The year of future invasion

Listen to article

This is the time for the yearender. 2024 should be remembered as the year when the future invaded our lives and when we were too busy to care or pay attention. Our choices speak volumes about these trends.

It was a record election year. Nearly half of the world's population voted this year, and more than half of these elections produced populist outcomes. What explains this? Dissatisfaction with the status quo and the ruling elite? The decline of institutions resulting in the flattening of state superstructures? Murphy's law? Election meddling by hostile actors? A bit of everything, I suppose. But also something else. We shall get back to this "something else" in a bit.

You can laugh at Murphy's law because it is made up half in jest, but it aligns perfectly with the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is bound to increase. That which can go wrong will go wrong - ergo, a reality of life.

Even the best institutions tend to decline when you introduce an unfair amount of new variables - more population, for instance, or cutting-edge technology competing with your credibility. When institutions decline, the state's superstructure caves in and becomes flat.

The dissatisfaction with the ageing ruling elite and its refusal to change and adapt to evolving times is a verifiable reality. To hide its inflexibility, privilege, entitlement and occasional incompetence, this elite relies heavily on secrecy, which breeds paranoia and contempt. Paranoia and contempt divert focus from substantive discussions towards theatrics, often empowering charlatans.

The diffusion of national boundaries due to the explosion of social media is not new. This makes the job of hostile election meddlers easier. Combining all the above factors will invariably get the most volatile mix useful to these bad actors.

But the "something else" we hinted at earlier explains many of these tumultuous developments. My regular readers may remember my piece published in this space in September titled "Why States Fear Complexity". In it, I identified two factors reshaping our reality: acceleration and complexity. In that very column, I also quoted Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, defining change as the process by which the future invades our lives. Consider the growing complexity and acceleration in our societies as the future's source of ingress into our lives.

Acceleration is caused by exponential population growth and the breakneck pace of technological innovation. Complexity results from these elements and a myriad of other factors, like climatic decay and the human desire to live in large groups, such as megacities. As I pointed out, no state is equipped to deal with such massive currents of change.

One example of how complexity blindsided state regulators is the 2008 financial crisis. Watch The Big Short to understand how most regulators were out of their depth regarding instruments like subprime mortgages and credit default swaps. The bankruptcy of FTX is another example. This complexity has only grown over the years, even if real finance has become a figment of our imagination.

With Trump's outstanding victory, you can already see the shape of things to come. For instance, cryptocurrencies, which you might have written off under a Harris administration, are going from strength to strength. There's even talk of Bitcoin strategic reserves and the creation of a new department in the US named after another cryptocurrency. How this trend will pan out in countries like Pakistan, which refuse to even acknowledge cryptocurrencies, is an open question.

Likewise, we have discussed breakthroughs in AI at length in the past. Even as the US lags behind Europe in laying down a regulatory framework, the advent of Trump's second term makes further progress in regulation highly unlikely.

In innovation, it is a race to the finish with China. The same can be said of quantum computing. Unlike American companies, China uses lasers for quantum computing. We still have to wait and see which version is more scalable and error-free.

Another significant development, to my great chagrin, is the gradual but total demise of the mainstream media. Take the examples of India and the US: there is no correlation between punditry and political outcomes.

The mainstream media seems to have lost all credibility in the face of a twin onslaught from charged social media and AI. These edifices still exist but are marked for demolition. My money is on the early demise of CNN. In our region, where global trends take their sweet time to arrive, media outlets enter zombie mode, going through routine motions while knowing the consumer's attention left the building long ago.

AI innovations are particularly life-threatening to the entertainment business. With text-to-image and animation platforms like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo producing photorealistic results, you can understand why many film and TV directors are worried about their jobs. These technologies can whip up complex, multilayered, gripping and nuanced scripts within seconds, and similar software can generate an entire episode or movie within minutes. No big production budgets are needed, and the number of takes is no longer a limiting factor. AI software can even help with distribution.

In medicine, technology is already producing impressive results: exoskeletons and bioelectric devices for disabled bodies, dual-targeting Alzheimer's drugs, new schizophrenia treatments, advancements in some cancer therapies and an HIV prevention drug with 100% efficacy among African women. According to renowned scientist Michio Kaku, progress in quantum computing could make finding a cure for cancer much easier by enabling countless simulations to run simultaneously at lightning speed.

Arthur C Clarke's third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. From here onwards, we will most likely live in magical times. But this magic will primarily benefit the rich. For the poor and working class, job displacement caused by automation will bring suffering. In the short term, the nature of work may change, positioning humans as overseers of AI. If you snooze, you lose - but this is only a transitory phase.

Keep Clarke's third law in mind, and remember the movie Idiocracy, which aptly illustrates the misplaced priorities of mortals who invest in superficial things rather than their own intelligence. Technological advancement is no guarantee of improved intellect. Consequently, you can witness the growth of climate denial, which may seal humanity's fate.

All this — from just one year.