Holiday vacation never seems to be long enough. When El Jefe told me I’d be writing theSync’s 2024 Preview, I thought he was sending me to Vegas to cover next week’s CES. But noooooooo. He wanted me to write a forward thinking piece about what to expect in 2024.

2023 Was a Weird Wild Year

We closed out 2023 with Apple accused of infringing on a smaller company’s 02 sensor patent on Apple Watches. The company formerly known as Twitter was valued at 71% less than its 2022 purchase price by some of Elon Musk’s buyout investors. ChatGPT burst into 2023 impressing and dazzling millions only to finish the year less impressive after numerous hallucinations and fallacies. Sam Altman finished the year with his OpenAI job while pushing a sketchy, eyeball scanning crypto.

Plenty of good things happened in 2023. We reported on them. But those are never as interesting as the crazy stuff that happens and Elon Musk is a constant source of material. We’re going to lead 2024 with 5 positive predictions you should expect to see this year.

The World Yawns at AI

This isn’t a bad thing, but a very good thing. There will be plenty of innovation in the AI space. Consumers just won’t be very impressed by it. We’re predicting this will be the year AI is embedded in everything and consumers will just expect experiences to be enhanced by AI. GPT-3 and Generative AI dazed and impressed many with its ability to write entire comic books or render derivative art.

General consumers will expect their cars to automatically respond, the next generation Keurig to use AI to brew the perfect cup of cheap, bland coffee, and music streamers the best collaborations between dead rappers and classic composers.

AI won’t command the headlines it did in 2023. It’ll just be here.

Regulators Put Teeth to AI Executive Orders

Real debates on AI ethics and the meaning of human labor are happening right now in ways that never happened during the rise of social media applications. Just as consumers come to expect AI to be in everything, they also expect AI to be a benefit to their lives and not a drag.

After a series of White House Executive Orders, the FCC, FTC, and the Courts will get a handle on derivative works, attribution, and usage of AI in specific domains. The impact of AI on jobs will be studied, and proposals outlining how worker rights and labor offsets should be protected when AI displaces workers.

The General Public Will See the First Robots

Last year, we covered the Plaggio’s carry-little, Gita robot. Pedestrians in New York didn’t know whether to ignore the thing, or ask the owner whatever the Hell it was. NYC also saw robotic trash cans used for the first time on street corners.

Robots have invaded selected Giant food stores and work in warehouses. We’ll begin seeing robots in neighborhoods doing rudimentary things like picking up trash at first. Privacy hawks will have many things to complain about, but certain communities will want the robots because they’ll have cameras that can deter crime.

Hardcopy Media Makes a Comeback

After the worst media merger of all time pulled the rug out from customers who paid to stream TV shows and ruined WestWorld, consumers will get smart and begin buying DVDs and copies of other hard media.

The streaming distribution model is fatally flawed, and streaming companies have no incentive of providing a full archive of content that was promised. Streaming company after streaming company has pulled content from its services. This year, a director’s fans will opt to purchase media instead of waiting for movies to arrive on streaming. Consumers should be especially concerns since a harbinger of doom is coming for Paramount. This is good for nobody.

Social Media Will See a Decline

The highly anticipated and wildly successful launch of Threads, followed by its hypersonic descent is an indicator of social media’s long range doom. 4.8 billion Internet users, 61% of the global population, spend an average of 151 minutes on social media a day. A day.

These numbers seem huge, but year-over-year growth has only grown 3.2% this year. We think 2024 will be the point of inflection pointing to social media’s demise. More Zennials and Gen Alphas are using TikTok than Facebook today. Don’t believe the hype on Facebook’s rise in Net income. Much of that is due to all the budget cuts after Facebook launched into the Metaverse no one wanted to visit.

I know what you’re thinking.

MJ, you were supposed to share positive predictions for 2024.

You, the Reader

I did.

Turning AI into a useful technology instead of something that rips off artists and resurrects dead rappers IS a good thing. Regulators stepping in to beef up labor protections of you and I makes a more stable society. And megamergers never worked for anyone except the CEOs who bail out of failures using golden parachutes.

These are our Top 5 for 2024.

Let’s read how well we do next year.