What really mattered in 2024

At the end of every year, journalists like to look back and see where our predictions held up or fell flat, what were the year’s biggest events, and just what the year, considered as a whole, really meant.

As I started doing this for 2024 I was taken aback by just how many things happened.

Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race! Donald Trump was nearly assassinated! …and convicted of 34 felonies! …and elected again! Elon Musk became his right-hand man. Israel’s war in Gaza exploded into additional fights with Hezbollah and Iran, which resolved shockingly quickly (unless I speak too soon). Out of nowhere the Syrian rebels overthrew a more than 50-year-old regime.

We had a new alarming bird flu epidemic that is increasingly jumping from animals to people. (If you haven’t heard about it, it’s because people clearly never want to think about pandemics again.) Self-driving cars went from fantasy to widespread reality (at least where I live in the Bay Area).

AI grew by leaps and bounds, again: You can now generate much better images, get comprehensive research reports on any topic, and talk for free to models that perform well across a wide range of tasks (while still having some glaring basic failings).

One of the biggest challenges of writing any retrospective like this is figuring out, in a tide of events, which ones will really last five, 10, or even 50 years from now. Our news cycles run very fast these days. Nothing stays in the headlines or in the discourse for long — we chew through events, interpret them, meme them, and move on from them.

The consequences for the lives of millions of people will absolutely linger, but then discourse is off to the next topic — this week, the United Healthcare shooter; next week, who knows? In the rapid churn of this environment, it can be really hard to keep in mind which events are consequential, even world-changing, and which will be swiftly forgotten.

Keeping some perspective on the news

There’s little I find more humbling than reading year-in-reviews from the past. They only rarely mention what we might now identify as the most important events of that year: the founding of Google in 1998 or Amazon in 1994; the invention of the modern internet in 1983; the development of a highly effective HIV antiviral regimen in 1996.

In hindsight, the most important thing that happened in 2019 by far were reports in Chinese-language media in late December of a strange new disease. Yet Vox’s 2019 year in review highlighted the first Trump impeachment (remember that?) and the longest government shutdown in history (I’d forgotten that one entirely).

Of course, there’s no way to confidently guess in advance which emerging new virus will kill millions and which, like most, will quietly and uneventfully peter out. And if you have a way to identify Amazons and Googles in advance, I presume you’re using it to become fabulously wealthy rather than to write news articles. But there are some general trends here to learn from.

Politics matters, having huge effects on hundreds of millions of lives. But the things we spotlight about politics often aren’t the things that matter most.

An administration’s regulatory changes that kill nuclear power, accelerate vaccine development, or fund AIDS prevention in Africa will often matter far more than whatever the highest-profile political fights of the year were. International events matter, but they’re extraordinarily difficult to predict.

No one I spoke to saw the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria coming — even the experts often expected there was little chance of the frozen civil war moving at all this year, let alone coming to this shocking conclusion. (The rapid collapse of the Afghan state after the US withdrawal also took many prognosticators by surprise. The lesson: Wars can spend a long time in what looks like a stalemate and then change very, very fast).

The other takeaway is that technology matters.

In the long run, the most world-changing events of the 20th century were often inventions: the antibiotics and vaccines that took child mortality from half of all children to virtually none; the washing machines and vacuums that changed domestic labor and the air conditioners that changed settlement patterns in the US; the transformations of our civic culture and society brought about by the radio, and then the television, and then the computer, and then the smartphone.

Every technologist likes to claim they’re the next step on that journey, and most of them are wrong — but someone will be right, and anyone who writes off massive technological change in our lifetimes is even more wrong.

For that reason, there’s one question I have found it particularly helpful to have in mind as I review 2024: What about my life this year would have shocked me the most if I’d known about it in 2014? And the answer there, at least for me, is unambiguously artificial intelligence.

When I want a highly specific piece of artwork, I type a few words and generate it; when I’m trying to make sense of some bit of technical text, I ask a language model its interpretation.

Self-driving cars are cool, but we knew in 2014 that people were trying to make that happen. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and tensions spiked between Israel and Gaza; the Syrian civil war was already underway. Most of the shape of what became 2024 would not have surprised me too badly. But the capabilities of modern AI systems are wildly beyond anything we could have imagined a decade ago.

But that might just be me — I use AI more than many of our readers. So I ask you: What about your life today would have shocked you most in 2014? That might be the real answer to what the most important thing that happened this year is.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!