New York Times: The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2023. “Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in technology to predict the tech that may affect your life in a big way — and the tech that will most likely be a fad. Before we get into that, though, let’s take a quick look back at 2022.”
The Next Web: What to expect from AI in 2023 . “From the AI developer who tried to convince the world that one of Google’s chatbots had become sentient to the recent launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it’s been 12 months of non-stop drama and action. And we have every reason to believe that next year will be both bigger and weirder.”
The Verge: Podcasting could be in for a rocky 2023. “It feels like 2022 was the year when podcasting came back to earth. After years of go-go growth, podcast hits going mainstream, major corporate investment, and hype about the market to come ($4 billion by 2024!!), optimism about the industry hit the wall of an uncertain economy. M&A took a breather, advertising got tighter, and companies started laying off audio employees after years of frenzied hiring. What does 2023 have in store?”
NiemanLab: This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!). “It is at this point that the most organized people in late capitalism will rise up about a very small matter and demand something better: An RSS for the people, open source, easily used, and not some weird niche version for podcasts or that uses AI.”
Stanford University: What to Expect in 2023 in AI. “This year’s biggest headline might have been generative AI, but what should we expect from the field in 2023? Four Stanford HAI faculty members describe what they expect the biggest advances, opportunities, and challenges will be for the coming year.”
News@Northeastern: Twitter, Meta And Tiktok Dominated 2022. What Will The Social Media Landscape Look Like In 2023?. “Social media is such an integral part of modern life that any change on a platform can be seismic, and this past year was defined by change. TikTok’s star continued to rise, Meta struggled to maintain relevance as Mark Zuckerberg committed to the Metaverse and Twitter imploded under Elon Musk. Northeastern University experts say the social media landscape in 2023 will continue to be defined by these power players––but in ways that we might not expect.”
Futurism: Google And Oxford Scientists Publish Paper Claiming AI Will “Likely” Annihilate Humankind. “In a recent paper published in the journal AI Magazine, the team — comprised of DeepMind senior scientist Marcus Hutter and Oxford researchers Michael Cohen and Michael Osborne — argues that machines will eventually become incentivized to break the rules their creators set to compete for limited resources or energy.”
Newswise: Which Companies Could Become Maestros of the Metaverse?. “IFI CLAIMS – a Digital Science company dedicated to providing the world’s most trusted patent data for research, innovation and technology – says patent applications provide telling insights into the leaders of innovation.”
Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!): The Metaverse in 2040 . “Hype? Hope? Hell? Maybe all three. Experts are split about the likely evolution of a truly immersive ‘metaverse.’ They expect that augmented- and mixed-reality enhancements will become more useful in people’s daily lives. Many worry that current online problems may be magnified if Web3 development is led by those who built today’s dominant web platforms.”
Stat: Forecasting the Omicron winter: Experts envision various scenarios, from bad to worse. “Since the Omicron variant was discovered four weeks ago, epidemiologists have been crunching data as fast as scientists on the front lines can produce it to scope out what the newest coronavirus variant means for the pandemic this winter and beyond. While many uncertainties remain, disease modelers have cranked out several potential visions for what the first months of 2022 may have in store. Worst case — they could bring the deadliest phase of the pandemic yet. But even the most optimistic scenarios aren’t exactly pretty.”
CNET: 5 trends to shake the world in 2022: Predictions for the year ahead. “Even before the momentous events of 2020 and 2021 shook up the planet, the tectonic plates of culture, society and technology were already shifting and reshaping the world. The pandemic took those changes and accelerated them, exacerbated them, and in some cases, threw them into chaos. As we speed into 2022, one question remains: where are we headed next?”
NiemanLab: Legacy news orgs dump their podcast strategies. “News outlet leaders believe that, since others are perceived to have success with podcasting, their payoff must be right around the corner. They see news of multimillion-dollar acquisitions and distribution deals, or derivative rights deals with major stars attached, and believe theirs will happen…soon. But I believe that 2022 is going to be the year that changes. Remember all those pivots to video? The same thing will happen to podcasting: a lot of thrashing around meant to replace one magic-bullet podcasting strategy with another.”
The Verge: The Next Privacy Crisis. “Writer and researcher Erica Neely says that laws and social norms aren’t prepared for how AR could affect physical space. “I think we’re kind of frantically running behind the technology,” she tells The Verge. In 2019, Neely wrote about the issues that Pokémon Go had exposed around augmented locations. Those issues mostly haven’t been settled, she says. And dedicated AR hardware will only intensify them. Smartphone cameras — along with digital touchup apps like FaceTune and sophisticated image searches like Snap Scan and Google Lens — have already complicated our relationships with the offline world. But AR glasses could add an ease and ubiquity that our phones can’t manage.”
Ars Technica: “Wayforward Machine” provides a glimpse into the future of the web. “What could the future of the Internet look like? With the digital world of the 21st century becoming a pit of unwanted ads, tracking, paywalls, unsafe content, and legal threats, ‘Wayforward Machine’ has a dystopian picture in mind. Behind the clickbaity name, Wayforward Machine is an attempt by the Internet Archive to preview the chaos the world wide web is about to become.”
Washington Post: The covid endgame: Is the pandemic over already? Or are there years to go?. “Innumerable predictions over the course of the pandemic have come up lame. Some scientists have sworn off soothsaying. But as they learn more about the coronavirus that bestowed covid-19 on mankind, they build models and make projections and describe the hurdles that remain before people can pull off the masks and go about their lives. The good news is there is some fuel for optimism.”
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