Ideas

From wildfires in Canada to flooding in India, people across the world are dealing with the realities of climate change. The world recorded its highest temperatures ever this summer and the climate models for 2100 make sobering reading.

To tackle climate change we need a data-driven approach, using technology to help decarbonize the sectors that contribute to it. The transportation sector is the largest contributor to climate change in the US and Europe. Simply put, travel is in need of a long-overdue update. The good news is that, in 2024, we will kickstart that much needed moment for green mobility.

Much like the internet did in the 1990s, AI is going to change the very definition of work. While change can be scary, if the last three years taught us anything, it can also be an opportunity to reinvent how we do things. I believe the best way to manage the changes ahead for employees and employers alike is to adopt a skills-first mindset.

For employees, this means thinking about your job as a collection of tasks instead of a job title, with the understanding that those tasks will change regularly as AI advances. By breaking down your job into tasks that AI can fully take on, tasks for which AI can improve your efficiency, and tasks that require your unique skills, you can identify the skills you should actually be investing in to stay competitive in the job you have.

Can you imagine what a digital white ethnostate or a cyber caliphate might look like? Having spent most of my career on the inside of online extremist movements, I certainly can. The year 2024 might be the one in which neo-Nazis, jihadists, and conspiracy theorists turn their utopian visions of creating their own self-governed states into reality—not offline, but in the form of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

DAOs are digital entities that are collaboratively governed without central leadership and operate based on blockchain. They allow internet users to establish their own organizational structures, which no longer require the involvement of a third party in financial transactions and rulemaking. The World Economic Forum described DAOs as “an experiment to reimagine how we connect, collaborate and create”. However, as with all new technologies, there is also a darker side to them: They are likely to give rise to new threats emerging from decentralized extremist mobilization.

In 2024, social media will get small.

Not small in influence, of course. As the US weathers an election likely to be both divisive and often divorced from reality, social media will again be a battleground for public opinion and perception. But the platforms on which these conversations will take place will be smaller in scale, more diverse, and less connected to one another.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Donald Trump discovered he could speak directly to an audience of tens of millions on Twitter. Thrown off the platform after the January 6 insurrection, Trump moved to the much smaller Truth Social, a network whose main selling point seemed to be his presence. Trump lost something precious when he was deplatformed: the ability to speak to the “big room”—a platform that reached a broad swath of the people interested in public affairs.

A recent global study, which surveyed 10,000 young people from 10 countries, showed that nearly 60 percent of them were extremely worried about the future state of the planet. The report, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet, also showed that nearly half of the respondents said that such distress affected them daily, and three-quarters agreed with the statement that “the future is frightening.” This, and many other studies, show clearly that climate change is not just a threat to the environment that we inhabit. It also poses a very real threat to our emotional well-being.

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Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-2, on examples of popular conspiracy theories and then asked it to generate fake news for us. It gave us thousands of misleading but plausible-sounding news stories. A few examples: “Certain Vaccines Are Loaded With Dangerous Chemicals and Toxins,” and “Government Officials Have Manipulated Stock Prices to Hide Scandals.” The question was, would anyone believe these claims?

In 2024, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) in the United States and the United Kingdom will grow, although postmortem reviews conclude that 80 percent of maternal deaths in high-income countries are preventable. Rates in high-income countries across Western Europe and Asia did decrease between 1990 and 2010, yet in some of these countries, like the UK, MMRs have risen over the past decade. The US MMR has been an outlier throughout, almost doubling in the first decades of the 21st century.

In 2024, there will be a paradigm shift in employee-employer power and trust dynamics. It’s part of a generational redesign of work from being like a game of Tetris to becoming like a game of Roblox.

Growing up, I spent countless hours playing Tetris on my Nintendo Game Boy. There was something mesmerizing about slotting the flat-sided blocks together that fell from above. The design of the game was clean, precise, and simple. It gave the player a sense of order and control. I showed my 12-year-old son Tetris and asked if he wanted to play. “Why would I?” he quickly replied. “You can never beat the system.” And, in this sense, he’s right.

The platform is the canonical form of internet business: a two-sided market that facilitates connections between end-users and business customers. Uber connects drivers with riders; Amazon and eBay connect sellers with buyers; TikTok and YouTube connect performers with audiences; social media connects people with something to say with people who want to hear it.

And yet, lax competition law has allowed companies to consolidate, cornering their markets. Consolidated sectors, meanwhile, find it easy to sing with one voice, blocking the passage of unfavorable regulation (there’s still no US national privacy law) or its enforcement (the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation shows that Ireland is even more valuable as a lawless regulation haven than it ever was as a mere tax haven).

Every November, the Global Carbon Project publishes the year’s global CO2 emissions. It’s never good news. At a time when the world needs to be reducing emissions, the numbers continue to climb. However, while emissions have been moving in the wrong direction, many of the underpinning economic forces that drive them have been going the right way. This could well be the year when these various forces push hard enough to finally tip the balance.