#197: 2023 Hopes, Predictions & Expectations
Will happen, won't happen, might happen, and would have been nice to happen.
I resisted this urge to make predictions through December, because there were just too many people doing it (most of them better informed than I am), but as importantly, there were so many different things to track! But it wouldn’t leave my head and I was slowly able to simmer this into 4 distinct list. The big things that I think will happen, the stuff that will keep evolving (with or without big milestones), the stuff that I’d like to happen but probably won’t, and the things I don’t think will happen this year.
I. Step Changes I Expect in 2023
Google search has been on a slow decay of usability - for many searches, the combination of advertisements and lack of contextual results means you have to work much harder to get useful results. Spurred by the threat of ChatGPT - I expect to see a somewhat overdue redesign and reinvention of the worlds favourite search verb.
Generative AI will continue to dominate debate and discussions - soul searching about what 'human creativity' means, and the reality of words and language will abound. Business models for Generative AI will emerge, and a lot of creative and writing professions will be turned insight out - although much of it will be initially based on augmenting human skills. There may well be an investment bubble in generative AI. The line between generative and manipulative AI will blur. Uses of conversational tech will spread to customer responses, artificial companions, and more. Microsoft, with its strategic investment in OpenAI will be a key beneficiary.
Tesla & Musk will rebound. People are concluding that Tesla has become a car company rather than a tech business thanks to its valuation drop, but assuming that Musk's Twitter distraction is taken care of, Tesla will go back to becoming the company that pushes the auto industry further forward. Its value will not just be in its cars, but its IP in and around the automotive software and EV space. As much as Twitter will pull Musk down to earth, SpaceX may elevate him, as it looks to raise funds at a higher valuation in a market when most competitors have lost significant value. BTW, many smart people including John Battelle think otherwise.
Digital Warfare will be front and centre - from cyber espionage, to attacking critical infrastructure, and from misinformation, deep fakes, and weaponisation of social media, to the use of AI, drones, predictive models, and autonomous robots on the battlefront. Defence spending is on the up, and a larger percentage of this will go into digital defence.
SpaceTech will become a household word - the war in Ukraine has seen the deployment of thousands of satellites to keep the internet running, and Space Tech may triple its current size to a $1.4tn industry by 2030.
ESG will hit a cross roads and need a redefinition. ESG is too broad (solving for everything), prone to greenwashing, and too complex. Simplifying some clear climate and emissions objectives will become a bigger priority.
Matter, the new smart home standard will take root. Smart Homes have long needed a killer app - home based monitoring and managing lifestyles for older adults, and associated health and care issues. Okay, I admit, this is as much hope as expectation.
Chip Wars change from industry based to geopolitical. The China and Taiwan risk has prompted investments in Chip manufacture in Europe and the US. These are long term bets, of course, but expect this to be a subject of national competence, especially along with AI and quantum.
Mobility - with flying cars, robotaxis, passenger drones, and autonomous passenger vehicles of all types, including micromobility solutions, the category boundary of what constitutes an automobile will begin to blur.
Crypto realism - specific and valuable use of crypto assets may evolve, in specific pockets, with real business models. Parallel economies will emerge with crypto and keep growing steadily and out of sight. ETH will continue to be a central strand and Bitcoin's value as as an extranational hedge will benefit it, despite the volatility. (Read Ryan Selkis's Crypto Thesis)
II. The Continued March of Constantly Changing Tech
Lab grown food & plant based meat alternatives will keep growing - the pressure of environmental concerns, animal rights, and the improvement in lab grown food will push cultural acceptance. Genetically modified foods like Perennial Rice (PR23) will keep evolving and their risks will get progressively lower, despite the skepticism.
Wellness will continue to be an issue for an ailing world. The combined stress of economics, politics, and social challenges will be fertile ground for mental health issues. The link between physical and mental health will become even sharper, and social media will come sharply into focus, especially for younger users.
Cancer cures will keep progressing. Bit by bit. Some predictions are more bullish than others, but there are a vast number of approaches, including mRNA vaccines, stem cell treatments, and many others.
Autonomous vehicles for research - use of unmannned vehicles for exploration of space, the earth, and the oceans will continue. JWST will continue to astonish.
AI will continue to seep into many aspects of our lives. The debate about transparency and trust will continue. Governments will create policies around AI. Synthetic data generation will be a particularly interesting use of AI for training itself.
Robotics - the combination of computer vision, improved automation, and precision engineering will enable better and more varied robots. From picking bell peppers, to preserving bees, to leading musical ensembles.
Many flavours of hybrid work will evolve and tools for hybrid work will keep improving. Devices and tools (including hardware) will be designed for WFH and hybrid working. Home design will evolve.
Falling cost of genome sequencing will create a groundswell of concerns about future health. Knowing the future risks will come at the cost of happiness. Some tricky questions will arise at the intersection of DNA test data, insurance, and policy. Meanwhile tools like CRISPR will continue to push the boundaries of the possible, such as gene editing treatment for cholesterol lowering
Software development will continue to eat itself via AI and automation. Low Code/ No Code / Software Engineering toolkit
Cloud will keep growing and drive more and more business and personal functions. We will do more in the cloud. As will companies, and governments.
The Data and information centric view of medicine will continue to evolve. Our understanding of the brain, the signalling system, and its impact on the body will drive bioinformatics as a discipline. Gut bacteria is a major source of data about our health - it’s connected to depression, ageing related problems, and a host of other aspects.
5G mainstreaming - especially in factories, automotive, and healthcare. As my more knowledgeable colleagues tell me, it’s not just about more bandwidth or even lower latency, but the ability to manage bandwidth through software, and hence through pre-defined conditions and triggers. Private 5G will be the norm for many businesses.
Quantum will keep progressing towards becoming real. More permanent qubits will keep evolving. More complex quantum machines will emerge.
Datafication of everything - from health and wellness, to automotives, and from sports to space. Tools for managing personal data will need to catch up, as regulation around use of personal data also starts to ramp up, especially in Europe.
III. Things I hope will happen in 2023 but probably won't
There will be much handwringing about the need for improved social care - an area that urgently needs reinvention, not just tinkering. I'm not sure that's what it will get. Social care and especially issues around ageing society and its related problems, will continue to be like pre-2020 environmental solutions - everybody knows the problem exists, but there is no willingness to fund solutions, as it's probably not yet problematic enough to hit people's bottom lines, just yet.
Education too needs a close look. My belief about education continues to be a need for reinvention at the core. Education currently does an okay job of workplace skilling but the push (and competition) for economic skills has seeped all the way to primary education because at each stage students are competing for the next one. What education has lost is the ability to help students understand the world - make more informed choices about elections and public issues, and deal with misinformation, for example. I doubt this will happen, though there will be the usual frothiness around Ed-tech, which tends to focus on pedagogy and the 'how'. Data and Cybersecurity issues will dominate the short term.
Smarter packaging - when you order something online, it will arrive in a compact, recyclable, reusable, box, which the company will take back. Economic models for recycling packaging will emerge.
Reduction in global wealth & income inequality: the global leaders at Davos and elsewhere will come up with a plan. Nurses, teachers, and all the people who make society work will be compensated better.
Better use of data. Facebook and Amazon will stop trying to sell me more backpacks starting from the day I actually buy one. My service providers will not have multiple addresses for me for the different services I get from the same company.
Variable Subscriptions - for all the content subscriptions we pay, we will see pricing structures that will go from a single (big) all-you-can-eat pricing to a more tiered pay-as-you-go pricing models, such as the Atlantic. One can only dream.
I sincerely hope that energy transition will hit a tipping point - driven by the urgency of the energy crisis created by the war, and shifting geopolitics, a combination of nuclear (including advances in fusion), solar, and wind, along with technological advancements in energy, will start to become significant part of the energy production bundle in many parts of the world, especially Europe, but also in China and India. This will come along with a push for battery tech. Would be nice, but I suspect it’ll be stop-start for a while.
IV Things That Won’t Happen
Mainstreaming of Metaverse - despite the ads by Facebook and Meta, I don’t think this will be the year of explosive Metaverse adoption and growth. For a big part of the reasons, read Matthew Ball’s book. But also, there is still a steep price for the Head Set, content and experience creation is expensive, and there is as yet no really broadbased tools and skills for creating content and especially for immersive multi-person experiences. There may well be pockets of gaming which jump ahead with Metaverse, or even games designed specifically for the Metaverse.
CBDCs - Central Bank Digital Currencies, though there will be plenty of discussions and debates. It’s a massive step for an economically major country to do launch a digital currency, and it definitely won’t be a cryptocurrency as we know it. Could there be a blockchain behind a CDBC? Possibly, and there’s a potential need for non-fungibility for any currency to prevent counterfeiting, but there are simply too many considerations to be thought through, and enthusiasm in CBDCs will will be additionally depressed currently due to the crypto meltdown. Besides, there’s a new circus in town and it’s called Generative AI.
Retreat from nationalism - to a more multilateral, common-good based model of global governance. Of course there’s no reason to believe this will happen. The nationalist / jingoistic model is doing fine, thank you. It’s winning votes and exploiting all the flaws of multilateral environments, and globalisation. The flaws of nationalism will probably come home to roost via future wars and stand offs. But there doesn’t seem to be a way around.
Reduction in misinformation - on any issue. In fact tools like ChatGPT and deepfakes will probably be used to generate industrial amounts of bullshit.
Web3.0 will continue to be an ethereal concept claimed by each new technology - from contextual tech to metaverse to blockchain, and presumably to generative AI next, in a return to the original ‘context based internet’ definition. But we won’t actually be seeing Web 3.0 this year.
And Here Are Some Other Predictions from Smart People
The Economist: https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2022/11/21/ten-business-trends-for-2023-and-forecasts-for-15-industries
Frog Voices: https://medium.com/frog-voices/whats-trending-in-2023-c952776c1901
John Battelle: https://johnbattelle.medium.com/predictions-23-ai-advertising-crypto-twitter-sorry-and-trump-double-sorry-eb38854fd7bc
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/03/personal-tech-trends-2023/
And an interesting look back, by Peter Diamantis: https://www.diamandis.com/blog/2022breakthroughs
That’s all for now. Have a great week!
Ved