Here's how Artificial Intelligence technology will impact our lives in 2024

Physicist Niels Bohr was quite right when he said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” This is especially true for technology, and even more true for Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has been developing at a breakneck pace. With the spectacular launch of ChatGPT, AI came into its own last year. However, 2024 will define how we work with this powerful, shape-shifting technology. Defying Bohr, let me dust my crystal ball, and peer into it to see what 2024 could bring to us. Here are the top four, which will impact your life and work this year: 

ChatGPT becomes multimodal

So far, most of our conversations with ChatGPT and its ilk have been text. We will see other modes coming—pictures, video, voice. So, you will be able to take a picture of the contents of your refrigerator, for example, and ask it to give you a healthy or a decadent recipe based on what you have in there, and it will do so. It could also ‘read’ a video for you, and describe the plotline, or any other thing you ask it for. It could also be personalised, so that ChatGPT understands you and your work and gives you answers more attuned to your personality!

Generative AI will come to the phone

The Internet really took off when it came to smartphones, with apps bringing the world wide web alive to everyone. The same will happen with GenAI. ChatGPT apps are already available, but soon Google and others will start bringing you phones with GenAI baked in. Google will bring Gemini Nano to your phone, and Apple is rumoured to work on something called AppleGPT. The AI revolution will go further beyond, as apps start giving way to agents. An e-commerce app can surface deals for you, an e-commerce agent will figure out what you want and buy it for you, if you ask it to! This will give rise to new gadgets with AI as an interface—some like the AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 have already been launched.

AI will make the future of work the present

GenAI will start fundamentally transforming work in 2024, especially with products like Copilot, a chatbot, by Microsoft. Satya Nadella has declared that his company will be the ‘Copilot Company’; work and productivity will change the same way as it did when the original Word and Excel came in. 2024 will also reveal to us how jobs will get impacted—a fear that is in the mind of many whitecollar workers. GenAI is a cognitive, creative technology and people who harness it will be able to work much better and faster than people who do not. While AI might not take your job, a human using AI could.

AI may put democracy under threat

More than two billion people will elect their governments in the world’s largest democracies, including India, the US, the UK, and Indonesia. Technologies like deepfakes will be used aggressively and actively by many players to change narratives and voters’ minds. Some of this has already started in Bangladesh and other places, and even in India we have recently seen a spate of deepfakes being created. There is great trepidation that democracy itself could come under threat with the abuse of AI, much like Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 US elections. This and other threats have catalysed a race to regulation among countries, and corporations. Following the EU AI Act, many other countries and groups will release AI regulations. There will be an effort for global regulation on the model of nuclear IAEA or climate COP summits. Thus, 2024 promises to be a pivotal year for AI and will start defining how humans and AI live with each other. We must remember, however, that the agency is with us, and it is up to us to shape the kind of AI that is created and deployed. As Australian-American educator, Peter Drucker famously observed, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” We need to be very thoughtful of the future we are creating!

Also Read: Is ChatGPT the answer to your relationship problems?

Also Read: What Does the Future of Artificial Intelligence Hold?