Tim Huckaby's Technology Predictions for 2024

I have written many published “predictions for next year” articles throughout the years.  I have been spot-on in many of those predictions.  I just read through a few of those articles, and I found where I was wrong the most amusing.  In 1998 I predicted the death of the internet.  Of course, I was naïve to the fact that Cisco would make a bad thing worse by inventing and propagating the first commoditized router. Now, we are stuck with it.  During that time, as a young engineer in building 25 of Microsoft, I also declared that HTML would die a painful death, saying something like, “No programmer in their right mind is going to use this. This is not programming. It’s chatty and stateless.  Just look at how stupid the form submit is.”

So, warning, it is with the grain of salt that you might consider my 2024 technology predictions:

• The world is going to realize that the state of Generative AI solutions like OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini are “just okay”.  They are not great; they are not good.  They are useful and frequently amazing.  But also, frequently flat out wrong since the inputs are content on the internet, they are subject to using incorrect information.  So, the hype will slow down until new and improved versions come in the future that ensure integrity of data.
• Thousands of Custom LLM (Large Language Model) wrapper applications will be created for the enterprise that solely look at data inside a company’s firewall. Fine-tuning these models to perform specialized tasks will be able to process huge amounts of internal information, crawling into places on the internal network that no one knew were unprotected.  raising new concerns around data privacy and responsibility. Exposing documentation of “episodes of bad” to every employee.
• Hollywood will try to brand a virtual actor which will essentially be a deep fake.  Perfect in acting abilities and perfect in beauty. Most likely it will be a male virtual actor, because it’s a simple fact and proven in retail time and time again that the most influenceable segment of the free world is an age range (I won’t mention) that is female.  This virtual actor will fail because of public outcry.
• Integrity in journalism will “explode” on two fronts:

1. The major TV and news networks will transition from a majority of negative shock journalism solely focused on the negatives of AI to the positives of AI (honestly, this isn’t a bold prediction as much as wishful thinking) like the breakthroughs in medical research facilitated by AI.
2. Integrity in content organizations will pop up serving as watch dogs for pure LLM produced content and fact checking services that will point out falsehoods.

• Moore’s Law will continue to execute.  Meaning by the end of 2024 new supercomputers will be within months of calculating at the speed of the human brain, which is ~100 trillion calculations per second.  This doesn’t mean machines will take over.  It means we’ll be able to solve some tricky problems like truly mapping the human genome allowing us to understand a lot more of the human body that we currently don’t understand.
• Governmental regulation on the use of AI will continue to develop driven by a collation of counties including the USA and many counties in Europe with the help of the major technology companies like Microsoft.  Unfortunately, the governments (and many of the bad guys in those counties) most apt to abuse AI for bad will not be part of the coalition.
• LLM wrapper chatbots will produce a new frustration of customer service.  Being efficient in helping in most ways and flat out wrong in providing bad information that might even produce legal challenges.
• ·Smartphone camera technology will, for all intent and purposes, eliminate the DSLR camera market.  Currently the iPhone and android cameras and the software that run those cameras are so good that they are being used for many professional use cases.  Modern smartphones have become so sophisticated that they are predicted to soon produce better quality images than DSLR cameras.  The next generation of phones even promise powerful zoom.  Yet, we are still decades away from producing a lens that comes even close to the capabilities of the human eye.
• 5 years ago, we were told Quantum computing will render every internet security protocol impotent. That didn’t happen.  Now we are told it will be another 5 years before Quantum computing is practically useful. The prediction?  The buzz of Quantum will fade a bit this year.  But it is coming.
• Currently, it’s almost trendy to predict that the machines are taking over and will soon have consciousness.  Many of those making those statements either have a financial or marketing reason for doing so.  In 2024 we’ll get a lot more public statements equivalent to: “We are decades away from machine being able to reason.”  

So, there it is.  My “bold” technology predictions for 2024.  Admittedly, some of these are more wishes than predictions.  And I sure hope I’m wrong on a some of them too.