What. A. Year. and fought for peace and justice. Inflation ; . , , , and were canceled, but in very different ways. , and so did… Who remembers? Ukrainians Iranians skyrocketed crypto cratered Rogan BoJo Holmes Djokovic Abe COVID left Fizz Brush? Tizz Lush? Bizz Muss? ; . , and . , . Apple reached 3 trillion the world reached 8 billion The Queen got off stage Will Smith got on stage While American women were forbidden to choose Italians chose fascism At least . ; . , but . , . ; . the metaverse was aborted Musk bought Twitter Trump sold NFTs Ring of Power was overrated Andor was andor-rated Macron got 5 years while R. Kelly got 30 COVID came back so did Lula , and . , and . , . “ ”? . The NYT acquired Wordle Argentina acquired a World Cup West Elm Caleb dated Kanye divorced Kaili made money SBF lost money Balle au centre ? No way to prevent this It’s Morbin’ time History has always rhymed; in 2022 it did so faster than ever But we’ve made it. And though many ( ) of my predictions for , , , and have fallen flat, there are two reasons why you should keep reading this article. Firstly… it’s fun! Secondly, because . Articles such as this one can act as catalysts to steer the conversation in the right direction. . but not all 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 the knowledge gained through planning for the future is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as events unfold We don’t know the answers, but we can at least ask useful questions 1. Jeff Bezos comes back to Amazon Current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has seen since he took its helm in 2021. Most of Amazon’s issues can be blamed on external factors ( ), but when you’re at the top, it is lucky to be smart AND smart to be lucky. Stakeholders cannot forgive such a heavy loss, and will soon beg ex-CEO and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to come back. They definitely could use his experience. They’ll even be able to use Disney for cover, as its board in late 2022. the company’s stock cut in half *Gestures Broadly at Everything* made a very similar move Bezos’ been “ ” for the past year. , … and is being reminded every day that . He will want to come back to protect the company he created, out of boredom, pride… or both. off He’s tweeted a bit played with rockets his ex-wife is leaving a better legacy than he is 2. Disney acquires Roblox With and , Disney needs to do something bold to regain shareholders’ favors. Historically, that usually predicts a major acquisition. Bob Iger back at the helm its stock in free fall Today, The Mouse rules almost every corner of modern entertainment… except gaming. Enters Roblox, with (the perfect Disney target audience). , approaching a valuation Disney can afford. Such an ambitious acquisition will allow Iger to boost his ego arguing he’s doing to improve Disney’s prospects. In fact, integrating Roblox ( ) to the wider Disney+ platform might be a great way to finance future series while gathering user data. 50+ million daily users, most of which are American or European 9 to 12 years olds Its stock is down 75% this year while everything $1.9B sales in 2021 3. Spotify monetizes AI music Artificially generated music already exists. You can give tools like a genre, a BPM, a key, and it will spit out a unique song in about 6 seconds. It’s magical… but limited. The “true” future of AI music is more likely to be based on prompts (which and already use). Tools like promise to make text-prompted music a reality, but . Soundful MidJourney ChatGPT Riffusion there is a long way to go Regardless of difficulty, making investments in this space will be worth it for actors like Spotify. The company knows what everyone’s taste is, and would be able to create and propose perfectly calibrated songs, without having to pay artists. This is especially relevant for simple genres like “white noise” and/or “easy listening,” which make up a large percentage of the platform’s usage. exactly 4. All tech companies fire 20% of their workforce Elon Musk is not a good manager, on that most of us can agree. But by while keeping the site (more or less) running, he is sure to have given other tech CEOs ideas. He’s also providing cloud cover for upcoming firings by sucking up all the attention in the room; who remembers that Facebook fired in November? firing 80% of the Twitter workforce 11,000 people , but will only accelerate in the coming months. There has been too much recruiting, for too little real created value, for too long. Thankfully, tech workers tend to be highly employable, and are . Large tech firms letting go of workers will favor the creation of new innovative start-ups, while also allowing long-unloved historical companies to strengthen their tech teams. It’s already started unlikely to struggle finding a new job 5. Morgan Stanley owns Twitter Speaking of Twitter… Musk signed up for to acquire the platform. This comes with interest payments of . , as a bit of napkin math shows. $13B in debt financing $1B+ per year That is not sustainable . . Since then, . That means the company will make $3B maximum if it stays the course. . If we assume Elon cut 60% of costs by firing everyone and stopping all R&D and not settling any ongoing litigations, he’s still got $2.2B in total costs and expenses… PLUS $1B+ in debt financing. Which means there’s a $200M hole. When that becomes apparent, will do what they do best, and repossess their assets. It’s probably what’s best for everyone at this point. In 2021, Twitter made $5B 90% of that was from advertising half the advertisers have stopped using the platform Costs last year were $5.6B at least banks 6. The “Apple Tax” starts a commercial war This is Twitter-adjacent… but about much more than Musk’s antics. It was in early December ’22 that “ ” announced Twitter plans to charge $11 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription on the iPhone in order to account for the 30 percent cut that Apple takes from in-app purchases. On the web, Twitter Blue will be priced at $7 per month. This very publicly acknowledges that Apple levies a tax on each iPhone-based transaction. Apple customers are 1 billion people on Earth. It’s unlikely they will care all that much about such a tax. But it materializes a trend between the haves and the have-nots, which Apple will not want to highlight. Tim Cook will go to war to avoid seeing the Twitter price difference become the norm. the wealthiest 7. Remote work and AI bury the middle class Globalization saw many blue-collar jobs off-shored from western countries to developing nations. Then came automation and robotization, and entire industries worth of jobs were wiped out. The same is happening today to white collar jobs. COVID made remote work successful, and companies are starting to realize that a worker in India can do the same job as someone at home in San Francisco… for a 10th of the cost. But this is just the beginning. While remote work is jobs in a familiar pattern, AI tools such as will make entire industries completely redundant. Customer care centers, for example, will no longer have a reason to be, except for premium brands. That’s gone in the blink of an eye. ; 2023 is when the cracks become too large to be ignored. off-shoring ChatGPT half a million jobs The middle class has slowly shrunk over the past decade 8. The great AI social rift is created Low-effort knowledge jobs in the very near future. But that will not apply to service jobs at luxury brands. In fact, these companies will use the benefits human to human communication to the benefits of paying a premium. will be replaced by AI highlight This trend has already started and is getting more pronounced every year. You can only talk to your airline if you have a first-class ticket, avoid being tracked if you have an iPhone, get size advice at Gucci… The increased implementation of AI will make one thing clear: there is one system for the rich, another for everyone else. Soon, talking to a human for customer support will be an exclusively upper middle-class experience. 9. Deepfake videos topple an S&P500 CEO It’s not only fake text and images that are getting better. Deepfake videos, too, are increasingly by the general public. Worryingly, companies and governments clearly don’t have the proper tools to fight them, short of resorting to full-scale authoritarianism. becoming easy to make It’s only a matter of time before a video emerges of . That video will be fake, but it will not matter as social algorithms are tuned to make controversial content spread faster than truths. The unlucky executive’s stock will tank before the truth comes out. Once the floodgates have opened, we will all be at risk… and any government-mandated medicine might be worse than the disease. an S&P500 CEO doing something ungodly to a pig 10. AI fuels the Culture Wars Video is striking, but . ChatGPT, in fact, is efficient. It can create thousands of articles, in a matter of hours, about any topic. If used intelligently by bad actors, it could have devastating effects. Today, fact-checkers are finding it hard to keep up in real time with human-made false information. Tomorrow, AI will create millions of fake articles and videos, tailored to individual readers, in a matter of hours. text is more efficient to spread misinformation incredibly We know from the past 5 years that . That was just a prelude. Now that everyone has picked a side for the culture wars, get ready for the Post-Truth society. it does not take much misinformation to tear the fabric of society real 11. All politics become about content moderation A Post-Truth society will likely birth a new wave of political questions. Should AIs be banned? Should training data be government-approved? Who is liable in case of a mistake? Are falsehoods illegal? How can we tell? What is considered spam? How hard should we strike down on them? In 2023, all politics will be about content moderation, with one question being repeated over and over again: ? Seeing how many countries veered towards authoritarianism in 2022, it’s likely we’re already seeing the beginning of an answer. Propaganda and total governmental control over media are, in a way, the strongest content moderation possible. how much freedom are we willing to give up in exchange for increased security 12. Tech makes us feel less alone With more and more AIs being readily accessible and easily usable, it’s only a matter of time before we use those tools to counteract the brought about by social media and other related social technologies. loneliness epidemic We’ve already seen start-ups working to use artificial intelligence to . It’s only a matter of time before become wide-spread. It may start with Cortana or Alexa-like avatars, but will quickly evolve. For those with no other options, talking to an AI is better than nothing. Whether this is a step in the right direction or not at all remains to be seen… and will heavily depend on the training data used. re-create the voices and personalities deceased loved ones such tools 13. We witness a training data disaster Present AIs are trained on man-made datasets. The articles we write, the images we draw, the videos we make… But future AIs may be trained on datasets created by AI, purposefully or not. This would, over time, amplify a thousand-fold any mistakes or unethical behavior that may have been hidden in the original training “material”. In 2023, a series of human errors will lead a prominent tech company to release an algorithm trained on artificial data, resulting in a very public disaster. The smart money is on a self-driving car accident, but to know it could be much worse than a few car crashes. we’ve heard enough about autonomous weapons 14. Social platforms start buying data As non-contaminated data-sets become rarer, they will become more expensive. Meanwhile, it will become harder to trust the information coming out of social media platforms, upon which millions of advertisers rely to make strategic decisions. This will lead to the creation of a new industry, from which social media platforms will buy training data-sets to train their algorithm. How to spot bot activity may well be the most valuable use case, but many others are sure to emerge. The Zucks, Musks and Spiegels of this world will be forced to invest to bring back trust to their platform, without which they are doomed. 15. Social Media as we know it dies Whatever means we may use to try to save it, social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years is dying. We once shared information only with the people we knew, or with whom we had developed para-social bonds. For a brief moment, marginalized groups even had the ability to . No more. speak directly to elites , and we now post primarily to reach people we know instead of the people we do. A new era is starting where entertainment and socialization are finally one and the same, closing a loop we may well have been building for the past 70 years. As you ring in 2023, go ahead and post those fireworks on Instagram if you still feel the urge. It might be the last time you do. TikTok and Youtube are at the top of the “social” game don’t 16. TikTok is not banned (unless China invades Taiwan) Talks of banning TikTok . . Firstly, because “ ” is more than Latin non-sense: TikTok is now , and banning it would likely lead to a lot of unhappy future voters, who right now are not really bothering anyone. have been around for years now They’ve heated up again in December, but will likely lead to very little Panem et circenses the world’s foremost entertainment company Secondly, because TikTok is a unique platform, a single-point-of-contact which aggregates billions of data-points from users. This has immense value for companies and governments alike. Since at this point America is just three corporations in a trenchcoat with a military, not a lot will be done about TikTok as long as its executives play ball (unless China invades Taiwan, which has not been ruled out yet). real 17. Everything transforms into OnlyFans TikTok becoming the biggest social and entertainment platform in the world announces many social issues. One of the least talked about is the fact that TikTok and OnlyFans are quickly becoming interlinked; much more than . when Instagram was a key traffic driver to OnlyFans TikTok offers a free visual medium and strong content moderation, permitting countless ways to be seductive and suggestive in a riskless way. The cheap dopamine that comes with such behaviour is addictive. Without falling into a self-righteous trap about what social media does to The Children, a conversation needs to be had about the intersection of Uberization, entertainment, monetization, youth, addiction, and alluring dances. 18. We say goodbye ad-supported media Over the past decades, . This worked well for newspapers. Then for TV. Then for social media. Now, all these actors are competing with streamers like Netflix, entertainment apps like Youtube and TikTok, new content producers like Apple and Amazon… And the advertising pie has not gotten bigger. In fact, a recessionary advertising environment means it will probably get smaller in 2023. This is not viable. advertising revenue as a percentage of US GDP has remained soothingly stable also In 2023, we will see consolidation and dramatic cuts in valuations for any and all ad-supported businesses (Meta, Google, BuzzFeed…). In the meantime, new business models will emerge to protect existing margins. 19. Augmented Reality makes it big(ger) AI took 10 years to get . It will take at least another 5 for Augmented Reality to reach the potential we’ve been promised since the early 2010s. But we’re underestimating . Tools like , for example, allow one to scan someone’s outfit and overlay it onto one’s outfit. Meanwhile, SnapAR afficionados are . as good as it is today already the stellar steps forward taken this year alone Garment Transfer making mini-games that use strangers as NPCs AR software and hardware is not as easily accessible as a keyboard, which is why adoption will take longer. But as computer vision gets cheaper, and as billions are poured into hardware by Meta and Apple, we will progressively start seeing more and more valid use cases emerge. 20. The Metaverse works as Meta employees go back to the office . Too much, in fact. One of the few reasons why the stock has dipped so much is because Mark Zuckerberg has bet the farm on vision of the Metaverse working. Meta has been beaten into the ground this year his He’s however done so while allowing many Meta workers to . This is not an effective way to create world-changing products and services. Executives are likely to realize this as the environment turns. Once people meet in-person again at Meta, their remote world will start churning out winning innovations. Ironic, right? work from home 21. Bitcoin falls below $5,000 Crypto has been ever since the pandemic started. That may finally be over. a fever dream The speculative cheap-money driven buyers have evaporated, leaving only the true believers. Large institutions will wait a few more years before dipping their toes again. Expect another winter throughout 2023, and see you in 2024 for the inevitable rebound. 22. A new FAANG emerges The king is dead. Long love the king. As Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix (which should have always been Microsoft) and Google work to keep their head above the water, new industries will come back to the forefront after 15 years in Big Tech’s shadows. , we will need to things again. Which is why the future of FAANG is Fuel, Agriculture, Aerospace, Nuclear, and Green energy. We need big projects to get out of a frankly predictable post-post-WWII slump, and energy is the place to start, as it will power the rest of the decade. A s money becomes tight again make 23. Hope For the past 5 years, the tech world has not delivered anything we wanted, or needed. Just more monitoring, more nudging, more draining of our data, our time, our joy. In 2023, let us hope that the industry goes back to doing hard, but necessary work. That we invent new tools to help reduce infant mortality, deaths from infectious disease and wealth inequalities between the poorest and wealthiest nations. That great medical advances are made, that education is further democratized, and that green technologies emerges as a long-term force for good. Fingers crossed. A lot of the above predictions are dystopian. It is nevertheless paramount to remember that technology is both created, implemented, and shaped by all of us, and that we have a very real say in how it affects us. This may be as small as sending a disapproving message to a corporation on Twitter, or as big as voting a politician out of office when they do not have our best interest at heart. Our actions matter, and it’s up to us to ensure that these predictions either do or don’t become a reality. Good luck out there. Also Published Here

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