Wired

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.

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Until now, AI systems have been largely designed to be algorithm-based and focused on input and output. But there is a conversation going on in both the digital technology and education sectors about the positive value of multidisciplinary design, and the importance of outcomes beyond revenue maximization and scaled efficiency.

For researchers, social media has always represented greater access to data, more democratic involvement in knowledge production, and great transparency about social behavior. Getting a sense of what was happening—especially during political crises, major media events, or natural disasters—was as easy as looking around a platform like Twitter or Facebook. In 2024, however, that will no longer be possible.

This story is from the WIRED World in 2024, our annual trends briefing. Read more stories from the series here—or download a copy of the magazine.

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When medical student Alyssa Murillo stepped into surgery, she was met with something most wouldn’t expect to find in an operating room: a towering surgical robot. She wasn’t there to observe the kind of surgeries she was used to seeing; instead she was getting an in-depth view inside the patient’s body through the robot’s video console.

When I worked as a copywriter at a dog-toy-slash-tech company, we used Airtable and Basecamp to organize our workflows. At my next job, the marketers made us learn Asana (“same as Airtable but much better”), but the product team pushed their work and sprints through Jira. I was laid off before I had to learn Jira, and at my next gig they swore by Airtable, which, phew, I already knew. But efficiencies were still being lost, apparently, and Airtable took the blame. As I was leaving that job, I heard someone mention that a new program, Trello, was going to replace Airtable and “change everything” for us. I came back as a contractor a few years later, and everything had not changed. The company had moved on from Trello and was now in the thrall of something called Monday.com. It, too, promised big changes.

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While recently readingabout leg-lengthening surgery, I couldn’t help but sense a touch of absurdity in the whole enterprise. Although I’m no taller than average—I’m 5'9", thank you very much—dispensing sincere sympathy for the men featured in the article didn’t come naturally. Even when it did, my sympathy was mixed with an element of comedic pathos, like for someone who just got a kick to the groin.

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Recently, a close friend told me how much he wanted to be a parent one day. I asked if he’d consider adopting. Suddenly, he became hesitant—pausing before admitting that he’d like to have children who were biologically related. His answer wasn’t unusual; in fact, it was probably my question that was odd. Yet his brief equivocation felt significant, signaling a peripheral awareness that this answer has become complicated.

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“My own solution for the problem of Venice is to let her sink,” wrote British author and onetime Venice resident Jan Morris with casual mercilessness in a 1971 essay for The Architectural Review . She reiterated the point in The New York Times four years later, hammering home her point with conviction and relish: “Let her sink.”

At an old biscuit factory in South London, giant mixers and industrial ovens have been replaced by robotic arms, incubators, and DNA sequencing machines. James Field and his company LabGenius aren’t making sweet treats; they’re cooking up a revolutionary, AI-powered approach to engineering new medical antibodies.

In nature, antibodies are the body’s response to disease and serve as the immune system’s front-line troops. They’re strands of protein that are specially shaped to stick to foreign invaders so that they can be flushed from the system. Since the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies have been making synthetic antibodies to treat diseases like cancer, and to reduce the chance of transplanted organs being rejected.