2024 Will Be an Exciting Year in Tech

Buckle up! This is going to be a rollercoaster of a year in technology.

Seventy-eight countries are holding major elections this year, and they're doing so in an environment where fake images have grown more realistic and more prevalent. But take heart-2024 is also the year you'll start to encounter countermeasures to keep you grounded in reality.

This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2024.

To take your mind off those elections, you might head to the Paris Olympic Games. But while you're watching the events, a network of AI-enhanced surveillance tech will be watching you. If that creeps you out, knowing that new privacy-enhancing chips mean that data need never be decrypted might cheer you up.

This year will also see multiple moonshots; one will even have a human crew. If you're lucky, you might watch those missions on an advanced display built with a better kind of blue pixel. On its way to you, that display might even be handled by a humanoid warehouse robot.

There's much more to 2024 inside this issue. We, the editors of IEEE Spectrum, hope you enjoy it.