2024 — The Year We Lost Contact
The year is over. Well, as good as. And good riddance, too. Traditionally I have written these kind of round-ups a few days earlier , but this year felt like there could be sudden twist or turn that made it worth waiting until it’s really over. And as usual this will be a more or less free stream of thoughts along my personal interest:
the year when AI became an ubiquitous annoyance
If 2023 was the year where “AI went mainstream” then 2024 was the year when AI became an ubiquitous annoyance. On an almost daily basis we could discover that “AI powered” features had been added to tools we had happily used without them. Messengers, social media sites and even simple video conferencing tools apparently can’t do without them any more.
Meanwhile the flagship product of machine learning, large language models, appear to have reached a point where progress for the end user has been slow. Let’s face it, while everyone and their grandmother had been in awe of ChatGTP in 2023, I would wager that hardly anyone outside a small group of hardcore users will have experienced a noticeably improvement. It’s a slow down, not the end of the road yet, but this will be interesting to watch in the new year which of the big tech companies will be the first to blink.
What has become noticeable however is that the tech industry appears to loose contact with the user, boasting about AI assistants nobody really has asked for or promising a robot in every household. All this powered not by innovation but by hitherto unknown amounts of venture capital. As a veteran of the Dotcom bubble those product-less valuations detached from any reasonable understanding of reality look eerily familiar. Bubble up everyone, if this one pops it will hurt.
“I earn therefore I am” I can hear Descartes whisper.
So thin is the air above the clouds of innovation, that OpenAI and Microsoft ended the year with the most nonsensical of all revelations: Artificial General Intelligence will not be defined by some sophisticated iteration of the Turing Test or some more metaphysical definition, it will come down to money: When a certain profit level is achieved, it’s AGI.¹ “I earn therefore I am” I can hear Descartes whisper from his grave.
For someone — like me — who writes about AI ethics, regulation and social interactions in the net, 2025 promises to be a tough year. While the EU AI Act has finally been done and dusted and promises to at least provide a solid basis to reign in the worst abuses with that new toy we call AI, progress in other jurisdictions has been slow — and that is being polite.
With Donald Trump’s win in the US election (oh, what was it I wrote about fascism in the media?) on the back of his tech bro anti regulation army little can be expected to move forward in the US when it comes to regulating automated decision making or data privacy. And with big tech desperately needing at least some return on their AI investments it is to be feared that AI based technology will be pushed into the industry never mind the consequences.²
Talking about the US, Elon Musk and his one-letter social network formerly and still being called Twitter has meanwhile descended into a madness which even I had thought to be impossible, and there is no sign that he will slow down his aim to convert the platform further into a fully operational propaganda machine for his own goals.
And while alternatives have been created, it remains to be seen if social media will ever be again what it once was. I can not shake off the feeling that many social media companies do not really care so much about being social, as underlined by Linkedin’s fall into AI generated boringness or Meta’s recent announcement to create AI powered bot users on Instagram and Facebook.
May that all be as it is, there is much to write about in 2025, and with having only written roughly 10% of what I wanted this year I pledge to work hard on my backlog, and I even plan to start a publication, oh, and write a book on urban design of all things. Well, one can dream. Is there more to say? Certainly, but I can say it next year.
Dear 2024, you won’t be missed as much as we thought a year ago. So happy 2025 everyone!
¹ Microsoft and OpenAI have a financial definition of AGI: Report — Techcrunch
² On United Health and AI — a thread — Threads
