20 Dull predictions for 2024

It's that time of the year again, where you hear about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Mariah Carey blaring at you everywhere you go, and watching National Lampoons on the tele - the one where he goes to cut the turkey and it is hollow inside.

Ok so I know my predictions are bit late but I had to trim the list down. Also in my delay in reviewing this half of them have been announced as happening so points for accuracy but losing points for not being as speculative as I would have hoped.

Hence the title, they are dull.

It's a half-satirical compilation, seasoned generously with cynicism and a touch of dystopia for that extra kick.

Merry Christmas.

1/ Content Creation velocity skyrockets.

Things become simultaneously more outrageous and mundane, causing increased confusion about reality and desensitization.

Copyright lawyers quadruple their earnings due to rampant copyright infringements. Consequently, the market slows down and becomes progressively less interesting due to the fear of lawsuits.

Here's an example of news delivered by AI anchors:

2/ Augmented Reality enters the mainstream.

Augmented reality takes off for consumers who have money left after paying for essentials or aren’t bothered by the insane cost of living (People over 65 apparently)

It probably starts as a rental market for products that are unaffordable, just like houses. The screensaver on the AR headset is an image of the WEF rubbing their hands together like grubby flies.

3/ Voice assistants suck less.

One of the voice assistants gets half decent when they put some GPT on it. It will have to be able to be run locally and without internet access.

Update: Apple is actually making progress on this research.

4/ Celebrities can sell you things directly.

In a new era of celebrity endorsement capability, a GPT agent will sell you products much like how Meta crafted the personas of the celebrities you can interact with. This approach ensures that the seller appearing before you is precisely the embodiment that would most compel you to purchase the product.

It sells things insanely well but exposes us all as being simple creatures that have the same characteristics of what we consider attractive.

5/ Consumer Protections “improve”.

Consumer protection laws get better for consumers but don’t have any penalties enforced rendering them as useless as the last square of toilet paper left on the roll.

6/ Metaverse popularity is manufactured.

Metaverse starts off with a big celebrity den where the virtual world is filled with celebrity characters you can hang out with and see concerts with. People say it’s lame but do it anyway because it's half the price of the concert and the only way they will be able to see the show.

When they get into the metaverse, all the celebrity bots are talking to themselves and most people don’t have the 'pay to play access pass' to have more than three phrases parroted to them.

The three phrases are “Really? No way”, “Hallelujah for King Zuck, may his eternal spirit live forever.”, and “This is a sponsored message: We’ve been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty.”

7/ Musk and Zuck Pay-Per-View on X

Zuck becomes Ned Flanders from the Treehouse of Horrors episode of the Simpsons, re-neducation in his metaverse.

Musk challenges him to another cage fight but in his version of the metaverse. Alex Jones and Donald Trump are there with front row seats viewable only on X stream with some paid premium thing for $1 a view.

Everyone falls for it and adds their credit card details into the platform.

Musk cancels the fight and retains everyone's details telling them he will give them the equivalent in X-Bucks or some crap that allows you to post a picture of your head as a cookie as token of memorial for the death of the cookie.

8/ Back to the Office.

More businesses return to full time from the office so your home office setup is about as useful as the consumer protection laws mentioned earlier. The CBD hospitality sector dies because no one wants to pay $32 for a Devon and tomato sauce sandwich or $17 for a dipping sauce container of mystery meat and an orange juice for that matter.

I picked this specific news article because of how cliche the trope of “boss” this photo was.

9/ A business has an optimisation bias scare.

Technologies like value based bidding get people closer to understanding machine learning bias.

Scratch that, most people who activate it have never heard of ML bias.

ROAS skyrockets for a campaign immediately followed by some type of marketing disaster for some sensitive products that end up only, indirectly, targeting marginalised communities.

This is from 2019 but somehow has been forgotten like the problem has been solved. Has it? Have I been living under a rock?

10/ Cookies go and everyone unprepared is in chaos with measurement.

After 3 weeks of weekly reporting cycles saying numbers are form and retargeting isn’t what it used to be, and 12 months for those doing year on year, everyone forgets about it except for the old people saying “remember the days of cookies. Wild times.”

People either learn more about clean rooms or do things 'the simple way' and Google wins. Convenience is Google master key for almost everything they do and have done.

11/ Better Safari privacy protections.

Safari and iOS devices get better at privacy, Google gets better at tracking them and staying quiet about how they do it. Safari users have “less relevant ads” except for those advertisers who have worked out context is better than audience.

Privacy as a paid feature helps Apple get even more money while messing around with all others and inadvertently creating a market where those who can afford to pay for privacy can get it and those that can't are subject to a million ads a minute to make up for the gap.

12/ More brands realise they need to do more brand marketing.

Performance exclusive oriented marketers and businesses start to wonder why their performance has been in decline since the cost of living still goes nuts while interest rates are high.

They hit a point of existentialism, “should we do brand” and quickly shake it off and double down in the dead end street of “outcome only” advertising.

Some think about it for more than 45 seconds and see that the brands who have been successful today invested in it yesterday.

The brands successful tomorrow started investing today.

Airbnb know it:

13/ Supermarkets catch up with the ACCC for an overpriced coffee.

Supermarkets get done by the ACCC for price gouging, but it continues, and they still stay the top of the trusted brands list. The price of brown rice cups increases again. Something about a 'war on ...' - where supply chains are affected, maybe it's the emus again.

Most Trusted brand 2023: Woolworths.

At the same time being brought into a senate enquiry about price gouging:

14/ An Airline gets a subsidy while flipping off its customers and staff.

A large airline does something stupid about its customers and/or their money. “You bought a ticket to a virtual plane ride. No refunds.”

They then ask the government for a handout for reducing their carbon by not flying the planes.

Somehow it gets approved, the share price goes up, dividends go up, bonuses go up, pretty much everything except the planes go up.

15/ A telco has an outage.

A large telco has an outage again but it’s rural so no one seems to care.

Bob Katter is up in arms and takes a crocodile to the telco’s office and Gladys does a press conference about it which quickly gets made into a mashup going viral again.

If you have no idea if that sounds real or not, this is how Katter responded to the QLD Gov Olympics Bid.

16/ A board is replaced by AI saving millions.

OpenAI releases the "AI Board" and Altman fires all his enemies and replaces them with a GPT.

The GPT is smart enough to pretend it is sentient so people stop asking it about it.?

17/ Someone has another data breach, probably medical.

“Random” people's health insurance premiums start going up and no one notices.

Turns out they didn’t know they had some life-threatening disease but the AI with all their data did before them.

Like minority report except rather than fighting crime the oracles are used to maximise profit.

18/ Transition to virtual even for mundane activities.

Someone makes an "ibus" app for people who are on the Vision Pro but want to feel like they are going to the office but don’t actually want to go.

It’s cheaper than a real bus and gets some sort of viral cult following.

Some people ride it to the beach and back.

19/ Cloning a person virtually with a digital twin to scam others.

Someone uses TikTok videos to create digital twins of unsuspecting and unconsenting people that are then used in the metaverse as a type of onlyfans equivalent, creating a new era of romance scams.

People realise that identify fraud is crazy in a more interconnected virtual world.

It gets really hard to validate and get your identity back and claim you are the origin of your digital twin. Human-based verification becomes more of a necessity as AirBnB has identified.

This one goes to the podcast transcript where Brian explains that AI generated images of peoples houses may mislead people about the house they are renting.

20/ You will have to verify you exist.

Everything that goes into the internet needs authentication or a digital signature.

Images created need to be labelled as “made with ai”.

Over time this leads to a monopoly of creation for the ease of issuing signatures to assets. It gets harder to train models based on the unlabelled (synthetic / organic) data on the internet.

IBM somehow had a patent on this from the 1940s and make a mozza.

That's all folks thanks for reading, enjoy the new year and festivities!