will 2024 bring? Buckle up, because it’s going to be strange. What it means to be human is changing. 

• AI will continue advancing by leaps and bounds in 2024. Like Sam Altman said the day before the drama started, “The model capability will have taken such a leap forward that no one expected.” Plan accordingly, and build personal resilience.

• Job replacement by AI ramps up. This includes customer-service, run-of-the-mill creative, and non-critical translation roles at first, but 2024’s upheavals will be just the warm-up to a vast replacement of administrative, programming, and analytical roles in the next few years. 

• We are simultaneously navigating a window of time when skilled human workers can be vastly more productive with the assistance of AI. As just one person, you can now do projects that might previously have taken an entire small company’s worth of resources. You can also do projects that might not have been profitable enough to justify trying them before, which opens up possibilities for helping underserved communities and small subcultures. Lots of opportunities here.

• We will engage in society-wide questioning of what it means to be artistically creative when human efforts take a million times longer than increasingly equivalent machine efforts. As someone who loves drawing and writing, I already feel this. Is creativity now worthwhile only as a means of personal fulfillment, rather than a career, with the exception of superstar entertainers? We’ve been heading this way for at least 15 years, but it will really kick into high gear in 2024.
  (But AI can’t write like Hemingway, you say. And I say, wait a couple of years. I wrote last December about ChatGPT that “Amanda Gorman could easily blow it out of the water.” That won’t be true for much longer, in the big picture.) 

• The biotech revolution will finally get going in earnest after decades of fits and starts. New medicines discovered by AI will make their way into early clinical trials. And maybe early clinical trials themselves will evolve toward simulation, allowing faster progress through better filtering of compounds at the outset. As I like to put it, I think we’re five minutes before dawn. Hang on if you can. 

• Nasal vaccines (edit: I should say inhaled vaccines here; they need to get into the trachea) will be able to stop most Covid infections, but it will take way too long for approval and rollout in most countries. 

• 2024 will be the hottest year in recorded history, just like 2023. People will continue to kick the can down the road, hoping for a technological miracle before the can falls off a cliff. This is a high-stakes, slow-moving bet. There were better paths, but they were harder and unprofitable in the short term, so here we are. 

• Politics will be crazy. Brace yourself, whatever your persuasion. I have no clue what is going to happen, and I don’t think anyone does. 

• Wisdom and perspective will remain priceless, and human connection will remain the most important part of life. It will become increasingly easy to lose sight of this, and increasingly important not to. 

I feel only partially ready for this coming year, in truth. I question if anyone can really be ready for massive change. On the upside, it’s an exciting time to be alive, we have ringside seats, and if we’re lucky and willing, we can try to contribute to good outcomes when and where we can. That’s what I keep telling myself.

Happy holidays, and have a good week! 

I’ll host a Substack chat about the books Human Compatible by Stuart Russell and HumanKind by Rutger Bregman on Saturday, December 30th, at 1pm Eastern time. If you’re interested in chatting about risk, reading, and life, feel free to hop in!