Future Beat: Stepping forward

At Dubai Internet City this week, 2024's Step Dubai conference provided boundless optimism and plenty of start-ups looking to make their mark.

There were FinTech, AgriTech, EdTech and SportsTech start-ups full of budding entrepreneurs pitching to investors, customers and seemingly anyone who would listen about how their offerings would change the world.

It was a stark contrast to the 2023 climate for start-ups when rising interest rates took a toll on investments and dampened the industry's mood around the world.

Step Dubai provided a different vibe.

One company, Qyubic, promoted its e-commerce deals platform for shoppers.

Another, Zenimal, showed off a screenless meditation device that closely resembled a turtle.

There was also something called "The Infinity Glove", which translated sign language into speech.

All in all, despite ample cynicism surrounding tech, it was a good reminder about how ideas can fuel optimism, something that's all too often in short supply.

Cody Sigel Combs , Future Editor

The Big Story

Que Sora Sora?

In brief | In 1956, Doris Day topped the charts with her song, 'Qué Será, Será.' Roughly translated from Spanish, that simply means "what will be, will be".

The song has since become synonymous with the notion of not worrying about the future, and instead, living in the moment.

Fast-forward to the here and now, shortly after OpenAI announced Sora (no relation to the song, of course), and the notion of not worrying about the future seems incredibly naive.

Sora, the company's text-to-video project powered by artificial intelligence, captured the world's imagination by providing incredibly lifelike videos based on just a few prompt lines of text.

In the context of technology, it's an incredible feat with quite a few potential positive uses.

In the context of ethics, there are countless questions about misuse, although OpenAI seems to be trying to get out in front of that.

“We’re also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora,” the company said shortly after it was announced.

It also remains to be seen exactly how Sora is trained, and where all the data it uses comes from.

Why it matters | Just when it looked like the world was getting more comfortable with the idea of working with, living with, coping with, and even benefitting from artificial intelligence, a new development comes along and almost immediately causes both wonderment and concern.

On paper, the idea of text-to-video might not sound like much, but from the brief examples provided by OpenAI, the lifelike videos that would normally take countless hours to produce coming to fruition with just a few strokes of the keyboard managed to humble the world.

The fact that the world is still talking about Sora more than a week after it was announced speaks volumes. Even more significant, OpenAI gave Sora a limited release, in part to a “red team” within the company, so it could monitor how it is used.

Quoted | “Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals”

– OpenAI statement

?Future in focus

Infinity glove | Lebanon start-up has high hopes for sign language translation glove

Seeing is not believing | Attempts to sway voter opinion with AI-generated video and audio have regulators scrambling to keep up

The Nvidia effect | Stock surges and Big Tech players scramble for more investments

Beyond drones | How defence experts imagine war in the 2040s

Predicting the future: signal or noise?

Most of the major tech players that make up our daily digital lives have come together and signed an accord to eventually adopt “reasonable precautions” that would prevent AI tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections and the democratic processes all over the world.

“Everybody recognises that no one tech company, no one government, no one civil society organisation is able to deal with the advent of this technology and its possible nefarious use on their own,” said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shortly after signing the accord.

This is a signal: Big Tech has been humbled and, frankly, is still reeling from the unaccounted surge of social media where fake news ran rampant and the psychological side effects of social media products were still unknown.

While the dustbin of history is littered with similar agreements, it does seem the last few years of regulatory criticism has sunk in.

It's a small win for governments around the world demanding action, but there's still a long way to go to see if any of these promises can be effective. Accountability is a continuing process, not an empty promise.

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