The Monthly Salon: December

What's on your mind for 2024?

Winter Landscape with Ice-skaters and Bird-Trap, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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.