The year ahead

Read it first on my Substack

The past year — heck, the past month — has brought massive change to the tech and media landscape: The ongoing implosion of the crypto market, the ongoing implosion of Twitter, ChatGPT’s parlor trick/portend of AI’s impending dominance.

Looking into next year, generative AI and novel social media platforms seem like good bets for our next major trends. But below the hype, there will be all sorts of technological advancements laying the groundwork for our next big breakthrough. Here I’d like to highlight a few of the areas that I’m excited about, two technical and one conceptual.

Simulation

It already feels like we’re living in a decreasingly “real” world, doesn’t it? Art hallucinated by machines, fictive money generated by machines, metaverses constructed within machines. In this context, handing over increasing proportions of process and activity generation to the machines feels like a natural continuation. I’m thinking about this in two parts:

Simulated activity

This is the realm of agent-based modeling, cellular automata (currently having a minor moment on TikTok), and other attempts to induce interesting behavior out of automated agents within strict rulesets. We’re seeing the potential success of simulation as a creative endeavor right now…