From the first licensed CRISPR medicine to unprecedented climate migration, these are the top 10 news stories of 2023 that have profound implications for the future.
OpenAI launches GPT-4, and the generative AI gold rush accelerates. Recession fears wax and wane but never subside. Culture wars continue, dragging in the world’s largest and most recognizable companies. And while it’s not a World War, the world is at war in more places than we’ve seen in a century.
In 2023, there was no shortage of major news announcing unprecedented technological, economic, and cultural change. It felt like every week was rewriting the future.
Buried within all the noise, there are signs that the future is already here. But those signals of the future can get lost in all the noise. And the cost of missing them is high. Take Meta’s sudden pivot from the Metaverse to AI as a cautionary tale. You can’t ignore the future. But you shouldn’t bet it all on the wrong thing.
Deciding which initiatives matter for your business isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about paying attention to where the world might be going and ensuring that you’re prepared for all possible futures.
This year, conversations about the future have been dominated by AI. We saw how it’s already revolutionizing major parts of life and work, from threatening white-collar jobs to powering a brain implant that enabled a paralyzed man to walk using his thoughts. But AI is only part of how the future may unfold. If you’re paying close attention, you’ve seen that this year was full of other critical developments.
Here are the top ten headlines from 2023 that you might look back on in a few years and wish you had noticed. They have profound implications for the future. And unlike simple projections, these stories indicate major shifts in our world that aren’t far-off hypotheticals. They’re unfolding right now.
1. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has repeated a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net positive energy yield. Although the NIF isn’t on a direct path to commercial fusion power production, this progress is one of the biggest achievements in decades to make fusion available for mass production. Fusion, the source of the Sun’s energy, could offer a nearly infinite source of clean energy.
2. The US faces a rising threat of widespread civil unrest. Last year, a poll by the Economist and YouGov reported that 42% of Americans think that a civil war is likely within the next ten years.
