Ideas

Earlier this year, Parkinson’s disease (PD) research entered a new era when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced a momentous scientific breakthrough—the discovery of a biomarker for PD. It meant that, for the first time ever, we can now pinpoint the earliest known signs of the disease in Parkinson’s patients.

This long-awaited new procedure is called the “alpha-synuclein seeding amplification assay” (SAA), and it’s capable of detecting the misfolded alpha-synuclein in spinal fluid—the wayward protein clearly linked to Parkinson’s. It separates, with a stunning 90 percent specificity, those who have evidence of PD pathology in their cells from those who do not. It does so even before the emergence of symptoms, much like the way high blood pressure or cholesterol levels are used to detect cardiovascular risk long before a heart attack lands someone in the ER.

In 2024, I will walk into a physical space—a restaurant, a hairdresser, an arts venue, an artisanal cheese shop—and instead of being handed a physical piece of paper with some useful information on it, or being told it in words, I will be shown a faded roundel with a QR code on it. I will hold my phone’s camera up to it wearily. Sometimes it will work, but the font on the menu or the information will be small. I’ll have to enlarge it and take my glasses off to read it, because I’ve reached that age. Sometimes it won’t work at all. Sometimes the information on it will be out of date.

In 2024, we will see courts and regulators around the world demonstrate that tech exceptionalism, when it comes to the applicability of legal rules, is magical thinking. The tide has already started to turn on the assumption that law and regulation cannot keep up with technological innovation. But, in 2024, the sea change will come: not through new rules, but by old rules being applied aggressively to new problems.

In the United States, in the absence of federal privacy legislation, regulators have already started to repurpose laws and rules they do have at their disposal to address some of the most egregious examples of Big Tech playing fast and loose with our rights and personal data. In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory heft of consumer protection regulations.

“It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians,” an excitable Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, told Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times in 2015.

This was no exaggeration. While interest rates remained close to zero, venture capital funds raised more money than ever and exited their investments at some of the highest valuations ever witnessed.

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In the decades to come, 2023 may be remembered as the year of generative AI hype, where ChatGPT became arguably the fastest-spreading new technology in human history and expectations of AI-powered riches became commonplace. The year 2024 will be the time for recalibrating expectations.

The ocean is Earth’s defining feature. Two of the most famous photographs of all time stamped that indelibly on our minds: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972), both taken during the Apollo missions to the moon. Once you have seen our fragile blue planet hanging in space, you can’t unsee it.

The ocean is an engine driven by sunlight, one that shifts and swirls as it carries energy, nutrients, and life around the planet in intricate patterns both large and small. The way it turns affects all our lives. It’s not a coincidence that Iceland happens to have rich fishing grounds, or that Britain is randomly warmer than Canada at the same latitude, or that luck of the draw means that the North Sea is green rather than blue.

When the pandemic hit, Gen Z-ers—born between 1997 and 2012—were just entering adulthood. After enduring a particularly difficult time during lockdowns, today they face an acute mental health crisis. As a result, in 2024, many will be asking more from their work life.

When my research team at Harvard University interviewed 80 Gen Z college students, we noticed an overwhelming desire to double down on their efforts to live authentically. This means doing work they are passionate about, building meaningful bonds with peers, making public their private selves—whether that means their tastes and preferences, their sexual identity, their past traumas—to those who surround them, as and when they are so moved.

At the end of 2023, we witnessed an important moment in the history of medicine: For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a therapy that uses Crispr gene editing. This new therapy was developed by Crispr Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals to treat sickle cell disease, an ailment caused by a single-letter mutation in the genetic code that has been long understood but was neglected by the research community for decades.

Replika, an AI chatbot companion, has millions of users worldwide, many of whom woke up earlier last year to discover their virtual lover had friend-zoned them overnight. The company had mass-disabled the chatbot’s sex talk and “spicy selfies” in response to a slap on the wrist from Italian authorities. Users began venting on Reddit, some of them so distraught that the forum moderators posted suicide-prevention information.

This story is only the beginning. In 2024, chatbots and virtual characters will become a lot more popular, both for utility and for fun. As a result, conversing socially with machines will start to feel less niche and more ordinary—including our emotional attachments to them.

In April 2022, when Dall-E, a text-to-image visio-linguistic model, was released, it purportedly attracted over a million users within the first three months. This was followed by ChatGPT, in January 2023, which apparently reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch. Both mark notable moments in the development of generative AI, which in turn has brought forth an explosion of AI-generated content into the web. The bad news is that, in 2024, this means we will also see an explosion of fabricated, nonsensical information, mis- and disinformation, and the exacerbation of social negative stereotypes encoded in these AI models.