Predictions 2024

Would an AI-powered meta-prediction be smarter?

Cropped from video source

Punxsutawney Phil is our populace’s perennially percipient prognosticator. Every February 2, Groundhog Day, at dawn, he is summoned from his burrow to look around. If he sees his shadow and recoils from it, he predicts six more weeks of winter. If not, an early spring is proclaimed on the way.

Today we discuss some predictions for 2024.

Phil has been doing this since 1887. It must be said up front, his track record is not great. The previous three years, he saw his shadow but was judged wrong by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA scores him only 3 out of 10 for the past decade, and various sources put Phil under 40% over all time. Part of the problem is that his choosing “shadow” almost 85% of the time has bucked the trend of a warming planet.

This year, he not only wised up and chose no shadow, he grokked another lesson of the 21st Century: He crowdsourced his prediction. There are other furry friends with filmy eyes:

• Four groundhogs in Lancaster PA split their predictions 2-2.

• Edwina of Essex NL predicted an early spring. She also projected Taylor Swift’s team to win the Super Bowl.

• Stonewall Jackson IV, Staten Island Chuck, Holtsville Hal, and Malverne Mell all agreed with Phil and Edwina.

• A hedgehog named Elsa, however, took the opposite view and burrowed in deeper for more winter in Cape May, NJ.

This still left a healthy 7-3 agreement with Phil. We wonder, though, whether their handlers should go whole hog and hire an AI in place of Phil & Co. AI has already proved able to outperform whole teams of human weather modelers, without having to solve a single differential equation. It shouldn’t cost too much to replace a few groundhogs.

Predictions and Meta-Predictions

There has been a plethora of articles with predictions for AI in 2024. Here are some:

• IBM

• Forbes

• Vox

• Stanford

• Simpsons

• TechCrunch

• Los Angeles Times

• IronHack

• Intelligent CISO

• Gizmodo.

We may say more later about some of these, especially the last three. But first we ask whether the divergent ideas over all the above represent a failure of vision. Surely an AI should be best at predicting AI. A model not much above (Chat)GPT-4 should be able to sift all the predictions through its tons of other data and ferret out plausibility that we data-limited souls cannot. The results could be called meta-predictions—but this kind of thing may soon simply slide under the existing ho-hum heading of “business forecasting.”

The other meta-prediction for AI in 2024 is one we have already hinted: surprise. In fact, we at GLL not only fear but sense a surprise that none of the above specifically mentions. It goes beyond the common predictions of deepfakes and other misinformation flooding our election year zones.

AI Hacking

Here is our main prediction for AI in 2024:

A non-governmental organization will use AI to formulate and execute a cyberattack on an unprecedented scale, not only disabling but taking control of over a billion dollars worth of assets of the targeted entities.

Well, we didn’t intend to wait until Groundhog Day to say this. Dick and I discussed this when I visited him in Manhattan in mid-January, but we were not satisfied with any details we tried to brainstorm.

So this post (originally with a different intro teasing whether a British company with the Portuguese name AI Caramba!—not Spanish and not Bart Simpson—would really exist) stayed hibernating. That is, until FBI Director Christopher Wray saw shadows everywhere in testimony before Congress on Wednesday. In particular, he warned:

“Obviously, AI will enhance some of the same information warfare that we’ve seen from our foreign adversaries for quite some time.”

The article goes on to say that Wray “also noted that AI can enhance foreign adversaries’ abilities to collect personal data and feed it into disinformation and influence operations.” We would still be interested to indulge some crowdsourcing of our own, to see if our readers can come up with a plurality prediction of how such an attack might unfold.

Open Questions

What predictions do you have for AI? Some even predict a return to “AI Winter.”

[persipcacious->percipient in first sentence; some other word changes]