Over the last 30 years, tech has gone from a background industry, which many believed would be a fad, to the leading factor in asserting America and China’s dominance as the two global economic superpowers. It’s hard to believe that even in the mid-1990s, people were laughing at the idea catching on or mobile phones becoming popular.
In 2024, those conversations are completely redundant, but for those tech experts, innovators and forward-thinking minds who held these belief systems a few decades ago, how do they see the future shaping up, and where could the next big innovation stem from over the next 12 months?
The gaming revolution
Although gaming hasn’t quite hit the same heights as the smartphone or AI industry, it’s a sector worth hundreds of billions of pounds a year. Gaming has proven robust, even amid economic downturns, with online gamers driving some of the largest profit margins in global entertainment. Gaming encompasses online video console gaming, PC gaming, casino gaming and the newer worlds of AI and virtual reality (VR), where many believe the latest innovations will emerge.
Casino gaming has long been at the forefront of immense technological change, consistently pioneering new ways for bettors to play — alleviating user issues and essentially bulldozing down digital barriers to connect bettors with their chosen games far more quickly. Online casinos in the UK have been the gold standard for many other countries, most notably the current US landscape.
Although Meta’s big gamble on VR technology looks to be premature at best and a total disaster at worst, there is a slightly increased demand for VR casino gaming, so this could be a significant innovation that operators and designers go all in on as 2024 continues to unravel.
Tackling tangible AI changes
Until recently, AI was seen as a handy, effective way of streamlining specific processes. For instance, if you wanted Siri to assemble your travel plan and read it as you drove, or you needed advanced spellcheck; advanced AI makes these processes simple.
At the end of 2022, the emergence of ChatGPT blew people’s minds with long-form answers to highly complex analytical questions. By taking AI into these new, unchartered areas, we witnessed the most significant technological development since the release of the first iPhone back in 2007.
Microsoft is once again challenging for supremacy as the world’s biggest tech company, with a lot of its recent success coming from its monumental and continued AI investment. The world’s top tech companies are slowly shifting their focus towards AI, with Nvidia gatecrashing the party with a market cap of over $1.5tn.
Many analysts and tech experts believe that the Californian-based juggernaut will make a serious and relentless push to become a cloud provider. Given that they’ve already mastered and become market leaders in a range of gaming chips, AI, robotics and autonomous vehicles, it’d be a pretty safe bet that they’ll be able to use their considerable size to muscle in on the cloud provider market — which still has staggering potential.
It’d be naive to think that the bulk of significant innovations we see throughout 2024, or even stretching beyond the rest of the 2020s, will not be substantially driven by the gigantic pivot towards AI technology.
How AI innovation could impact our daily lives
Erring on the side of caution is the best bet for AI; it’ll bring in significant advances, there’s no doubt about that, but at what cost? Goldman Sachs revealed in a startling report a few months ago that over 300 million current jobs could be expendable by the year 2050 thanks to AI.
Ultimately, there needs to be a balance, and ensuring that AI streamlines entire industries but at the risk of 20 or 25% unemployment rates isn’t going to bring the societal cohesion or progress required for humankind. In the short term, the predictions for 2024 will likely revolve around open-source AI models.
Open-source AI models in 2024
Unlike ChatGPT, which has a source code that can’t be amended or altered, open-source models encourage people to test for themselves, creating new AI ideas and using blueprints created by other developers. Now, it should go without saying that this type of AI technology must be adequately regulated, and more governments are aiming to do this before the horse well and truly bolts.
TensorFlow is an excellent example of how tech innovation in 2024 will help bridge the gap between the general population and the immense advancements in AI. Not only is it open source, but it is also free to use, and supports natural language processing tools and handwriting and image recognition. These types of software will have a significant impact, and while we might not see the full brunt of it this year, the wheels will begin turning and showing people just what the future has in store.
Microsoft back on top?
We’ve already alluded to this, but 2024 could be the year that Microsoft establishes itself as the most prominent company on the planet. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, during the early .com bubble, Microsoft operating systems were the monolithic presence on hundreds of millions of home computers and laptops.
Under the masterful direction of Steve Jobs, Apple quickly became the omnipresent and dominant tech force in our lives. It seemed as though everybody switched to the iPhone toward the late noughties, and nobody looked back. This propelled the company to become the first trillion, $2tn and $3tn valued company.
While it might seem like a bold prediction, Microsoft has unexpectedly taken the advantage over other companies with their AI approach, and they’re the market leader in investing in innovative start-ups, implementing AI seamlessly into their current, mind-blowingly successful business model. This year could allow them to establish dominance, so don’t be surprised to see them sitting comfortably at the top of the corporate world by the end of 2024.
More food delivery tech in 2024?
Delivery companies have tried and failed to get the idea of drone deliveries off the ground. However, as autonomy becomes a significant talking point in travel, many people believe that the food delivery gig economy could be the next industry to take a seismic hit from AI.
Although we must admit this isn’t a particularly groundbreaking theory, it is something that has been a topic of discussion for years. As the investment in AI skyrockets and begins to trickle into thousands of sectors and subdivisions, the exploration of autonomous food delivery bots could gather momentum.
AI content and multimedia
Music production, graphic design and writing are all in the firing line. Many analysts believe that content writers, screenwriters and illustrators could be some of the first casualties of the AI revolution. While that’s unlikely to happen in 2024, we could see more of a foundation for this change to occur. It’s not all doom and gloom for writers though.
Sports Illustrated tried to create AI profiles and fake AI-generated articles as part of their main website offering, and it caused an uproar, ending up on international news. AI-generated creativity can be innovative, and some of the imagery and stories it can churn out do have a place in some aspect of entertainment, but for them to dominate the industry would be a dangerous slope to begin on.
Although there is a heightened sense of apathy and perhaps a collective indifference to the skill and commitment it takes to turn a creative passion into a full-time vocation, the vast majority of people who enjoy watching a new movie or TV series want to watch a story written and performed by a human. However, there’s no denying that tech innovation will likely lead to content writers and some forms of creativity becoming surplus.
Final thoughts
We apologise if today’s piece was a little bit too AI-heavy, but there’s just no shying away from the impact it will have. While the short-term timescale over 2024 won’t likely involve anything too significant, at the beginning of 2022, few people probably believed that something like ChatGPT would emerge from nowhere and tune itself into the global conscience of humanity.
Now that the initial Big Bang has happened, there’s been a lull and a plateau, but the heightened investment means that many of these changes will be going on behind the scenes before beginning to rear their head once new products are developed by many of these trillion-dollar companies.
VR has been quiet for 18 months since Mark Zuckerberg and Apple collectively tried to talk people into spending thousands of pounds on a VR headset with no real practical or obvious tangible use case. As these headsets come down in price, more people may give them a try which could kickstart some small change.
However, it’s unlikely that many people will purchase a costly and relatively niche technological invention in the current economic climate. One thing that is ironclad is that it’ll be yet another interesting year in the world of tech, and there will undoubtably be some surprising innovations that will take the majority of experts by storm.