What We’ll Probably See in 2023

Generated by author using Midjourney

We all like predictions about future technologies because if we’re wrong, we can reminisce about how naive we were (without realizing that we’re still naive). Here are some some fairly transparent trends we’ll likely see in 2023.

• Easy-to-create AI-generated giphies. “super mario jumping up and hitting a box that explodes” “quick zoom in of a cats eyes with a galaxy being reflected in them”.
• First commercially available animal proteins in supermarkets. It’ll probably be some milk alternative using lab grown whey to start, or a lab grown egg replacement, but it will be packaged, approved, and available to retail consumers.
• Worldwide Internet Service Providers. While Apple announced emergency satellite capability on the iPhone 14, we’ll see new services come online beyond Starlink. Project Kuiper will finally get going and by the end of the year, mobile phone or at least portable hubs will be available to use anywhere. It’ll be like we came out of a 15 year coma on satellite phones.
• Self-driving (sort of) taxi services will launch widely. We’ll see Waymo and Uber expand their efforts widely.
• Content we hate to write will be drafted first by machine. GPT3 and other technology will write out summaries and reports that we don’t really enjoy writing, based on events that it’s observed. This might lead to callousness in some industries because “report writing” was the disincentive for taking a strong action (e.g. drawing one’s gun). However, for the most part, it will help document things that usually don’t get document.

It could be that these trends are more of what I’m hoping for than likely outcomes, but there’s not a lot of downside of being wrong here.