Article by The Minister of Truth

When it comes to predictions, nobody said it better than physicist Nils Bohr: “Predictions can be very difficult,” he said, “especially about the future.”

But for 2024, it’s actually pretty straightforward, because artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to be the main game in town. It’s going to have an impact on almost everything that we do. And such is the pace of development – faster than exponential according to Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google DeepMind and author of The Coming Wave – that this won’t be so much of an industrial revolution as a quantum revolution.

In 2023, we had the ChatGPT hype. Generative AI was going to change the world and make us all redundant. Then we found out that, actually, it made a lot of stuff up and got a lot else wrong. Plus, we learned that GenAI couldn’t just be left alone to get on with the job, we needed to coach it, ‘prompt’ it, and coax it into doing what we really wanted.

And then dull data privacy considerations made corporates realise that they couldn’t just go hell-for-leather giving GenAI programs full access to its reams of proprietary and customer data without knowing exactly who else it would be sharing all this data with and how it would be using and storing it, even if the UK is no longer subject to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

But we could all see AI’s potential.

So, 2024 is going to see the maturation of GenAI and its adaptation according to the specific needs of each company and organisation. Conversational AI that can help developers code new iterations of GenAI simply through natural language conversations will kickstart a powerful wave of innovation. This will lead to probably the key trend of 2024: hyper-personalisation.

We’re used to Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and the like curating our content based on our previous searches and purchase histories. Now GenAI will take that to another level. Every digital interaction we have with any product provider will be used to create individualised content and messaging to give customers truly bespoke experiences.

Companies will be able to create chatbots that act like a concierge, knowing our preferences, even predicting our future needs and behaviour (much in the same way that pattern analysis of customer loyalty card data enabled retailers to stock more efficiently and target their marketing more accurately).

And while this trend will transform the way companies interact with their customers, it will also impact how we interact with our devices. As GPU chips become more powerful, it’s likely that stripped down versions of GenAI will be embedded in smartphones – we’ll have our own genie in the lamp that we can call up whenever we want, coordinating our diaries, looking for better deals on our behalf, and perhaps even negotiating with other chatbots in entirely non-human transactions. Imagine your own version of IronMan’s digital butler and superbrain Jarvis in your pocket.

That may seem fanciful right now, but if the AI experts are correct, these programs, with the huge compute power and tech resources being put behind them, will develop much faster than we expect.

There’s a flipside to all this, of course, as there always seems to be with any technological leap. Powerful AI programs in the wrong hands pose a major cybersecurity threat to companies unprepared for the coming fraudster onslaught. Phishing – usually via email, but increasingly via other digital channels - catches out too many people, costing UK businesses alone tens of millions of pounds a year. While most of the emails are screened out by Google and others, it only takes a few to get through and have a big impact. Normally fraudulent phishing emails are easy to spot - spelling mistakes, odd punctuation and grammar, dodgy-looking URLs - give the game away.

But imagine what these criminal campaigns will look like once they’re refined using assiduously trained AI? CEO fraud, whereby criminals pretend to be senior directors usually demanding rapid payment for time-critical reasons, will be so much more convincing. There’s now the prospect of synthesised audio and deepfake video mimicking senior directors to give the fraudulent money transfer requests even greater credibility.

So companies are going to have to shore up their cyber defences quickly: retraining staff, introducing new security protocols, updating antivirus and firewall software, and allocating more resources. AI promises massive improvements in sales and productivity, but those gains could be easily taken away through a massive increase in AI-driven fraud and industrial espionage.

On a more positive note, it’s clear that AI will continue to improve medicine and healthcare, speeding up drug discovery through the identification of promising base molecules, informing public health policy by crunching epidemiological health data to spot patterns of disease, and diagnosing an increasing range of diseases faster and more accurately than seasoned clinicians.

AI will also be enlisted to help tackle climate change. Not only do we have to increase renewable energy generation massively to keep global warming at or below the 1.5 degrees increase Celsius already predicted, we also need to increase energy efficiency. This will involve making use of new materials that are lighter and stronger, updating the electricity grid to handle all these new sources of renewable energy as they come on stream, and developing more efficient forms of carbon capture and energy storage technology. Speed is of the essence, and speed is what AI offers.

The year 2024 will also see a development from the internet of things to the internet of everything, whereby connected sensors embedded in machines and devices of all kinds will provide terabytes of non-human data for AI to feed on, analyse and derive insights from. This will facilitate smarter cities, more integrated transport systems and better energy management in offices and public buildings.

In short, AI is going to impact almost everything we do in 2024. The pace of change will be dizzying, so buckle up and be prepared to adapt fast.