The Monthly Salon: December
What's on your mind for 2024?
This is the monthly community Salon at New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
The year is winding to a close.
Here in London darkness is falling as I write this, even though it’s only mid-afternoon. And soon I’ll be taking the children on our regular December family jaunt to see the Christmas lights at Eltham Palace.
But there’s still time for a final Monthly Salon before the newsletter takes its usual winter pause!
As I said in last month’s inaugural Salon, think of these posts as a space in which our community can gather. A room open to those in the know, where you can eavesdrop on a fascinating debate or start one yourself.
That will all happen in the comment threads. So to contribute, click through to the article page on the web — just hit the headline at the top of the email — scroll down, and dive in.
Given the season, I’m thinking a lot about the year that’s gone and the one that is to come.
I’ll be writing a proper review of the year, as usual, in January. But it’s obvious that machine intelligence has been the overarching theme of 2023, both for NWSH and much of the world beyond.
The amazing AI story we’ve tracked across this year fuels my sense — which has grown recently — that we’re on the eve of a period of epochal change. One that will be fascinating, thrilling, and destabilising in equal measure.
As much as we’ve talked about machine intelligence this year, the story is so absurdly early; we’re not even close to understanding all the implications yet.
In 2024, if rumour is to be believed, OpenAI will train GPT-5. And we’re going to see a huge push by that company and others to commercialise their technology. That means persuading large corporations that some of the work they currently pay humans to do can be done, instead, by intelligent machines.
But the news won’t be limited to AI.
We’ll hear from Amazon on the results of their trial of the Digit humanoid robot. If the news is positive, we’ll see other huge logistics and retail giants testing humanoids. The makers of Digit, Agility Robotics, are trying to get ahead of demand: in the New Year they’ll open the world’s first humanoid mass-production plant in Oregon.
Both the AI and the humanoid robots story have clear, and difficult, implications for human labour.
Meanwhile, the New Year will also see the first landing on the Moon executed by a private company. US startup Intuitive Machines are using a SpaceX rocket, due to launch in January, to send their Nova-C lander to the lunar South Pole. The lander will scout out landing locations for the Artemis crewed mission due to launch in 2025 or after. The touchdown of Nova-C, then, will fire the starting gun on the return of humans to the Moon.
In short, an intriguing year awaits.
So as a theme for this month’s Salon, I want to ask about how you see the year just gone and the one ahead.
In 2023, what news on our shared future most made you sit up and take notice? What technologies and happenings do you think will prove most consequential, for good or ill? For next year, which stories will you be paying most attention to? What are you looking forward to, and what are you worried about? Are you persuaded, as I am, that a tsunami of tech-fuelled change is coming?
Wherever you stand, dive into the comments and share. I’ll discuss my thinking on all this in the comments, too.
As ever, remember that this monthly theme is only a conversation starter: feel free to take the conversation where you like. Throw out thought starters of your own, and take us in new directions with wild abandon.
I’ll be back in your inbox one last time before Christmas. But for now, over to you.
David.
Welcome to the Salon; let's talk!
As it sounds from the above note, when I look out to next year I'm particularly fascinated and terrified by the impact machine intelligence and robots are set to have on the real economy, and on the everyday work and lives of billions of people.
I think 2024 is sizing up to be the year when these technologies really make their impact felt. And that means reckoning with a set of social and economic questions that we've long talked about, but that have so far remained fairly theoretical.
What does an economy look like when much human labour can be automated away? What are the social implications of this? How will those who are displaced out of their jobs survive?
I think it could get extremely difficult. And at the end of this road, I think, lies a discussion on radical new conceptions of 'work' and new ways to reward people for what they contribute to society. If more and more value is created by autonomous machines, we're surely need some form of universal basic income to share the gains.
I hope automation can liberate more people to do what only people can do: listen to, understand, and truly see others. In other words, to care for one another.
I think we need to rebuild the respect we once had for that kind of care; including care for children and other relatives. And we need to find ways to reward the contribution this care work makes to the human collective.
AI has sucked all the oxygen out of the innovation room these days. I do get the hype, but I don't get the feeding frenzied pile-on... especially with so many unexplored corners worth my attention.
Thus I will be looking for Deep Tech, biotech, and other emerging trends that won't get the attention alongside the all-AI-all-the-time bug lamp.