New York, USA.- It's been a crazy year in technology: Artificial intelligence (AI) infiltrated everything.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg agreed to a cage fight (which never happened).
A high-profile CEO was fired and rehired in one weekend. Oh, and Apple introduced its most unconventional product since the G4 Cube.
We could go on, but we are here to look forward. That's the best part of this annual exercise, where we all hop into an electric time travel vehicle and choose The Future as a destination on Google Maps.
So what can we predict for 2024? AI as far as…the eye can see. We won't even pretend to know everything generative AI will do to our devices, our jobs, our lives, and our choices, but we promise you won't be able to escape it.
We'll see other things, too: the decline of the hated password, a boom in cleaner energy, increased regulation around kids on social media, and more.
And yes, Apple will start selling a $3,500 face-worn computer that seeks to change the way we see the world, or at least our living rooms.
These are our predictions for the next year in technology:
It is real?
When photos of a bull walking on train tracks in New Jersey recently went viral, the first thing many people thought was, “Is this a product of AI?” No, the photo was real.
This is the challenge of the internet in 2024: How do we distinguish real from AI?
The avalanche of generative AI products will continue, but more tools are also anticipated to help us identify artificially generated text, photographs, videos and audio.
Specifically, OpenAI has promised a feature that will identify whether an image is created by its image generator, Dall-E 3, and TikTok has said it is working on ways to automatically detect and tag AI-generated content.
EVs struggle to accelerate
If you expect 2024 to be the year of the electric vehicle (EV) boom, reconsider. “It's not that electric vehicle sales have fallen, it's that the pace of growth is slowing,” noted Dan Levy, an analyst at Barclays.
That slowdown appears to continue, but it marks a turning point: More car buyers are starting to evaluate their EV options. Two of the biggest hurdles for consumers, price and charging, will begin to improve, particularly for those looking beyond Tesla.
Sometime in 2024, Ford, General Motors, Rivian and others will be able to charge at many of Tesla's charging sites, and this should significantly increase the number of places where EV drivers can stop for power on a long road trip.
AI + PC = ?
In 2024, leading manufacturers aim to give you access to AI on their devices quickly and easily, even when they are not connected to the internet, as current technology requires. Welcome to the era of the AI PC and also the AI Mac.
What's coming is what engineers call “on-device AI.” Like our smartphones, our laptops will have the ability to run the specialized computing needed to perform AI-powered tasks without connecting to the cloud. They will be able to understand our speech, search and summarize information, even generate images and text, all without the slow and expensive round trip to a technology company's server.
On December 14, Intel announced its participants in this race: chips with integrated neural processing units. Qualcomm had done the same at the end of October and both silicon giants will compete to be the engine of Windows laptops and Chromebooks. Perhaps more chips like this will come courtesy of Nvidia and AMD.
Apple, which in 2020 brought variations of its neural engine-equipped mobile chips to laptops and desktops, will make that specialized processing power available to software developers in new ways.
Longer life for older devices
Unlike bread and milk, the packaging of our devices does not have an expiration date printed on it, but that does not mean that it does not have one. Modern internet-connected devices remain tied to their manufacturers after we buy them and die when manufacturers stop offering services and software updates.
However, an increasing number of manufacturers and brands are expanding software support. Apple, which updates iPhones for about six years and Macs for six to eight years, depending on the model, was the gold standard, but has fallen slightly behind Alphabet's Google. For its new Pixel 8 phones, Google increased support to seven years. The company also said it will provide updates to Chromebooks for up to a decade starting in 2024.
Apple's mixed reality takes on the real world
Will Apple's Vision Pro change the way we work by placing floating 3D spreadsheets on our office walls? Will it make us all long for FaceTime with holographic grandma? Will it finally make 3D movies cool? Or, at $3,499, will it be the most expensive paperweight in the world? We will know at the beginning of 2024.
In early testing, we were impressed with how natural it is to navigate the digital interface with simple hand movements and finger taps. However, it's still a pretty substantial piece of hardware that you have to put on your head, complete with battery.
With its price and first-generation status, the Vision Pro is not positioned to be a widespread success. Rather, Apple is betting that early adopters and software developers will define the breakthrough apps of spatial computing, the idea that we can combine our real lives and our digital worlds in new ways. As Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said at the presentation of Vision Pro, it is “the beginning of a journey.”
Cracks in the walls of the apple garden
Perhaps the president of the European Commission should simply relocate her office to Cupertino, California. In 2023, European Union legislation forced Apple to give up its proprietary Lightning port in favor of USB-C on the iPhone 15. Next year, EU regulations will push Apple to make additional changes.
While Apple's App Store has been the only way to install apps on the iPhone, the EU Digital Markets Act aims to change that. Requires specific technology companies to stop prohibiting users from obtaining apps outside of their own app stores. The deadline to comply is March 7. In documents recently filed by Apple with the SEC, the company stated that it anticipates “making further commercial changes in the future” to the App Store.
Access keys in more places
Passwords are terrible. When hackers exposed information belonging to about 6.9 million customers of 23andMe, the DNA testing kit company, the company noted that because people often reuse their usernames and passwords, thousands of logins worked for them. attackers using data stolen from other sites.
Therefore, in 2023 companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon adopted passcodes, a type of login that can replace passwords and two-factor authentication codes. Starting next year, Microsoft will roll out business passcodes.
A passkey is more secure than a traditional login because each one is unique, stored within password managers, and can be accessed via a face or fingerprint scan.
Editing of the original article
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