Welcome to New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To Begin
Judging by the replies, the first instalment of the year — it was called Creatures and Machines — resonated with many of you. That’s great news, because I’ll be writing much more in that vein in the coming months.
In the meantime here is something a little different. I promised a Lookout to 2024, which outlines the big themes and topics on my mind as we head into the year.
This piece was shared first with subscribers to The Exponentialist, the premium research service I co-founded back in October.
We’re all set for a year by turns fascinating and somewhat terrifying.
Why? Put it down to a potent mixture of multiple emerging technologies set to mesh with the real world, ongoing social and political destabilisation in the Global North and beyond, and geopolitics that feels balanced on a knife edge. All these factors, of course, overlap. Overwhelming complexity is the defining feature of the age.
I hope what follows can serve as a high-level map of this terrain. It’s not a comprehensive survey; that’s impossible. There are important themes I’ve omitted, including the race toward another human landing on the Moon via the NASA Artemis programme, which will gather pace in 2024. And, as ever, there will be things that come out of nowhere; things we don’t know that we don’t know. We’ll watch them and learn.
Wise practitioners of foresight — best understood as the exploration of multiple possible futures — are always wary of making hard predictions. But yes, there are predictions woven through this piece. We can look back in January 2025 to see what I got right and shout at me for what I got wrong.
Let’s get into it.
💥 Generative AI hits the real economy
The generative AI revolution, and ChatGPT in particular, was the dominating theme of 2023.
It’s been a thrilling ride, brought to a crescendo at the end of the year with Alphabet’s launch of the multi-modal Gemini, intended to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4.
So far, though, the story has been more about light-speed technological advance and philosophical reflection that it has about economic impact. This year all that changes. OpenAI will face multiple pressures — not least from its partner Microsoft — to commercialise ChatGPT and prove that the hype can translate into real profits.
One possible path for the rockstar AI firm of the moment? Expect a new focus on AI agents that automate knowledge worker tasks — we may see a major launch around this in 2024. Also, landmark partnership deals with major consultancies and household name brands to roll these agents out across their workforce. In other words, in 2024 OpenAI is coming for jobs.
Even since I sent this to Exponentialist members it has emerged that OpenAI is now working with the US Department of Defense on AI tools.
Meanwhile, expect the first lawsuit victory for content creators who say AI giants have infringed copyright by using their work in training data. And as the promise — or spectre — of some form of AGI looms closer, we’ll see the beginnings of strange new economic, labour, and social trends.
This barely scratches the surface of what is sure to be another incredible year on this front. Alphabet will go to war with OpenAI/Microsoft by pushing Gemini hard across its platforms. Apple is likely to finally show its hand and launch a next-generation, on-device virtual companion fueled by its own large language model. New text-to-video models will allow for the first AI-generated short movies.
But the core message: this is the year it all gets real. That means someone you know tells you: my boss is considering replacing me with an AI agent.
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🗳 Democracy collides with the Exponential Age
This year will be a historic one for global democracy. A full 76 nations — including the U.S., Indonesia, the UK, and India — will go to the polls. Over 3 billion people will be eligible to cast a vote in a single year: a new record.
Amid the coming global pageant of democracy, the U.S. Presidential election in November will naturally be the star. Right now, Donald Trump has an overwhelming lead in the race to be the Republican candidate. A Biden/Trump election would be a raucous and polarising affair at any time. But 2024 will see the first Presidential election under full exposure to generative AI and deepfake technologies.
Text-to-video models — currently getting better by the month — will allow any ordinary user to create sophisticated fakes of the candidates and celebrity supporters. And that’s before we talk about what professional users of these models will do. Expect a deluge of synthetic content and a welter of mass confusion that mainstream media scrabbles to navigate. X (formerly Twitter) will become a theatre of the unreal with Elon as its reigning Agent of Chaos.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. A second Trump presidency will profoundly reshape the U.S. and its role in the world. And all this as AI smashes into the real economy, and geopolitical tension over the race for compute power heightens as never before; see below for more on both.
My best guess — and I’m no political pundit, so treat it as nothing more than that — is that Biden wins a razor-thin reelection. U.S. institutions muddle through, and the transition of power is more or less orderly. I’m far more sure about one thing, though. That is, 2024 will be the year it becomes inarguable that we must remodel our democracies around the challenge posed by the Exponential Age.
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⛓ Blockchains go mainstream
We’re all set for a new crypto run in 2024, with price surges for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana that continue into 2025. As always, there will be corrections along the way. And lots of noise: hype, cynicism, and fear of missing out.
But here at New World Same Humans we’re interested in the broader implications.
This year, the mainstream wakes up to the radical power of blockchains to rewrite the source code of our highly centralised societies. New price highs herald the era of mass adoption when it comes to Bitcoin. And this, in turn, sparks another powerful wave of blockchain-based innovation and creativity. Expect mass-membership social movements and successful startups to come together around decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). This sets the stage for a mainstream political conversation on radical decentralisation in 2025.
Remember ConstitutionDAO, which saw 17,000 people pool $40 million in an attempt to buy an original copy of the U.S. Constitution? And FriesDAO, an attempt at a decentralised fast food franchise startup? We’re going to see more of that kind of thing, starting this year.
I know we’re all waiting to hear about the Bitcoin ETF — perhaps news on it will have landed by the time you read this. But however that goes, the underlying direction of travel is the same.
The core point here is that blockchains unlock a new way to serve a fundamental human need: collaboration at scale. Whenever an emerging technology collides with deep human needs in this way, we need to pay attention.
Many get caught up in the crypto hype/hate cycle and lose sight of this underlying story. In 2024, though, it’s going to manifest in powerful ways. The block is ready to strike back.
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🤖 The humanoids walk among us
As 2023 drew to a close we saw an update from Tesla on its humanoid robot, Optimus. New videos show it walking autonomously, performing squats, and handling an egg. A few days ago another video dropped: Optimus can now fold laundry.
I was sceptical when Elon Musk announced Optimus in 2021, alongside a man dancing in a white spandex suit. Two years on there’s no denying I was wrong: the pace of improvement has been insane.
But this story is only just getting started. A spate of developments means 2024 is set to be the Year of the Humanoid.
News will emerge on Amazon’s current trial of the Digit humanoid robot in some U.S. fulfilment centres. If the reports are positive expect other retail and logistics giants — think Walmart, for example, or FedEx — to engage humanoids of their own. Meanwhile, Agility Robotics, the makers of Digit, will open the world’s first humanoid mass-production facility in Oregon. And a flourishing ecosystem of humanoid startups, including Sanctuary AI, Figure, and 1X, will jostle for a slice of the action. But my prediction? By the end of 2024, the coming dominance of Optimus — trained on all that Tesla data — is undeniable.
Humanoid robots are taking aim at nothing less than the world’s largest and most consequential market: that is, the market for human labour. Across the Global North and in China, rapidly ageing populations mean an urgent need for new answers if GDP growth isn’t to become a distant memory. In November the CCP announced a massive initiative to transform its economy via an ‘army’ of mass-produced humanoids.
That’s the long-term story. For 2024, remember that Amazon employs around 1.6 million people worldwide, mostly in its fulfilment centres. The job-displacing power of these robots is going to be immense. And this is the year it starts to bite.
What happens to all those displaced workers? What strange new shapes will the economy take when we can mass-produce near-infinite human labour? This year, we’re going to have to confront those questions.
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🇹🇼 The war for compute power turns hot
Speaking of the CCP, their plan to launch an army of humanoids into the world is just one small part of the picture in 2024.
So many of the decisions emerging in Beijing currently can be traced back to a single root.
In short, the CCP fears that a rapidly ageing population will bring its quest for world hegemony to a crashing halt. That fear is behind the new push for humanoids. But it’s fueling a generally more assertive and risk-taking CCP, determined to consolidate gains before time runs out. And that, in turn, means rising tensions with the U.S. How will those tensions manifest? That’s where the story goes exponential:
In 2024, we’ll see U.S./China tensions flare around a key nexus of competition: the race for next-level AI and the compute power needed to train it. The U.S. Chips Act has already restricted the sale of the most advanced AI chips to China. The CCP responded by limiting the sale of vital minerals used in the manufacture of chips. This all points in one direction: Taiwan, which manufactures 90% of all advanced chips. There’s a non-insignificant chance we see a major escalation in 2024, all the way up to a Chinese invasion.
Taiwan, a country of 24 million, is at the fountainhead of the world’s most critical resource: compute power. As we all know, CCP leaders believe the country rightly belongs to China. And now, everyone can see that the nations with the most advanced machine intelligence will own the 21st century. The longstanding tension around Taiwan, then, is all set to boil over.
An invasion is still unlikely on balance. But I expect further tit-for-tat trade restrictions and growing Chinese interference in Taiwan. And that could be enough to interrupt the global supply of compute, with all kinds of implications for the Exponential Age.
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⚡️ Science leaps to warp speed
The AI revolution we’re living through is so consequential that one section of this Look Ahead is not enough to contain it.
While generative AI meshes with the real economy and we watch a host of practical implications play out, in 2024 we’ll also witness a strange new form of AI magic unfold. Machine intelligence is about to accelerate mathematical and scientific discovery to warp speed, forever changing our relationship with knowledge.
Early signs of this nascent revolution now appear with increasing regularity. In November, for example, a Google DeepMind AI predicted the structure of over 2 million new materials, some with the potential to revolutionise engineering, architecture, and more.
In 2024, we’ll see the ongoing rise of the ‘self-driving lab’: laboratories that combine powerful AI models and robotics to automate scientific experiment and discovery in biology, materials science, and more. Expect powerful new advances across the life sciences, including in genomics and the identification of new medicines. The wild card here? An AI-fuelled advance in theoretical physics that fundamentally transforms our view of the universe.
Okay, that’s unlikely in 2024 — but it’s now resolutely possible. And that means that this is the year we must confront a new and disorienting truth. All through human history, only we humans were capable of pushing back the frontiers of what we know. Now, we’re about to take a back seat in the quest for knowledge — machine intelligence will drive it forward.
We will live, then, amid a new and alien way of seeing the world. One that will discern truths we were never capable of discovering alone. This year, we wake up to the fact that our next big challenge will be to understand what our AIs are telling us.
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👋 Humans argue about their machines
For this final section, something a little different. This one is about what all this exponential change means at the deepest level for we humans. And how that plays out in 2024.
There’s nothing new in people arguing about technology. That’s been a prominent feature of our collective lives at least since the first industrial revolution.
But in 2024 that argument will take on new — and in some senses ultimate — dimensions.
As it becomes ever more apparent to the mainstream that we’re living through epoch-making change, the ongoing exponential technology revolution will become a social and political faultline. On the one hand will be those who want to accelerate technology; who relish the chance to develop superintelligence, fuse with the machines, and become all-knowing and infinite. On the other hand will be those determined to preserve recognisably human ways of being and living amid all this destabilising change.
You see this polarisation firing up now in the public conversation on AI, and in the rise of online intellectual currents such as effective accelerationism.
But in 2024, this debate creeps into the popular consciousness. And that will fire the starting gun on a conversation that becomes ever-more acute across the coming years.
For more on all this read the instalment I sent a few days ago, Creatures and Machines.
Onwards to an Exponential Future!
Thanks for reading this instalment of New World Same Humans. If you found it useful, consider sharing it with friends and colleagues who’d also like to join our community.
This Lookout to 2024 was shared first with subscribers to The Exponentialist, a premium research service covering the nature and implications of the technology revolution we’re living through, and the investment opportunities it presents.
Intrigued? Just go here to to learn more about The Exponentialist.
I’ll be back soon. Until then, be well,
David.