Author: Kristoffer Lawson
2024 will be the first full year of operations for Kaiden. So the start of this year is filled with trepidations and excitements. In everything we do, we aim to make companies, and the world, benefit from the greatest developments in technology, embracing the new and being prepared for the challenges. With that in mind I felt this to be a good spot for a step or two back, to view the big picture and where we are likely to be heading. Then, come 2025, we can have a bit of fun in checking how many predictions were fulfilled. One came to fruition before I even had a chance to publish this (text had to be updated).
AI
All right, let’s get this out of the way. Everyone’s talking AI, everyone’s investing AI, everyone’s demanding AI. Many, however, struggle to really define what it is they specifically want AI to do and how it will help. It is a vast field of very different technologies (from computer vision to language generation). Development has historically tended to happen in leaps, leading to immediate excitement, which then dies down as the reality doesn’t quite match the dream. Large Language Models, and generative AI, popularised by OpenAI and their ChatGPT and Dall-E, is an absolutely incredible development, with philosophical repercussions: if, by pure language modelling and prediction, we can create such a convincing, seemingly intelligent system, then are we ourselves actually anything more than language processing machines? The reality so far, however, is that it has been difficult to pinpoint exactly how this should be used. Sure, it’s a fun assistant when writing run-of-the-mill text, especially the dreaded report you were supposed to send in yesterday, but it currently really serves as more of a creative assistant than a useful generator in itself. Companies expecting to be able to replace human operators are likely to be disappointed in the final results. Remember that generative AI is just as capable at generating gibberish as it is at creating useful information: will you be happy with an AI potentially telling your client complete nonsense? If not, think again. Useless chatbots will thus remain equally useless. They will just be marginally more fun to interact with.
One area that promises to be shaken up over the next few years is music. With it being increasingly easy to guide AI systems to generate music, and to create virtual artists to support the music, we will start to see an increased focus on a new kind of music conductor: the AI whisperer that formulates the pieces, creates stories around them, builds virtual performers and is able to gather a following around their work.
Prediction: AI musical whisperers will become musical celebrities.
Of course, we should also ask AI itself what 2024 has in store:
In 2024, AI is expected to make significant strides in various fields. According to Chris Sharp, the CTO of Digital Realty, AI will continue to transform our lives and work. Multi-modal generative AI tools will be integrated, leading to more demanding AI workloads, necessitating adaptable and agile infrastructure solutions, particularly data centers, to support these applications effectively.Dell CTO predicts that AI will move from theory to practice, zero trust will get real, and quantum will support AI. Improved gen AI ecosystems, next-level security, and 'common edge' are some of the other predictions for AI in 2024.
TechCrunch predicts that 2024 will be the year when the hype runs full-steam into reality as people reckon with the capabilities and limitations of AI at large. OpenAI will become a product company, and we'll see agents, generated video, and generated music graduate from quaint to experimental. The limits of monolithic LLMs will become clearer.
Forbes predicts that AI will continue to transform industries and challenge norms. Cybersecurity will be a major concern, and AI will be used to detect and prevent cyberattacks. AI will also be used to improve healthcare, education, and transportation.
These are some of the predictions for AI in 2024. It will be interesting to see how AI evolves in the coming year!
Car Technology
Will 2024 finally by the year of the self-driving car? Nope. Despite Elon Musks’s own prophecy claiming ‘next year will be the year of FSD’ (a prophecy repeated every year), we are many years away from being able to snooze off our New Year drinks in the back seat while our car takes us home. While recent developments from multiple car manufacturers are impressive, and do offer some real assistance for the long motorway hauls, Tesla themselves have yet to even perfect automatic wipers, using pure cameras and AI, so expecting them to suddenly turn a corner and have a fully autonomous vehicle that manages everything would be overly optimistic, to put it lightly. It’s debatable whether current cars even truly have the hardware necessary: cameras are still exposed to poor conditions, with no mechanism to clean themselves, and most of the camera angles are not served by stereo vision or backup. Will it even be Tesla leading the pack? Mercedes Benz is the first vehicle manufacturer to have official Layer 3 autonomy, albeit still in fairly narrowly defined conditions.
Beyond the driverless car, Tesla does still have a significant position in drivetrain technology for electric vehicles and even, to some degree, manufacturing and logistics. That has allowed then to push prices down, while many traditional players struggle to turn a profit. That position will hold, with the Model Y being the world’s most sold vehicle, and rumoured for a major upgrade soon. They will, however, be increasingly threatened by the Chinese. MG is already outselling Tesla in some markets and the hoards of other Asian marauders have barely reached our borders.
The manufacturer in the most precarious position is Toyota. Japanese companies in general have been slow to react to the demand for fully electric cars and are in danger of falling out of the game altogether.
Prediction: I see Toyota permanently losing their number 1 position and there is a risk of mass layoffs over the next few years. It might not yet happen in 2024, but by the end of the decade.
Cryptocurrencies
Two main events are worth following carefully in 2024:
- The first American ETF
- The fourth Bitcoin halving
An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, is a publicly traded fund that holds an asset or assets. Up until now the American Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has yet to allow any ETF to hold Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency. For years they have deferred decisions or withheld permission due to stated concerns about market manipulation. That has now changed, with the SEC having just approved a whole array of Bitcoin ETFs in one sweeping, if reluctant, gesture. The reason this is important is that ETFs offer a safe, regulated, and easy way for investors to trade an asset, on common exchanges, without having to hold the asset itself and without dealing with cryptocurrency exchanges. While Bitcoin ETFs do exist in other countries, the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, with assets worth 9 trillion dollars, is set to provide a Bitcoin ETF. That is potentially a huge deal, but a lot depends on how investors react to that, and how much potential cryptocurrency investment activity has not already been sufficiently serviced. Rumours are that an Ethereum ETF could then follow, later in 2024.
The next big event of 2024 is the so-called Halving. Bitcoin’s algorithm means that roughly every four years, the amount of new Bitcoin created drops by half (until the last bitcoin is mined, some time in 2140). The supply of new Bitcoin halving should, in theory, drive up prices, if demand remains the same. This has happened every time, following a halving. However it’s worth keeping in mind that the effect of new supply is today less than what it would have been in the beginning, due to a greater supply from existing Bitcoin changing hands. Additionally, as this mechanism is more widely understood, chances are that it has already been priced in earlier, leading to less pronounced bumps. The halving is scheduled to take place 22nd April.
These points relate to Bitcoin as a financial instrument, but what continues to disappoint is the lack of scalable, sustainable use-cases. The promise of a decentralised payment service is still there, but the currency’s use as such is limited to rarer high-value transactions, or transactions in areas banks aren’t keen to touch. The technology has not been able to scale to real retail use, despite steady growth in the Lightning Network that aims to solve that.
One aspect that I feel has constantly been overlooked is the blockchain’s role as a permanent log (particularly Bitcoin and, to some degree, Ethereum). Blockchain is the technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible and provides the most immutable form of storage we have seen in the digital age. This is essential for financial transactions, but has uses beyond that. For instance it is being used for tracking CO2 offsetting and plastic recovery efforts. De Beers, the group behind most of the world’s natural diamonds, recently launched Tracr, which they claim provides a tamper-proof mechanism to track the source of diamonds. While interesting, one should always be careful in analysing exactly what technology is being used, particularly if being built on a blockchain other than Bitcoin or Ethereum. As far as I can tell, Tracr is its own blockchain, with nodes most likely run by De Beers. So claims of it being tamper-proof can only be trusted insofar as the company behind it can be trusted.
Prediction: Making financial predictions is dangerous, but I suspect there will be upwards pressure from these events. However, the real value-generating work will take time, and several crises are in store.
Computers
Personal computers will, unfortunately, continue to follow an iterative evolutionary path. Despite work models being significantly different from the 1980s, when the first graphical user interfaces were popularised, our regular desktop experience has not leaped in step. We will continue to interact in the usual app-focused manner, with collaboration being more of an afterthought. Something we tried to change a few years back, when building the Solu computer, but that revolution will have to still wait.
On the heavier end of the computing spectrum, serious investment has been made into quantum computing, but results will still be limited, and will require further investment (but will not necessarily receive it) to get to something generating real business results. Instead, quicker gains will happen in chips that specialise in AI computation.
Prediction: A return to interest in AI assistant devices.
Social Media
In 2022 Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now renamed X. By most accounts this was a disastrous purchase which not only has damaged Elon’s reputation, but lead to advertisers pulling out of the platform and the value of the service has been estimated, by X’s own investor Fidelity, to have dropped 71%. Last year Elon hired Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO, but there are justified questions about whether that position is merely for show. All strings seemed to be in Elon’s grip and Linda herself has been caught completely unaware of developments on the service. Prediction: Linda will be out within two years. As a result of the mess, several other Twitter-like services have been picking up the crumbs. The most interesting recent development is Meta’s (of Facebook fame) Threads service taking its first steps to federate with services like Twitter-alternative Mastodon, using the open ActivityPub protocol. A handful of Threads accounts are now linked up, meaning they are interfacing with the many independent servers that make up Mastodon and the broader so-called Fediverse. In other words, if you are on Mastodon, you can follow those accounts on Threads and, soon perhaps, vice versa. While the work is still on-going, Threads seems to be following through with its commitment to join Wordpress, Tumblr, and Flipboard. Services that already interface with the Fediverse. I find this to be the most exciting Internet development in years, and reminiscent of the early days of the web: thousands of independent services all linking up to create a web of social media. If Threads fully joins, it means the emergence of the largest social cluster of microblogging outside X.
However, the disruption may yet appear from a different direction. BlueSky, backed by Twitter-founder Jack Dorsey, has built an alternative protocol to ActivityPub, which they call the AT Protocol, and they have developed a service around that which is picking steam. For the moment BlueSky is not really federated as the only server running is BlueSky’s own one, but they claim that 2024 will be the year they focus on federation, allowing for others to set up and run services interacting with their universe.
In terms of protocols, I feel ActivityPub has the momentum. It’s perhaps not as sophisticated as AT, but one thing I’ve learnt over the years is that the best technology is not often the one that wins, but it’s the technology that gets enough backing and weight. Certainly ActivityPub has some serious heavyweights all hooking up.
Prediction: ActivityPub and services related to that will be the real social media winners in terms of growth.
Mixed Reality / Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality
This will be the decade it all happens for sure! As we’ve been told every decade been since the 1980s. So yeah, any minute now. Probably around the time self-driving cars properly appear. Apple’s Vision Pro is, of course, scheduled to be released in 2024 so perhaps we will be closer than ever? Most attempts so far have failed to deliver a truly compelling user experience. Sci-Fi style handwaving quickly becomes tiring. There are ways to make that much better, and Apple has tapped into some of them. The very steep price (in a tough economy) and the dorky looks, common to all prior attempts, means, for now, limited demand.
Prediction: 2024 is unlikely to be the year of artificial realities. Maybe 2025 then.
Final thoughts
For long, the technology industry has been somewhat sheltered from economic realities. Covid, followed now by pointless wars, is delivering hard punches which are dazing even hardened companies. The cancerous creep of technology will not relent for long, however. As my colleague, Lari, likes to point out: every company is a technology company. Indeed, often those companies that, during times of trouble, have invested heavily into the future, are those that come out on top when things pick up. There is a renewed, albeit careful, sense of optimism amongst many I have talked to. That 2024 will mark a turning point, after several years of bleeding. Whether that is blind hope, or a real sign of improvement, our next journey around the Sun will soon reveal. Often, though, it only takes belief to make the remarkable happen.
Prediction: Despite global tensions, 2024 will see the tech industry hiring again. Unless the situations in Taiwan and the Middle East become even more explosive.