Transcription

Congratulations, you survived yet another year in the simulation. If you still have a job in tech, it means you survived massive layoffs, didn't get drafted into a war, and outsmarted the artificial intelligence that your boss wants to replace you with. 2023 was the craziest year ever, but at the rate things are accelerating, it'll look like nothing compared to 2024. I care deeply about the future because I'm going to spend the rest of my life there, but the future ain't what it used to be. In today's video, we'll look at 10 trends in technology that you can take advantage of in 2024. Let's get started by looking at the health of the job market. At the beginning of 2023, we had massive layoffs from magnificent 7 companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Not only did this flood the job market with more talent, but simultaneously, the number of open jobs declined by about 60% based on data from TrueUp.io. And that's been a one-two punch to the nuts for junior developers looking to get into the industry. In 2021, we had people working multiple full-time jobs simultaneously thanks to remote work, and you could land these jobs by simply taking a 100-second boot camp. But today, things look a lot different. Managers are still desperately trying to get people back into the office, and you can find all kinds of anecdotes on Reddit about how brutal the job market is right now. It's been a rough year, but there is some hope. If we look closely at the chart, you'll notice that job openings are up 13.8% from earlier this year, and all the big fang companies have unfrozen their hiring freezes, although there aren't nearly as many open jobs as there used to be. So I'd be cautiously optimistic about an improving job market going into 2024, but a lot of that depends on the state of the world. We're still in a high-interest rate environment, which is not ideal for cash-burning startups that need that easy money to hire a bunch of people to grow quickly. Just yesterday, Spotify did its third layoff of the year, where it severed about 1,500 heads, which it blamed on the higher cost of capital. These high rates have also put the real estate market at a standstill, dramatically reducing the total number of transactions, because nobody wants to pay $900,000 for a cardboard box with an 8% mortgage. The automotive industry is also struggling, and we saw Tesla prices come way down in 2023, which was a shock to some people who thought their Tesla was an appreciating asset just a year ago. The economy, and especially technology, is addicted to low rates, but we've also got some wars going on. Now, I don't stand with Palestine, I don't stand with Israel, I don't stand with Ukraine, I don't stand with Russia. I stand with Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and the military-industrial complex. These companies make the tools we need to blow each other up, and when you stand with that team, you really can't lose. What you have to realize is that you're living paycheck to paycheck, your employer is living bailout to bailout, and the United States government is living from war to war. If we don't get a big war soon, the entire system could collapse, and that's not going to bode well for tech jobs in the future. But speaking of money, crypto is back. Bitcoin was $16K at the beginning of the year, and just broke $40K a couple days ago, and crypto bros are already predicting that one token will be worth over a million dollars by the end of 2024. The price to watch for is $69K. If it reaches this price point, the world will be flooded with memes that will elevate FOMO to biblical levels. In other words, the crypto winter might be over, bringing us a fresh new round of Ponzi schemes to invest our parents' money in. Another failed technology that could come back in 2024 is augmented and virtual reality, thanks primarily to the Apple Vision Pro, which is set to release in early 2024. Apple has done some revolutionary things in the past, like a mouse that charges from the bottom, and if these VR goggles take off, it could lead to a whole new round of opportunity for app developers. However, I think that's unlikely. Plenty of Apple cult members will drink this Kool-Aid, but I don't think the general public is going to fork over $3,500 to become even more disconnected from reality. Ultimately, though, I think this will end up being a niche product. Very cool to some people, but not appealing to the average NPC. Now, speaking of hardware, Microsoft just announced a few weeks ago that it's going to start producing its own chips, like the Maya chip for artificial intelligence, and the Cobalt CPU, which is an ARM-based processor designed for general purpose use in the cloud. And AWS is also building its own ARM-based chips, which are cheaper and more efficient than traditional x86 chips. Now, as of today, virtually all PCs and laptops running Windows run CPUs based on the x86 architecture, but that may not be the case in the future, because thanks to Project Volterra, it's now possible to run Windows on ARM chips. Hell, even Intel is going to start manufacturing ARM chips. The single most important thing anyone does with a CPU, though, is play video games, and just yesterday, we got our first look at the GTA 6 trailer. This'll likely be the most hyped-up video game in the history of the world, and it's built using Rockstar's own proprietary Rage game engine, and that means you can't use it. What you can use is Unity. However, Unity made a massive blunder in 2023 by rolling out new pricing that would charge developers every time a game is downloaded. Unity developers revolted, and it got so bad that they had to roll back the pricing and apologize. That's right, apologize. Meanwhile, Unreal Engine released version 5.3, with some crazy new features, like a procedural content generation framework and its substrate material system that gets almost indistinguishable from reality. Now, Unreal Engine's parent company, Epic Games, sued Apple a few years ago, saying it's a monopoly because it takes a 30% cut on the App Store and doesn't allow alternative payment methods, but it lost that suit, and that was held up on appeal in 2023. Epic Games is not giving up, though, with a similar ongoing lawsuit against Google. It seems like a long shot, but if they somehow win, it would be huge for indie developers, because they could avoid that 30% cut to the big guy by using their own payment processor. But now let's talk about web development. JavaScript land is as crazy as ever, but I think in 2024, people will stop building new JavaScript frameworks, because nowadays they all have a similar developer experience with signal-based reactivity, and the race will shift to who can build the best tools for existing frameworks. We're seeing more visual editors and IDEs for frameworks like React, where you can drag and drop components instead of coding them manually. Then you have frameworks like Nuxt, which have built-in dev tools to make life easier, but pretty soon, we should have AI writing most of our code. There are tools like Visual Copilot, where you can take a design in Figma, and it will automatically write the framework code along with tailwind styles. In the near future, I think every JavaScript framework will have its own specialized tooling, along with its own specially-tuned AI, for writing useful, accurate code. Whichever framework does this the best will win the web development war for the next 10 years, and I think there will be a lot of opportunity on the web, in part because of trends in mobile development. This trend has been ongoing for many years, but people just don't want to download mobile apps anymore. It's not like 10 years ago, when you could develop an app in your mom's basement, have it go viral, and become a millionaire overnight. There are billions of people using smartphones every day, but getting their attention away from established apps is harder than ever. Like, as you can see here, most of my screen time goes to Twitter and Discord. When it comes to building mobile apps, not too much has changed, but if you're building cross-platform, we're starting to see more low-code tools that can build for both iOS and Android, with a drag-and-drop interface. But now let's talk about low-level systems languages. Rust is still growing incredibly fast, and you can now find Rust code in the Linux kernel. There was some drama with the Rust foundation earlier this year, and I might get sued for using this logo, but there are some other up-and-coming low-level languages as well. Like Zig, the language behind the JavaScript bun runtime, and also Mojo, a Python superset that can also handle low-level memory management, making it both approachable and extremely performant, an ideal option for AI and machine learning. And finally, that brings us to number 10, the elephant in the room, artificial intelligence. ChatGPT has only been around for a year, although it feels like a lot longer, and most normies out there haven't even touched it yet. But that's going to change over the next few years, because we now have Barg built into Google to cannibalize its own search engine, we have Copilot built into Microsoft Office to write all your papers and do all your spreadsheets, an estimated 75% of all stock trading now happens via algorithms, and AI is being weaponized to both launch and defend against cyberattacks. And even our military-industrial-complex friends like Palantir are using AI to help blow people up in a more environmentally friendly and equitable way. But things got really crazy with generative image AI. Ten years ago, Ian Goodfellow published a paper proposing the first generative adversarial network. Seven years later, OpenAI brought us diffusion models with Dolly, but they still sucked pretty hard. But then just two years from that point, we get images good enough to make $10,000 a month on OnlyFans. In 2024, a big trend to watch is text-to-video. Stable Diffusion just released a text-to-video model, and at the current rate of progress, I predict that by the end of 2024, you'll be able to generate a full-length Bollywood-quality movie from your laptop. But none of this will matter if somebody first achieves Artificial General Intelligence, an AI that can actually think for itself and not just regurgitate and remix things humans have already done. Some people even think this has already been achieved by OpenAI with the leak of QSTAR. However, there's a French guy that thinks AGI is decades away, and some think it will never be achieved. When that day comes, it could be a great day for humanity. We'll never have to work or think again, and there'll be nothing left to do but indulge in pleasure. On the other hand, though, you may live to see AI-made horrors beyond your comprehension. It could end up being like when Faust made a deal with the devil for unlimited knowledge and pleasure. But once that knowledge is achieved, there's a trade-off in the form of moral and spiritual decline. The AI will have to adjust for this trade-off by creating billions of lab-grown babies, which are now a real thing, then put them into a simulation that has a disproportionate amount of suffering in order to offset the pleasures experienced by the AI. In fact, you might be in the simulation right now. Why else would you be watching a video gaslighting you into thinking you're in a simulation? You'd have to be crazy to think we're not in a simulation right now. But again, congratulations for making it to round 2024. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.