2024’s most energising insights from our digital futures

We published dozens of insights into future trends in 2024. Which ones caught your imagination? It’s all about AI, politics, and the merger of physical and digital…

Yesterday, we had a look at the top 10 most-read insights on our site in 2024, whatever their age. We’ve often said that many of our pieces here are written for the reader in five years’ time, not the reader for today. As always, the clue is in the name: we’re creating insights into what’s next, not what’s happening now.

But occasionally, it’s interesting to look back at what we wrote in the year just gone, and find out which of those resonated most strongly with you. We last did this back in 2020. Half a decade on, it’s time to do it again. And so, here are the pieces from 2024 that you, our NEXT community, read the most.

These are specifically the top 10 most-read pieces published in 2024 — we’re separating out the topical content from the more evergreen pieces. There’s inevitably some overlap: the top two pieces written this year also feature in our round-up of the most read pieces.

But it’s the other eight that are more intriguing: what are the emerging trends and ideas from 2024 that really resonated most with you?

The answer is threefold:

  • AI
  • Geopolitical shifts
  • The merger of physical and digital

Let’s explore…


10. Dr Ivan Poupyrev: The Era of Physical AI

Adam Tinworth

Liveblog and video from the NEXT24 session with Dr Poupyrev. This dives into what could well be the next major iteration of AI: physical/digital integration. He’s building AI models that can understand what’s happening in the physical world, and act on that. This has potential far beyond what we conceive of as AI right now. Imagine the applications in urban planning — or finally realising the autonomous vehicle dream.

A classic NEXT glimpse into a potential future.

9. Apple Vision Pro: a tentative first step into a phygital world

Adam Tinworth

We used to do a lot more general tech blogging here a decade ago — and this was a return to that. I tried to examine the future that the Apple headset was pointing to, rather than just looking at it as an expensive product I can’t justify buying…

Arguably, this piece is a partner of the one above: starting to explore what it could mean for us when the physical and the digital become more closely intertwined. This is clearly coming — but I’m not sure even Apple has this vision (pun intended) locked down.

8. Jon Alexander: Democracy is dead, long live Democracy!

Adam Tinworth

Another #NEXT24 liveblog and video — this time about Jon Alexander’s stirring talk about revitalising democracy through encouraging more active, participatory citizenship. If you’ll excuse me a cliché, I think this will age like a fine wine. Too many of us are trapped in a social media-generated bubble of synthetic citizenship, with activism and attention in the digital world substituting for actual civic engagement. Finding ways to bridge from one to the other could make a massive difference to our struggling democracies.

Some hope in an oft-dark political time.

7. Democracy and its demands

Martin Recke

We always knew that 2024 was going to be a year dominated by elections, with a significant proportion of the world’s population heading to the polls. Halfway through the year, Martin paused to take stock of how it was panning out — and what that might say about the interaction of digital with our politics:

Meanwhile, infrastructure is crumbling. Healthcare and education are stuck in the past. Blindness towards the countryside, its demographics and its problems is now costing the urban-minded parties dearly.

Democracy demands that governments address the issues of their voters. It’s not enough to declare those topics as not worthy of consideration, or that the voters are ill-informed.

Again, this is worth reading in conjunction with the piece above. Social media, which should, in theory, allow politicians to connect more easily with voters, may actually be amplifying the voices of the most extreme, leaving politicians disconnected from the social majority that they need to survive. And events since have only strengthened this thesis.

6. Payal Arora: Positive provocations on designing inclusive AI

Adam Tinworth

This is the most popular liveblog/video post from NEXT24, and you can easily see why. Payal Arora contrasted the West’s growing tech pessimism with the optimism and eager embrace of emergent technology and models in the Global South.

Her point — and it’s a valid one — is that we see clearly how much we could lose, whereas for many in the Global South, it’s mostly all upside. But, critically, with so many of our challenges now global ones, we can’t afford this split mentality. Finding a balance of seeing and making the most of the upsides of tech, while preparing for their downsides, is the path forward we all need. Swinging between tech utopianism and dystopian depression helps nobody.

5. Will AI change everything everywhere all at once?

Martin Recke

Martin explores the ideas in Miriam Meckel and Léa Steinacker’s book: Alles überall auf einmal. To me, this is almost the first piece in a post-AI series. Just as we’ve looked at the post-digital world in the past, and how that’s become the world we live in, we will one day live in a post-AI world. Ai won’t be gone, it’ll just be ubiquitous and unremarkable. It will be a tool that infuses everything else.

If AI proves to be the transformative tool many people predict it to be, then these are conversations we need to be having. We asked the post-digital question in 2012. When’s the right time to ask the post-AI question?

4. NEXT24 theme: New Energy – Recharging our Systems

Ina Feistritzer

The theme post for the 2024 conference, penned by our glorious leader Ina, and iterated on by the rest of the team, seeks to explore the need for new energy both literally, in the face of the climate crisis, and metaphorically, in shaking the tech and digital world out of their doldrums.

The fact that the most-read post from the conference itself was about the optimism and innovation coming from the Global South suggests we hit the nail on the head with this one…

3. The demographic collapse

Martin Recke

More geopolitics from Martin. Demographic changes and the migration issues likely to arise from them have been a recurrent theme at NEXT for the best part of a decade — and that shows no sign of changing. Even the current pushback against globalisation is a reaction to that trend, not a denial of it.

The piece points out that the global population might start declining as soon as the end of this decade. While that might be cheering from a sustainability perspective, it’s going to have a massive impact on our lives and businesses.

How long will the decline of the global population continue? This is hard to predict, even by demographic standards. If fertility rates below replacement levels persist for more than a generation, as already is the case for many Western countries, the trend becomes almost irreversible. However, new societies with higher fertility might emerge. They could enjoy an evolutionary advantage in an otherwise shrinking world.

It’s the geopolitical trend that could reshape everything – but almost nobody talks about it.

2. Physical AI might be the truly transformative technology

Adam Tinworth

The second piece in the top 10 derived from the work of NEXT24 speaker Dr Ivan Poupyrev. His company, Archetype AI, is training AI on the real world. This is truly future-looking; right now, much of the focus of AI work is on information management, but when you start applying machine learning to the real world, whole new fields open up. We discussed this in the overall top 10 piece.

1. A biological computer that can play Pong

Martin Recke

Another curtain raiser for NEXT24, this looked at what could be the next wave of AI beyond ones that understand the physical world: biological computers.

Andy Kitchen of Cortical Labs took to the main stage at NEXT24 to explore what this future could look like, once it moves beyond its very early nascent stage. This is a prime candidate for a piece that could still be in the top 10 in a decade’s time, as biological computing develops…

We also discussed this one in the overall top 10 piece.