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From 2023 to 2024: The top 4 tech trends

In this final newsletter of the year, we’re leaning on the wisdom of four leaders within Project Liberty’s Global Alliance for Responsible Tech to tease out four big trends that weave together responsible tech's current reality and future potential.

• Sandra Khalil is the Head of Partnerships and Trust and Safety Lead at All Tech Is Human, where she is building the responsible tech ecosystem.
• Mark Graham is Director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, where he works to help make the web more useful and reliable.
• Dr. Maggie Little is the Founding Director of the Georgetown University Ethics Lab, a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and a professor of philosophy at Georgetown.
• Aaron Huey is a National Geographic photographer and Founder & Chief Creative of Amplifier, a media lab building campaigns to amplify the most important movements of our time.

// Trend #1: the rise of a new technology

Just two letters dominated the tech world in 2023: AI. The mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence—alongside grappling with all of its implications—was the dominant story in 2023.

Aaron Huey said, “I remember the first time I heard that a local news organization was producing thousands of stories a week using AI,” and Dr. Maggie Little (pictured above) declared generative AI to be an “avalanche.” She said, “the speed at which this is moving and the implications it may have is, I believe, a moment in time.” 

Avalanche it was. From the articles we linked to each week to the events we shared, nearly every organization, news outlet, and podcast tried to understand this fast-moving technology. On one hand, all the attention was for good reason: AI continues to reveal itself as a once-in-a-generation technology capable of shaping everything from our jobs to the shared sense of truth vital for democracy. On the other hand, the press and attention on AI exacerbated the hype, fear, and conjecture about the impacts of this technology, and made it harder to understand the long-term impacts of a technology still in its infancy.

In reflecting on the year, Mark Graham pointed to three separate examples of how people tried to align AI with human interests and safety considerations: 

1. In March, an open letter was published, now signed by more than 33,000 people, calling for a pause for at least 6 months of giant AI experiments.
2. In May, more than 350 executives, researchers, and engineers working on AI signed a one-sentence open-letter warning that AI might pose an “existential threat to humanity.”
3. In October, the US White House issued an Executive Order on the "Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence."

// Trend #2: the new regulatory wave

The rise of AI in 2023 coincided with the emergence of emboldened efforts to reign in the harms caused by big tech.

From a new advisory by the US Surgeon General on the risks posed by social media to young people to the newest Meta whistleblower citing corporate negligence that put teens at risk to increased enforcement by the EU to make tech platforms safer and the passage of the world’s first AI regulation, the risks of harmful tech entered mainstream public consciousness and provoked a response. 

Emboldened by the belief that they didn’t do enough to regulate social media and data privacy, regulators and activists spent this year trying to make the existing tech safer.

Sandra Khalil (pictured above) said, “We saw governments worldwide engage with their industry leaders, expert thinkers, and advocacy groups, like those organizations in Project Liberty’s Global Alliance, to address the challenges posed by AI, emphasizing the responsible development and deployment of technologies above infinite innovation. This achievement is a pivotal inflection point laying the foundation for much-needed guardrails as AI becomes increasingly integral to optimization across sectors.”

// Trend #3: the search for shared truth

At a time when tech platforms are fueling polarization in the US, the experts from Project Liberty’s Alliance highlighted the need to fight against misinformation and disinformation and build a shared sense of truth.

Aaron Huey (pictured above) said, “As we get closer to the 2024 Presidential election, there will be a veritable tsunami of misinformation and disinformation, the likes of which we have never seen. The responsible tech movement will have to deliver tools to help sort truth from fiction and work harder than ever to create media literacy programs to prepare the public.”

When asked what success might look like at the end of 2024, Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine, suggested that we’ll better recognize the importance of archives as anchors of truth. If we were to zoom ahead one year and look back at 2024, he said, “These archives have been acknowledged as vital infrastructure, instrumental in fostering our understanding of media's impact. Furthermore, they have proven invaluable in differentiating misinformation and disinformation from authenticated facts and truths, thanks to their clear provenance and reproducibility.”

// Trend #4: the new relationships between humans and computers

As the world becomes increasingly technologized, humans are partnering with computers in new ways, raising questions of ethics, originality, productivity, and what is actual intelligence.

• In reference to a local news organization using AI to churn out news articles, Aaron Huey said, “the hundreds of thousands of stories produced by AI highlights the need for rigorous standards and ethical guidelines for AI in journalism.”
• Mark Graham (pictured above) said, “claims of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will surface, sparking debates due to the vague definition of AGI. However, it's anticipated that certain AI will surpass individual human capabilities in many significant ways. Material, social, and job-loss impacts of AI will start to dominate the headlines as AI technology is applied to nearly every dimension of our world.”

While technologies are prompting us to interrogate what makes us human, what makes art original, and how we do our jobs, shake-ups in the tech sector are leading to an unbundling and re-bundling of tech talent. Sandra Khalil pointed out how “the 2023 downsizing within big tech companies will channel creativity and innovation into new sectors in 2024. We'll see the benefits of an influx of brilliant minds in civil society, academic, governmental, and entrepreneurial roles. These professionals will redirect their invaluable expertise toward spaces with more direct social impact and public service beyond the confines of corporate environments.”

// Final reflection from Project Liberty

From the fight for truth to the threat to democracies to the need to align fast-moving technologies with human values, the stakes have never been higher, and the risks have never been greater. But the opportunity to build a tech future that gives people ownership and agency over their data has also never been more possible. We’re honored to continue to work alongside the many organizations in the Project Liberty Alliance to build a better web. We’ll pick up that work in the new year. Happy holidays!

Other notable headlines

// 🖥 Google and startup Quantinuum performed breakthrough experiments in quantum computing, but conflicting views of the results reveal challenges, according to an article in WIRED.

// 📽 An article in The Atlantic explored why nobody knows what’s happening online anymore. The internet is becoming more fragmented as algorithms customize content, fracturing a shared sense of reality.

// 🏛 Social media companies make it extremely difficult for anyone to study them, according to an article in Tech Policy Press that suggests policy is urgently needed to enable better social media research.

// 📱 TikTok is feeding young users a stream of intense, polarized, and hard-to-verify videos about the Israel-Hamas war, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal.

// 💬 Apple’s newest headache is Beeper Mini, an app that offers iPhone messaging on Android phones. Its rise and battle with Apple has the attention of antitrust regulators, according to an article in The New York Times.

// 🇮🇳 YouTube is the last bastion of unbiased journalism in India, according to an article in Rest of the World. As the government clamps down on free press, journalists are going solo to report unbiased news.

// 🤖 An article in The Atlantic explored the biggest questions in 2024 about artificial intelligence. Is the technology set to take another leap forward? Will it swing the election in the US?

// 👤 According to a new report, more than 1,000 child sex abuse images have been found in a dataset training image generators, as reported in an article in Ars Technica.

// 🤔 What does Gen Z really think about AI? The Washington Post spoke to young people about how artificial intelligence is shaping their future.

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