At the end of each year, journalists like to look back and see where our predictions stuck or fell flat, what the biggest events of the year were, and what the whole year really meant.
As I started doing this for 2024 I was amazed at how much happened.
Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race! Donald Trump almost killed! …and convicted of 34 felonies! …and elected again! Elon Musk became his right-hand man. Israel’s war in Gaza has erupted into additional fighting with Hezbollah and Iran, which has resolved very quickly (unless I’m talking too soon). In some places, Syrian rebels have overthrown more than 50 years of regimes.
We had one New alarming bird flu epidemic Which is gradually jumping from animals to humans. (If you haven’t heard about it, it’s because people apparently don’t want to think about the pandemic ever again.) Self-driving cars are gone. From fantasy to reality (At least where I live in the Bay Area).
AI has grown by leaps and bounds, again: you can now make much better pictures, get extensive research reports on anything, and talk for free with models that perform well across a wide range of tasks (although there are still some glaring fundamental failures).
The biggest challenge in writing such a retrospective is figuring out which tides of events will really last five, 10 or even 50 years from now. Our news cycle moves very fast these days. Nothing stays in the headlines or the discourse for long — we chew on the facts, interpret them, meme them, and move on from them.
The consequences for millions of lives will be absolutely lasting, but then the discussion moves on to the next topic — this week, the UnitedHealthcare shooter; Next week, who knows? In this fast-paced environment, it’s really hard to remember which events are impactful, even world-changing, and which will be quickly forgotten.
Putting some perspective on the news
I find it more humbling than reading past year-reviews. They rarely mention what we might now identify as the most important events of that year: the founding of Google in 1998 or Amazon in 1994; Invention of the modern Internet in 1983; Development of a highly effective HIV antiviral regimen in 1996.
In retrospect, the most important thing that happened in 2019 was the reporting in Chinese-language media in late December of a strange new disease. Yet Vox’s 2019 review highlighted the first Trump impeachment (remember?) and the longest government shutdown in history (I totally forgot about that).
Of course, there’s no way to confidently predict in advance which new viruses will kill millions and which, like most, will peter out quietly and involuntarily. And if you have a way to pre-identify Amazon and Google, I guess you’re using it to get fabulously rich instead of writing news articles. But here are some general trends to learn from.
Political affairs have a huge impact on the lives of millions of people. But the things we often gloss over about politics aren’t the most important.
An administration controller that changes Nuclear power killsAccelerating vaccine development, or funding AIDS prevention in Africa, is often far more important than the highest-profile political battles of the year. International events are important, but they are extraordinarily difficult to predict.
The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria is unlikely to come to anyone I’ve spoken to – even as experts often expect that a frozen civil war is unlikely to last this year, let alone come to this shocking conclusion. (The rapid collapse of the Afghan state after the US withdrawal also surprised many predictions. The lesson: wars can have a long period of what looks like a stalemate and then change very quickly).
Another takeaway is that technology matters.
In the long run, the most world-changing events of the 20th century were often innovations: antibiotics and vaccines that took infant mortality rates down. Half of all children have virtually none; Washing machine and vacuum that Changing Domestic Labour And the air conditioner that Changed the pattern of settlement in the United States; Transforming our civic culture and society Brought by radioand then Televisionand then Computerand then Smartphone.
Every technologist likes to claim that they are the next step in that journey, and most of them are wrong — but someone will be right, and anyone who writes about massive technological change in our lifetime is even more wrong.
What will we remember?
For that reason, I found one question particularly helpful to keep in mind when reviewing 2024: What would have shocked me most about my life this year if I had known about it in 2014? And the answer there, at least for me, is unequivocally artificial intelligence.
When I want a very specific piece of art, I type a few words and create it; When I try to understand some technical text, I ask a language model to explain it.
Self-driving cars are great, but we knew in 2014 that people were trying to make it happen. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and tensions rose between Israel and Gaza; The Syrian civil war was already underway. Most of the size of 2024 wouldn’t surprise me too badly. But the capabilities of modern AI systems are far beyond what we could have imagined a decade ago.
But that could just be me – I use AI more than many of our readers. So I ask you: What would shock you most about your life today in 2014? This may be the real answer to what happened to the most important thing this year.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect Newsletter. Sign up here!
