First of all, my deepest apologies for not being a more regular writer in December of 2023. I am involved in an AI project that is consuming both my time and my interest, and it is the way that I support myself and my family. Plus, I have to say, that the work is totally satisfying and engaging.
Opportunities Everywhere
The more that I delve into AI and Machine Learning use cases, the more that I am convinced that we will see it everywhere in almost every aspect of our lives. I have been consulted, queried, asked and opined for AI and Machine Learning in diverse aspects from Home Improvement to shopping list generation and the odd protein folding study as well. The entire field is wide open since ChatGPT burst on the scene. I am finding good use cases everywhere. Almost every single use case that has been presented to me is a viable one, that solves a time, money, information or knowledge problem. They are not only feasible, but actually sellable. The big problem in making money from technology streams, is not the technology itself, but rather the marketing. AI tools offer their own, self-evident value proposition that make them an easy sell if you market correctly. AI can even help with that.
And like all things, the earlier that you get into the game, the more money that you will make.
The Machines Are Listening
I have never used Siri or Cortana or any other voice activated digital assistants like Alexa. I figured that whatever I asked, would be stored in servers somewhere. I have never used Google assistant. But I just watched a disturbing video of a person demonstrating that Google listens to everything on you laptop or computer even when you do not ask the assistant to help you. I have never used these assistant tools and yet there is proof that Google listens when you have the Chrome browser open.
An experiment to prove this was conducted by a young man who lived alone, was a techie, and never had any pets. He never queries or searched for anything related to pets, especially dogs. He did this experiment live in a video. He held up a sign saying that he was going to talk about “pet toys”. Then he went to a bunch of sites that served up google ads. Some were newspapers, broadcasters and a variety of sites. He noted the ads that were served up. None of them were about pet toys.
He then closed his browser and opened up a fresh one. He ad libbed for about thirty seconds on how he was considering pet toys, and even considered buy a red chew toy known as a Kong. He then went back to the websites that he had previously examined. On the first site that he went to, he was served up an ad for Pet Smart. On the Fox News site. the banner ad was an advert for a red Kong dog toy. This continued to all the sites that he visited. Most of the ads were for the pet chain store Pet Smart.
After seeing this, the first thing that I did was to disable the microphone. On Windows, right click on the Start button and select Device Manager. Expand Audio Inputs and Outputs. Right click on Microphone to disable it.
On a Mac, open System Settings. Click on Privacy and Security and select Microphone. You can then choose what apps can use the microphone, but certainly not Google Chrome. (Note: this is for new Macs. I am not sure how to do it on older Macs).
Of course, if you are forced to use voice due to some sort of accessibility restrictions, you are a bit out of luck. However, as a public service, I have recorded a background noise .mp3 for you. If you play it on continuous loop on your computer, it will be enough to confuse the clandestine machine listeners that are eavesdropping on you. I recorded this clip in a very noisy Thai restaurant. (The meal by the way, was delicious.)
Pay TV Is Dying
As ad funded streaming gains momentum in 2024, Pay TV will suffer greatly. Amazon Prime just announced that there will be ads in their streaming, but if you pay $3 more per month, you can eliminate the ads. More and more consumers are ditching cable TV with what is known as linear broadcasting (television networks broadcast shows on specific days at specific timeslots). Some pundits are even calling an end to this type of broadcasting once 5G becomes ubiquitous. This mode of content production has been in play since television was invented.
Broadcasting as a whole is suffering due to digital streaming. AM radio has taken a huge hit and it may become even more obsolete because major automobile manufacturers have announced that AM radio capabilities will no longer be built into cars.
The way that I see the evolution of streaming happening is similar to what Ted Turner did back in the early days of cable TV that will be mashed up with the Netflix model. Essentially you will log into a streaming channel that will be modulated and hosted by AI. You can choose everything from major films, to series programs, to Youtube-like videos or even a continuous stream of short audio clips or music. Eventually you can yield the choice of what and when you listen to the overseer, because the AI will have mapped your preferences.
And of course, that opens you up to AI driven advertising, which is another big can of worms. Just from your playlists, the data brokers will know your age, your probably geographic location, the foods that you like to eat and the entire range of your consumeristic consumables. They won’t do it by mining your personal data, but rather by mining and aggregating the large corpus of data and using machine inference to figure it out just from what you consume in terms of digital media.
Job Churn
Artificial Intelligence is a double job threat, both coming and going. More and more jobs will be pared down because of the productivity increase with AI. So most successful career people are already leveraging AI to gain an edge over other employees when the inevitable “Great Pruning” comes to their company. The other end of the job aspect comes when getting a new job. A CV will be triaged with an AI machine. So if you find yourself as a new job-seeker in 2024, you need to leverage AI yourself.
The first step is to extract all of the keywords and make sure that you include them in you CV. The way that you can do this, is to copy the job description and paste it into an online keyword extractor. Here’s one URL but there a few out there: https://www.cortical.io/freetools/extract-keywords/ There is a button on the site to download the extracted keywords in a csv file. Google is your friend here to find other online keyword services, providing that your microphone is turned off.
After you have the keywords extracted, ask ChatGPT to write your CV using the keywords. ChatGPT is really verbose, and it could be obvious that you used it to write your CV so you have to edit it into your own voice. And don’t take the first iteration. Ask ChatGPT to regenerate and make an amalgam of the two.
The other major advantage that can boost you to the front of the line, is to take an online free course from a “name” university in a tangentially related field to show that you are extremely well rounded. I took a business marketing course from Harvard University that was free.
If you find yourself needing a job in 2024, or even suspect that you may end up in that category, you should start polishing your credentials and leveraging AI now.
Beware of the Super Apps
Elon Musk wants to transmogrify X, formerly Twitter into a super app. These are apps that not only argue with strangers on the internet, but you can also make payments, order food and general open your entire personal data corpus to the whole technology/retail/marketing/data brokerage and intelligence agencies corporate complexes.
But it’s not just X. Tik Tok has plans to eat into Amazon’s market and become a super app. Tik Tok is perhaps the most dangerous because they are China’s biggest importer of North American’s personal data.
And while we are on the topic of apps, if you truly value your personal data privacy, you will stop leaving reviews on any website. There are several data brokerages who harvest this data and sell it to the highest bidder, including marketers and for sentiment analysis to the companies who produce these products. Even if they don’t have direct personal details, they can aggregate the data and extract identifying features.
The bottom line is that super apps are extremely handy however, you pay for that by being the raw meat customer with your data.
2024 Trends Omnibus
Working Hours
Accenture reports that Large Language Models can impact 40% of all working hours. In other words, work can be done 40% faster with AI and presumably, if the property is distributive in nature, then 40% less people doing those tasks can be a natural conclusion.
Forget Pickleball
Pickleball took the world by storm, especially among the seniors ranks. It is not as strenuous or as fast as tennis, but offers a good regime of exercise if played with moderate vigor. However in 2024, there is a growing trend to the old sport of badminton, which has a more “serious” cachet. This is according to the meteoric rise in queries for badminton on Google.
5G
In the US, 5G is available in 503 cities. It’s available in 356 cities in China. This is expected to grow exponentially. One of the negative aspects of 5G, is that it will allow scraping of personal data in larger and more efficient volumes.
No Programmer, No Cry
Programming is not a good career choice, and it is going to get worse. Copilot does tasks that previously took 10 minutes now take just 30 seconds. Current estimates are that Copilot and its ilk currently does 40% of all programming.
Going to the Office, going to get working …
Only 12% of managers have confidence in the productively of remote workers. However the pandemic opened the remote work can of worms. The answer is more surveillance technology for remote workers. If you have an idea for more of this stuff, it is the Royal Road to Riches and employers will line up to buy it. It’s not good for the serfs though, who are not replaced by AI. 2024 will see more workers returning to the office.
Don’t Expect Training
Technology is seeing a 7.6% boost in spending while increases in training and development and personnel are seeing only modest increases hovering around 3%. Training can be augmenting by asking AI models for specific instances that workers encounter. Why spend a whole lot of money when employees are expected to train themselves using Large Language Models? Did we say that the impact of AI on the workforce will be huge?
Need Good Ads? Sell Your Soul and Google & Meta Will Do It For You
Google reports that it plans to implement AI-powered ads in the near future. Business users will simply upload materials to train the AI model. Then the model will create new ads from those materials, complete with new text, images, and videos. Meta has said they’ll introduce a similar AI model for ads on their platforms.
Fashion
There are two dominant trends in 2024 fashion. There will be Grampa Core fashion. It consists of retro streetware, cardigans and plaid. The other major trend is Jazz Aesthetic clothing. It has had a 180% increase in searches, so the super suave look is in (again). And speaking of retro and the 1970’s, wedding planners are reporting a trend in "Groovy Nuptials" inspired by the 1970’s post-hippy trends. Spare me!
Micro Influencers
Advertisers are finding niche micro influencers that see a 60% higher engagement rate than is seen with any other kinds of advertising. So do you own a micro niche like bird carving, nail care or turd polishing, and have at least 20,000 followers? You could be in for some major money!
And Finally Something Offbeat - Indoor Architecture Called "Aquatecture"
Indoor spaces will be outfitted with water based environments ranging from huge gaudy aquariums with fantasy worlds in them for the fish to swim, or medieval turtle habitats and even terrariums and "closed ecosystem aquariums" or "closed aquatic ecosystems". I dunno. I am not a fan of having varied species of living things in my environment other than plants. Sometimes I even object to other humanoid species in my living space. But that is just me, and that is a wrap for what I see that you can expect in 2024
Thanks for reading.