What are some tech predictions for 2024 that actually could happen?

Google will kill a product or service you use and like.

Yeah I think Google podcasts is getting killed in a few months.
- And YouTube music for podcasts sucks. And I use it for music.

Elon Musk is gonna say and/or do something stupid. That's tech, right?

I hate /r/technology. Thanks for reminding me
- you mean !technology@lemmy.world
Statistically that has already happened
- I'm surprised it didn't happen by 12:02 AM on the first.

Here are some things I think will happen.

Nueralink first implanted to a human. Likely the first person gets killed also probably due to complications.

Increase lifespan of pig heart implants to humans.

Introduction of autonomous drones that are allowed to make decisions who to kill, I predict it's going to be tested in Ukraine.

We start to see more widespread effects of LLM in general in our society, lost of jobs, and so on.

Release of Windows 12, possibly backtracks Windows 11 decision of requiring TPM.

Release of Windows 12, possibly backtracks Windows 11 decision of requiring TPM.
I hope so, I built my own PC less than 4 years ago and it can't run windows 11. I don't care that much at the moment because I'm not a fan of some of the UI choices (and I only use Windows for gaming anyways) but once support is dropped for Windows 10 I'll need options.
- There’s always Linux.
- You can install win11 on older hardware. Even update win10 to win11 from older hardware. It is just a matter of disabling the right settings.
  For a fresh install, use Rufus to create the bootable usb.
  An update install is a bit trickier, but you can check the following article: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-install-windows-11-on-older-unsupported-pcs/
- Why is nobody else recommending buying a TPM? They don't seem that expensive.
- Is the TPM requirement the only one holding your PC back from installing it officially? There's workarounds to that
Release of Windows 12, possibly backtracks Windows 11 decision of requiring TPM.
Not going to happen. Microsoft makes a ~~lot of money~~ few bucks by locking windows keys to the motherboard.

That tech will regress due to the greed of tech corporations.

Tech is regulated by the big corporations that consistently either throttle innovation or degrade what already is established because they all want to figure out how to squeeze as much profit out of everything possible while blocking or preventing anything new that might compete with them.

Any new innovation that will occur will be military and will either have a machine gun attached to it or can deliver a high explosive.

One potential regression that I see is that the current generative models are abandoned, after being ruled as "infringing copyrights" by multiple countries. The tech itself won't disappear but it'll be considerably harder to train newer ones.
The most problematic part is however if one of them survives; likely Google. That would lead to a situation as in your second paragraph.

Solid state batteries being used in EVs

I just want good, cheap, and mass production ready solid state batteries of any sort. Right now, anything that's on the market either isn't good or isn't cheap, and none of it is mass produced... Often all three.
If we get over the hurdle of something we can mass produce for cheap that's as good as, or better than the existing lithium tech that we have, I'm in.
I read they're making progress on salt batteries.

The iPhone 16 will be the most powerful iPhone ever created

God damn you.

Either Uber or Lyft go bankrupt.

A lot of unicorns that aren't currently profitable also go bankrupt as their funding dries up and there is no more available loans.

Uber has posted profits for the last two quarters. Lyft hasn't yet been profitable, but they have been reducing their losses quite a bit.
I don't think either of them will fail this year. Some AI gold rushing unicorns out there certainly will. It's hard to know which though; they're still private companies.
I'm hopeful that government austerity measures ease up before that happens too much. There have already been so many layoffs.
- Layoffs may continue.
  Profitable tech companies have to maintain their existing businesses, but development of new businesses is likely to stay low and unprofitable businesses are still scrambling to hit profitability before bankruptcy.
Rates are coming down, and everyone is bullish as fuck about the economy, so idk that the loans are gonna be drying up.
- Even the anticipated cut of 2.25% is still higher than why the Silicon Valley boom was based on. You are also seeing the cuts happening due to an anticipated recession.

I like this one. I've been hoping for some host-your -own AI models that I can dump into a system with a bucket of TPUs and a decent GPU for processing and get my own version of something like chat GPT at home then train it on the entire collective works of documentation and help articles about the software I usually do support for so it can act as a defacto repository of "natural language" chat/search for troubleshooting.

GPT-5 releases and it's a bigger leap forward than most industry experts were predicting.

It will be a leap year

You're a leap year.
- Your mom is a leap year.

Computer components will get a bit more expensive except motherboards for some reason.

The SSD price hike prediction is really fucking infuriating. Doesn't seem like we're aiming to replace HDDs ever at this pace.
- Density keeps going up on magnetic platters while prices keep dropping on a $:TB comparison. I see no reason to wish for HDD to ever go away so long as they are cheaper and better for mass storage.
- I just got a new work PC and they finally have PC's with a SSD . My old PC was so infuriating to use . Would have to turn it on 30 minutes before my shift to be able to login on time .
SSD prices are going up already

Dippin Dots actually has helped fuel the faux-meat industry!

Multiple countries demonstrating sustained, net-positive fusion reactions seems extremely likely.

Or it takes another 20years
- This has already happened in 2 labs. Final product and the "free energy revolution" are still years/decades away, but this is still an amazing achievement.

My domain provider increasing prices "due to increased electricity costs". Already happened to my VPS and email.

New content for streaming is going to fall off a cliff. Except maybe for Apple, no streamer seems willing to put money into new flashy shows the way they used to.

If a new breakout TV show hits this year, it is likely going to be more in the model of IASIP or Shoresy.

Air fryer 2

AI finally decodes cetacean language.

Outside of unpredictable things like hacks which are bound to happen, always the potential of something with widespread impact, 2024 will be a year of increasing "AI" venture capital investment and some widely used online services are going to pivot or completely rebrand.

VR tv shows?

I think VR is going the other way.
Zuckerberg killed VR with the metaverse...
- he bought the perfect VR headset company and then made it very difficult to homebrew and sideload. Mark killed VR.
I thought 3d TV/movies were neat but not essential.

I feel like I don't want it to happen, but maybe artificial general intelligence?

I think we're still a bit far off from that. No doubt the models will be quite good, but they won't be anywhere near general intelligence.
- Cross modality is what is missing. We have models that can produce text, hear things, and see things really really well. Facilitating communication between these individual models, and probably creating some executive model to utilize them, is what's missing. We're probably still a few years from beginning to touch general intelligence
It probably won't happen until we move to new hardware architectures.
I do think LLMs are a great springboard for AGI, but I don't think the current hardware allows for models to cross the hump to AGI.
There's not enough recursive self-interaction in the network to encode nonlinear representations. So we saw this past year a number of impressive papers exhibiting linear representations of world models extrapolated from training data, but there hasn't yet been any nonlinear representations discovered and I don't think there will be.
But when we switch to either optoelectronics or colocating processing with memory at a node basis, that next generation of algorithms taking advantage of the hardware may allow for the final missing piece of modern LLMs in extrapolating data from the training set, pulling nonlinear representations of world models from the data (things like saying "I don't know" will be more prominent in that next generation of models).
From there, we'll quickly get to AGI, but until then I'm skeptical that classical/traditional hardware will get us there.

X, formerly known as Twitter, declares bankrupcy.

Peacock streaming network going to shut down.

I’m really hoping my email service gains more traction. People are so accustomed to crappy email providers that the current providers don’t really innovate anymore. I think it will actually have a chance of catching on, because it’s such a different way of doing email.

Check it out: https://port87.com

Great concept, how do you fund it? I imagine running an email service isn’t cheap.
- Right now I’m self funding it. I’m building out the enterprise features, like custom domains and domain user management, so I can start marketing to businesses. I’d like to be able to fund it to profitability without any outside investors.
  It’s actually surprisingly affordable to run an email service. Right now my biggest expense is the MySQL server. With one server node plus one backup node I should be able to handle several hundred active users.