Jake LaCaze

Tech in 2024: Musings

I don’t know what’s ahead for tech in 2024. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about it.

A career in the volatile oil and gas industry has cured me of any thoughts on making bold predictions. So instead I’ll look at what may happen (instead of what I think will happen) and what I’d like to happen for tech in 2024.

Will the generative AI bubble burst?

It’s too hard to say if the generative AI bubble will burst in 2024. But I certainly hope it will. My reasons have been well-documented on this site. For one, I fear the developers of generative AI are too busy trying to sell their non-human-focused solutions rather than solving problems that could help real people1.

If a career in oil and gas has taught me one thing, it’s that ‘boom’ is often another word for ‘bubble.’ And bubbles burst eventually. 2023 brought a great boom for generative AI. Might 2024 bring the bust?

Fingers crossed.

Let’s say the bubble does burst. What follows?

What will the shakeout look like? What developments will stick around?

The internet didn’t go away when the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s. The internet itself wasn’t a total waste; there was just a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed so that we could focus on the useful parts.

The same logic applies to AI.

I’m sure many of us can get behind the thought of AI having an impact beyond the burst of the bubble. But as Chuck Klosterman pointed out in But What If We’re Wrong?2, we run into problems when we try to get more specific with such prediction.

Is 2024 the year to regain control of your digital home?

With the rise of social media, personal homepages became less important.

But now with the chaos of Twitter/X, many people are re-thinking their stances on owning their digital home spaces. Many of those same people don’t want to trade one dumpster fire for another by leaning on Meta-owned platforms. So they’re looking for niche, sometimes indie, solutions.

Many are opting to invest in homepages again.

I spent the last quarter of 2023 setting up my own digital home at jakelacaze.com. 2024 is the year I’ll settle in and hopefully more consistently blog (and maybe include other types of content).

I don’t know if I’ll ever abandon social media. LinkedIn helps with finding new jobs. And experimenting with platforms like Bluesky adds variety to the online experience. But I know my own webpage should remain my digital focus and that I should use other tools only insofar as they don’t distract me from my own platform.

I hope more people will join along so that we can make the web weird–and therefore, fun–again.

Could Logseq be a useful personal knowledge management system?

I’ve given Obsidian many tries over the years, but for some reason, it never quite stuck for me.

In December I tried Logseq and am so far loving it3.

Logseq and Obsidian largely do the same thing: They both act as a ‘second brain’ where you can dump information so that you can use your limited brain power on the hard stuff.

While Obsidian is designed around individual pages, Logseq instead focuses on bullet points. Perhaps because I once tried the bullet journal method4, thinking and organising information in terms of bullet points makes sense to me.

I hope Logseq can prove to be a tool worth the time.

Here’s to hoping you find a way to make tech work for you in 2024

The tech industry has a habit of making us bend to the tech they build.

I urge you to instead look at how you can bend tech to work around you. Maybe that requires rethinking how you use tech. Maybe it requires simplifying usage. Or maybe you’ve already got everything perfectly figured out.

Either way, I see little harm in our being more thoughtful about the digital tools we use on a daily basis.

Jake LaCaze wishes you a happy near year in tech and beyond.

  1. Is AI just a solution looking for a problem? on jakelacaze.com ↩︎

  2. But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman on Bookshop.org (Affiliate link) ↩︎

  3. Logseq ↩︎

  4. How to Bullet Journal on YouTube ↩︎