Some guesses about 2024
2024 will be about blurring lines between AI and human. It might be too soon for the “AI” word to fade as a buzzword, but what it enables embeds itself in every facet of what we do.
World
Aging & care shape the relations between people.
Climate change still progresses - and impacts everything else. Should I say more?
Shortage on materials and weak supply chain links help steer reusability, reparability, and service-based initiatives, as opposed to selling stuff.
Uncertainty forces insurers to find new ways or working.
Uncertainty and agents drive polarization forward, weakening global institutions. Democracy suffer and inequality rise.
The knowledge society - albeit a fraction of global society - redirects its attention to non-knowledge endeavours.
Society
Someone will decide to leave agency to a set of AI or to agent-based frameworks, start an economic entity (trust? fund?) that does not necessarily do financial investment but starts delivering direct services to client and self-manages.
Political attacks using deep-fakes-like technology become common.
We will explore new ways of building trust and confidence between economic agents.
Because production is massive, bottleneck will be human capacity to absorb. We start relying on agents to interface with the wider information world, and we put more weight on human-based relations where things are important.
As a reaction, offline becomes attractive.
Infrastructure
A critical failure of aging infrastructure will occur, demonstrating non-linearity of effects.
NEOM competes for infrastructure professionals with Ukraine reconstruction
AI impact on infrastructure - more datacenters, more energy, more chips required.
More sustainability in infrastructure in general, less available skilled professionals.
General effort to stabilize uncertainty (supply chain, climate, wages, ..)
Jobs
Meeting ‘secretaries’ make meetings simpler: transcription allow for a full memory of exchanges. They can be queried in natural language.
Automated translation, bidirectional, video-true, allow for better collaboration between areas. Barriers to competition appear to drop, only for cultures differences to become the next hurdle.
First virtual ‘projects manager’ are mobilized on small/medium scale projects. They are equipped to err manage scope, budget and timelines, along with a keen understanding of contracts and smooth communication delivery. Humans pretty much required to check and approve content.
‘Buddies’ appear - when delivering a standard work, trainers equip buddy with an understanding of what your work means, how it’s delivered, and still manages to equip them with the knowledge of past reports.
‘TuringBots’ reshape the work of developers.
We start to see ‘virtual colleagues’ - avatars based on one’s appearance, with access to past mails and chats, and who can take over when someone is on leave. Or organize meeting (timing, agenda, …). Or keeps a memory when someone leaves an organization or retires.
As a reaction to creation of free content, “bullet point mails” to colleagues and possibly clients start to appear.
Future of work
People get scared about what AI does. Society reacts by putting more controls - but individual entities keep on progressing due to lack of enforcement.
Global anxiety raises in the knowledge sector.
A bit more on genAI
After generalist genAI, dedicated models appear. Small ones are generated for specific purpose. Can be trained by content generated by larger ones.
Smaller models rely heavily on good-enough, open-source models.
As a consequence, agent-based frameworks grow (even more) on 2024.
Dedicated hardware appears and allows running models on a phone.
Supply chain security and auditability of one’s models appear as a reaction to models poisoning.
Security
Cybersecurity threats still increases - starting with possibly seeing some proprietary models leaking. What happens when not a report leaks, but the tool capturing your business model?
Information wars accelerate. The “free” production of content and models, in all media, saturates absorption. Trust is key, trusted curation occurs more.
Privacy technology accelerates - (fully) homomorphic encryption starts to build.
Trust, again, is key. A colleague calling you in full video for help might very be an external agent looking for information.
