Understanding the Future
Gaining perspective in a sea of change
The best thing I read this week was Five Future Roles for Designers, by Jorge Arango. Perhaps because he’s also an educator, but also because he posed this question to his students, “Try to envision your job twenty-five years from now. What will your work look like in 2049? What will you be doing?” I’ve been teaching and practicing design for almost twenty years now, and during most of that time, I could have easily answered the question. However, right now I cannot imagine what design will look like five years from. Actually, I can give you some answers or predictions, but I won’t have much confidence because I think we have several paradigm shifts ahead of us. If you’re curious about the future and would like to read his predictions, check it out
Seven technologies to watch in 2024
If you’re also like me and can only think as far as the next 12 months, you might enjoy reading this article from Nature. However, you’re going to need to be smarter than me (not a big leap), or at least have a deeper understanding of science. To be honest, I struggled with some of this, but if you’re like me, and you understand that the world is changing, it’s worth a look. tldr; list below.
Deep learning for protein design
Deepfake detection
Large-fragment DNA insertion
Brain–computer interfaces
Super-duper resolution
Cell atlases
The AI arms race is about GPUs
I first started to understand what GPUs were (the graphics card in your computer) during the shortage at the tail end of the pandemic. My son was trying to build his own computer, but all the good ones were getting bought up by scalpers and he had to wait a year for the prices to come down. Perhaps that’s what Mark Zuckerberg was trying to avoid last week when Meta purchased $10 billion worth of the NVidia H100 GPUs, the kind needed to run a Large Language Model. Sam Altman is raising billions to build proprietary chip factories to meet the needs of Open AI’s growth plan, and Microsoft flagged chip shortages as it’s biggest risk for growth in 2024. And this is just the beginning of a long list of nations and companies with similar purchasing ambitions. If you’d like to understand the scale of what’s needed, you should probably check out this article from Axios
Eleven Labs raises 80 million
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know how much I like using Eleven Labs for my AI filmmaking projects. They’ve just introduced some new features which make them even more attractive, but I’m really excited to see what they do with this next round of funding. You can now clone your own voice with only a few minutes of training data and translate that into 29 languages. As an educator, I’m really excited about this possibility, because it means I can (hopefully) try it out with some of my students for whom English is a second language. They’re also creating a “Voice Marketplace”, enabling users to sell their AI-cloned voice for money. So if people always told you that you have an amazing voice, this is your moment!
For better or for worse, this will certainly impact industries like film and video, gaming, and audio books as many people who have worked in voice over will suddenly be in a tough position. On a positive note, content creators (YouTubers) can quickly internationalize their work and reach a broader audience. Check it out
More bad news on jobs; Great Infographic
Hey, they’re have only been 11,000 job cuts in the tech industry in January, so far…that’s so much better than a year ago. You can go into greater detail at Visual Capitalist
Google’s new AI Video tool looks amazing!
I knew that Google has been working on an AI video generation tool and that it was rumored to be better than RunwayML. Before you get too excited it’s still a research paper and not a product, but the first views are pretty stunning. I’m sure these are cherry picked examples, but if you’d like to see what the future of generative video looks like you should check it out (and by Future, I mean Spring ‘24)
Reminder: Figjam + Jambot make meetings fun
Are you tired of running over (opening a tab) to ChatGPT all the time? If you’re like me, you have more AI tools than you know what to do with. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a supercomputer in our back pocket? Oh never mind, wrong metaphor. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a brainstorming buddy right in that tool we use every day. If you’re stuck, or your team isn’t getting it, or you just need a little creative oomph, remember that Jambot is a widget that lives inside Figjam, that might actually make meetings fun again. Check it out
Closing thoughts: Cat and Girl
I read a lot of newsletters every day. This has popped up a lot, lately. If you are, or were an artist at some point, who just wanted to make work that mattered. Check it out
That’s it for today. I had a ton of other stuff I wanted to write about, but I’m running out of steam. I hope you all are having a great time out there and that this newsletter is helping you navigate these stormy seas. As always, if you have questions, suggestions, or hot tips, send me a message. And for those of you who have been forwarding this too your friends, thank you so much!