Looking back to 2024: From AI to Trump – what will history remember?

At the end of every year, journalists like to look back and see where our predictions held up or failed, what the biggest events of the year were, and what the year as a whole really meant.

When I started doing this for 2024, I was surprised at how many things there were happened.

Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race! Donald Trump was almost assassinated! … and convicted of 34 crimes! … and re-elected! Elon Musk became his right-hand man. Israel’s war in Gaza resulted in further fighting with Hezbollah and Iran, which dissipated frighteningly quickly (unless I’m speaking too soon). Out of nowhere, the Syrian rebels overthrew a regime that was more than 50 years old.

We have had a new, alarming bird flu epidemic that is increasingly spreading from animals to people. (If you haven’t heard of it, it’s because people apparently never want to think about pandemics again.) Self-driving cars have gone from fantasy to widespread reality (at least where I live in the Bay Area).

AI has once again grown by leaps and bounds: you can now create much better images, get comprehensive research reports on any topic, and talk to models for free that perform well on a wide range of tasks (and still have some glaring fundamental flaws).

One of the biggest challenges in writing such a retrospective is figuring out, in a sea of ​​events, which events will really stick five, ten, or even 50 years from now. Our news cycles move very quickly these days. Nothing stays in the headlines or in the discourse for long – we chew through events, interpret them, memorize them and assume them.

The impact on the lives of millions of people will absolutely continue, but then the discourse moves on to the next topic – this week, the United Healthcare shooter; next week, who knows? In the fast-paced nature of this environment, it can be really difficult to keep track of which events are momentous or even world-changing and which are quickly forgotten.

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There are few things that are more humbling to me than reading annual reviews from the past. They rarely mention what we might now consider the most important events of that year: the founding of Google in 1998 or Amazon in 1994; the invention of the modern Internet in 1983; the development of a highly effective antiviral HIV regimen in 1996.

Looking back, by far the most important event of 2019 was the report in late December in Chinese-language media about a strange new disease. But Vox’s 2019 review highlighted Trump’s first impeachment trial (remember that?) and the longest government shutdown in history (I completely forgot about that).

Of course, it is impossible to predict with certainty in advance which new virus will kill millions of people and which, like most, will disappear quietly and uneventfully. And if you have a way to identify Amazons and Googles in advance, I suspect you’re using it to become fabulously rich instead of writing news articles. But there are some general trends to learn from here.

Politics matters and has a huge impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. But the things we highlight in politics are often not the things that matter most.

A government’s regulatory changes that destroy nuclear power, speed vaccine development or fund AIDS prevention in Africa are often far more important than the most important political battles of the year. International events are important, but they are exceedingly difficult to predict.

No one I spoke to saw the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria coming – even the experts often assumed that there would be little chance of the frozen civil war even getting off the ground this year, let alone that this shocking result comes about. (The rapid collapse of the Afghan state after the US withdrawal also surprised many forecasters. The lesson: wars can remain seemingly at a stalemate for a long time and then change very, very quickly.)

The other takeaway is that technology is important.

In the long run, the most world-changing events of the 20th century were often inventions: the antibiotics and vaccines that reduced child mortality from half of all children to virtually zero; the washing machines and vacuum cleaners that transformed housework and the air conditioning that changed settlement patterns in the United States; the changes in our civic culture and society brought about by radio, then television, then computers, then smartphones.

Every technologist likes to claim they are the next step on that path, and most of them are wrong – but someone will be right, and anyone who writes off massive technological changes in our lives is even more wrong.

For this reason, I find it particularly helpful to have one question in mind as I look back on 2024: What about my life this year would have shocked me most if I had known about it in 2014? And the answer, at least for me, is clearly artificial intelligence.

If I want a specific piece of art, I type a few words and create it; When I try to make sense of a technical text, I ask a language model for its interpretation.

Self-driving cars are cool, but we knew in 2014 that people were trying to make this happen. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and tensions between Israel and Gaza increased. The Syrian Civil War was already underway. For the most part, the developments in 2024 wouldn’t have surprised me too much. But the capabilities of modern AI systems far exceed anything we could have imagined a decade ago.

But that might just be me – I use AI more than many of our readers. So I ask you: What about your life today would have shocked you most in 2014? This could be the real answer to the most important thing that happened this year.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Register here!