2024 - the year of AI, Automation and the CoPilots
Whilst quite self explanatory of a title I want to just highlight my thoughts on why 2024 is the year of AI, Automation and the CoPilots.
AI
AI is going to help drive immense amount of changes across many areas of our lives. Mostly in good or fun ways but there will, as is always the case, be cases of it’s use not be for ethical or moral reasons. Unfortunately this is the case for basically all software.
Does that mean that I am scared by using AI in my day to day life? Absolutely Not!
However, like all technology, and is something that I’ve said for many years now, is that when used correctly, can improve our daily lives.
Automation
Along with AI, 2024 will see lots of innovation in the areas of Automation.
Some areas that will continue to grow
- PowerShell
- Bicep
- Terraform / OpenToFu (for more on this read up on OpenToFu site)
- dotnet - C#, F#, MAUI and more
- Python
- Java
- Javascript/Typescript and Javascript based libraries and frameworks
- Rust
- PowerAutomate, Zapier and other SaaS Personal productivity Workflow engines.
These are just some of the many areas in Computer Programming that we will see huge growth in, many will be helped by use of AI, their respective communities of users and also all the many Copilots.
Copilots
So Copilots, of which there are many, each with their own uses and more importantly skilled areas to ask for help with. These could (but won’t) along with AI & Automation technologies as well as the communities focused around them, lead to less need for organisations to reach out for Consultancy whether that is in Development, Support or Training, which I don’t expect to be the case.
If anything the organisations that are already outsourcing some of these tasks out, should be requesting detailed information about their partners use of these technologies as part of their tender process, and regularly push to ensure that these technologies are being used appropriately via 3rd party auditing processes.
Other Key Technologies
Operating Systems
It will be interesting to see all the changes coming to Client and Server operating systems.
Whilst Windows is my most used OS, I expect more use of Linux which will be an area I spend more time with in future.
Programming Languages and Productivity Tooling
This is an area where we will see exponential growth due to not only AI, Automation & Copilots but all the communities around them having more and more people getting started with these technologies that the amount of improvements happening in this area will be very hard to keep up with.
Whilst many people, myself included, will publish content on these technologies, we are best served in helping extend the official documentation (where possible) as opposed to publishing our own lengthy posts or videos. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t post your own content, because you definitely should, however the impact you have by adding to official docs and/or learning materials, is greater than your own content channels, even if that means you aren’t gaining any income from doing so. This is an area where I strongly believe overall we can and should do better & is why in my 2024 Wish List post I have wished for governments internationally to implement some form of Open Source Development Fund that their citizens & businesses can tap into to help boost efforts in this area.
Streaming technologies
Streaming is perhaps one of the great big booms, and whilst services are having issues in attracting and keeping hold of paid subscribers.
A service I really want to see is a service where you can set up a playlist of the things you want to stream, and no matter which service it’s on (paid/free/both) it will allow you to keep that playlist going and you queue up what ever you want and up date it or skip in realtime. This service should be a cross platform service and enable you to set up either an audio only, video only or a mixed content playlist.
I know this is achievable, with the right developer API access capabilities in the respective tooling, particularly for the paid offerings. The big things that would be hard to integrate would be content ratings, likes/dislikes, commenting, all from within this one app.
This alone is an example of another project that would likely cost many multi-millions of pounds & require a large amount of development time to complete that I have thought of over the years.
Also another reason why I’ve long said that for me to do all the things that I want to that it would need me to have 20+ clones of myself, and whilst that ain’t happening any time soon, perhaps if another one of my wishes for 2024 comes true, then some of the bigger projects that I want to achieve will happen, but not because I code them myself but because I can manage to work with others that will do them with me.
Summary
2024 will be an interesting year for tech, not just AI, Automation & Copilots, and with the many enhancements in tech that will come this will allow many, if not all of us, to do more in less time, but with any new technologies we need to ensure that governance, security and human oversight are things that we ensure are added as key priorities going forward to ensure that we not only build good secure solutions, but that they correctly do what they want to do, in as optimal a way as possible & ideally without it being overtly complex when not really needed.
Whilst my personal circumstances at this time aren’t great, due to still being homeless (see my Here comes another bout of Homelessness post) for more info on that, which 🤞 will be something that changes by the end of this month.