A Tumultuous Year: What Lies Ahead in 2024
Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash
The 2020s have already brought with them so much uncertainty and heartbreak: the surge of a terrifying pandemic, the thawing of geopolitical conflicts thought to be frozen in amber, active genocide, and ethnic cleansing. It's hard not to look at the situations unfolding before us and not believe they will worsen.
While we cannot know precisely what the future will hold, we can make a few educated guesses. The predictions I have made below are not a definitive list (and I am sure a few of them will end up being wrong), but taken as a collective pattern; they paint a picture of the dark year ahead of us in 2024.
The Ukrainian-Russian war will rage on
This war has been waged for over two years. Both sides are significantly depleted. Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of troops and is loosening conscription laws. Ukraine has not faired better, losing hundreds of thousands more (in overall casualties, not troops) and about 20% of its territory.
If such material indicators were why wars ended, then this war would be over. Unfortunately, both countries appear to be bleeding out while waiting for the other's defeat. Ukraine is part of the United States gambit to deplete Russian military forces, and Russia has staked so much on this quagmire that Putin might be worried for his political survival (and actual survival) if he were to end the war without achieving his objective of holding onto captured territory.
Since the GOP blocked December 2023 funding over the border, some claim that a Republican Congress will kill funding in 2024 as well. Yet I see this as a larger play for border funding (and they'll get it). Biden does not want to lose Ukraine right before the election, so he will sacrifice a lot to prevent that from happening.
In the meantime, Putin will most likely wait out 2024 for his Hail Mary: the election of Donald Trump. The Republican Party and Trump, more specifically, do not appear to be as supportive of the War in Ukraine as the Biden administration. And so, Putin hopes to wait out the clock on Biden's presidency. If and when this happens, and the Republican government cuts Ukraine's funding and military aid, the Russian government will then pressure Ukraine to accept a new, smaller Ukrainian map.
The border will be further militarized
As alluded to in the previous section, our country's conservative attitude toward border control will become more entrenched. The US has been militarizing its border for a while now. The establishment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2003, as well as a steady increase in funding for border agencies (and the businesses who supply them), have been pointing us in the direction of a someday locked-down US-Mexico border (at least for migrants coming from outside the US).
Yet I suspect things will get worse in 2024, in no small part due to the presidential election, which will incentivize more funding to border agencies and more troops to be stationed there. In the words of Mark Akkerman in the Migration Policy Institute on this funding increase:
“The United States has in recent years spent more money on immigration enforcement than at any other point in history. For fiscal year (FY) 2024, the Biden administration has asked Congress for nearly $25 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an increase of almost $800 million over the previous year and nearly equal to the entire gross domestic product (GDP) of Iceland. U.S. immigration enforcement budgets have been steadily increasing for many years, irrespective of the political orientation of the country’s federal government.”
As we can see, neither party has the incentive to roll back the decisions of the other. The GOP wants to militarize the border, and the Democratic Party seems largely indifferent to this. This status quo creates an incentive to increase militarization to score easy points and deflect criticism.
I don’t think the border will close in 2024, but I do suspect this year we will see the continued contraction of civil liberties for people along the border (both for Americans and refugees), which will have ripple effects for years to come.
It will be the hottest year on record
If there is one thing on this list that is a near certainty, it's that 2024 will be the hottest year in recorded history. Not only because climate change has made the last decade already quite hot but because El Nino (a meteorological process that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific) will increase that heat. As mentioned in YaleEnvironment360:
“Next year is likely to surpass 2023 as the hottest ever, according to the U.K. Met Office, which projects that 2024 will likely measure 1.46 degrees C warmer than preindustrial times, but could conclude up to 1.58 degrees C warmer.”
This process will lead to a year with stronger hurricanes, rising ocean levels, famines, and, as we shall soon discuss, lots and lots of refugees.
The heat in the American Southwest will lead to internal mass migration
Climate change and political instability will lead to a lot of people fleeing their homes, but I want to focus on the American Southwest (i.e., Arizona and New Mexico, along with parts of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah) because I don't believe people have come to terms with how dire the situation will be there this year.
The American Southwest has been projected to be severely impacted by Climate Change. In 2021, the IPCC had an entire section devoted to the region. With poor water security, severe wealth inequality, increasingly poorer air quality, and worsening wildfires, the rising heat levels in 2024 will lead to a situation where many people lose (or are forced to leave) their homes.
While some states in the region, such as New Mexico, have low, almost flatlining growth rates, states like Arizona have experienced steady population growth. I understand why this has happened, as the cost of living there is lower than on the coasts, but as water and electricity become internalized into these residents' costs, this incentive will shift.
Indeed, we are already starting to see this internalization happen. The metropolitan area of Phoenix, Arizona, voted to increase water rates significantly this year (the same in Tucson, Arizona). Water rates have also increased in the last few years in Denver, Colorado, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Other Municipalities, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, are delaying increases despite the need.
I believe that 2024 is going to be the year the "shit hits the fan" for a lot of people in the region. And since America already has a very poor social safety net, many Americans in the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, will be forced to move with little resources. Next year round, I expect to see very different growth figures from the American Southwest overall.
Artificial Intelligence will cause the further degradation of Google Search Results
2023 was a cultural flashpoint for AI, mainly because of programs like ChatGPT, where people could suddenly churn out low-effort content with less than 30 minutes of effort. It wasn't great content (mostly), but there was an abundance of it very quickly.
Google search results, at one point the backbone of the Internet, have been flagging for a while now. Unless you are very good at keyword searches, for years, the top couple of pages of Google have been SEO soup for most search results. This is because the economic incentive is to produce clickbait and misinformation. AI will make this problem much worse. As Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer write:
“In 2024, AI-produced dreck will find its way into nearly every corner of the internet. While most of it will be inoffensive and generally correct, it will get enough wrong — and cause enough frustration among those it misleads — that trust in search will decline.”
Yet the way that AI is trained might also lead to new problems. Companies like OpenAI set their AI on the Internet to learn how to do tasks like writing and image generation. However, now that the Internet is quickly becoming filled with AI content, it leads to a situation where AI starts training on more and more AI material, possibly leading to model collapse. As a recent paper writes (first coming my way via reporting from VentureBeat):
“…learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.”
All in all, expect the Internet to be just a little worse in 2024.
We will still be arguing about a recession
Most conversations about economic health are usually framed on whether or not we are in a recession — i.e., a decline in economic activity that lasts for at least a few months.
However, that framing comes with some significant limitations. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the main trusted body in the states for determining such a thing, uses quantitative indicators such as "real personal consumption expenditures" and "industrial production," among others, to make such an assessment. The nature of tabulating and comparing such figures to past trends means these assessments are made after the fact. And so, political leaders have to act to stabilize the economy before a recession is determined.
Yet, as many Americans know, another problem is that indicators like "personal consumption" or "how much businesses produce" are not the best for judging their standard of living. Real wages in the US have been very slow to grow and, in some sectors, have yet to meet inflation or increased productivity. Other essential costs such as housing and healthcare have likewise increased, reducing many people's wealth generation. If you have to deal with these problems, it doesn't matter what the US's GDP is; you won't experience that alleged prosperity.
This creates a disconnect where the forces in power will bring up figures such as increasing GDP, low unemployment, and more as signs of economic prosperity, but that wealth is not felt by most Americans. These two sides are essentially talking past each other (often callously so for those focusing on recessions), and I don't expect this debate to go away in 2024. If anything, it will intensify as two different ideas of who the economy should serve come head-to-head during this election year.
Covid will be here to stay, and we won't care
COVID-19 defined 2020, and much like 9/11, I expect our geopolitics to be discussed in terms of a pre-COVID and post-COVID world. And yet, much of the country has gone "back to normal." Masking mandates have been lifted, and much of the initial measures have been rolled back with no signs of returning.
Yet the virus is still with us, and although vaccines have made it less deadly for those countries that have access to them, there is still much we do not know about long-COVID (i.e., the long-term negative effects from the initial respiratory infection). The virus may have already disabled over a million, possibly even millions of Americans (but again, we still don't know with certainty).
I suspect this status quo will remain in 2024. COVID will remain a persistent problem in the backdrop, but we will not pursue systemic remedies such as extensive air filtration systems and masking up while using congested public transit. Instead, our society will learn to live with long-COVID.
Elections all over the world will be very unstable
There will be 2 billion voters across 50 countries in 2024, and they will have dramatic consequences on the world, particularly the elections of the United States and India. These elections have authoritarian people running in them who have no problem encouraging their followers to use violence to achieve victory. We all remember the January 6th riot in reaction to the 2020 election, but that potential instability will not just be in the US.
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP party has long manipulated ethnic and religious tensions for political gain. While the BJP has launched an effort to increase its share of Muslim voters in the 2024 election, nationalistic rhetoric has still been part of the party's bread and butter. And with recent clashes in Manipur (a state the BJP controls), there is reason to be concerned that such tensions will enflame further this election season.
In Indonesia, according to reporting from the Carnie Endowment for International Peace, for years, power has shifted mainly in the hands of elites who first built their fortunes during the authoritarianism that existed in the country before 1999. Upstart Joko Widodo tried to challenge the status quo in 2014 but quickly became coopted by the establishment. He is now trying to use this election to make himself Indonesia's new kingmaker, and that comes with the possibility of high tensions.
From Mexico to the European Union, many pieces are on the board this year. And yes, the US election (a Trump-Biden matchup) will be one of them, and it is expected to be very messy. The election denialism of 2020 has not gone away (if anything, it's hardened with Trump's base). It feels terrible to say, but expect at least one attempt of a US-based terrorist attack motivated by the 2024 US election.
Military conflicts will escalate in 2024
There is no other way to say it: 2024 will worsen military conflicts. 2023 was already pretty bad, with many (though not all) parts of the African continent engulfed in conflict (see Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, etc.). Elsewhere, there was also the Ukrainian-Russian War, the hostilities in Palestine, and many more.
I suspect some of these conflicts will expand, even as new ones burst onto the scene. The more prominent tension is in Palestine. The Israeli government is currently committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and that has eaten away at much of its international goodwill, jeopardizing support for the first time in decades. Israel is also currently engaged in border skirmishes with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which have the genuine potential to spill out into a regional war, forcing the country to deploy troops on multiple fronts.
Another contentious region is Haiti. Groups have been sounding the alarm here for a while. The economically impoverished country has been struggling with famine and criminal activity (two interrelated issues), and now that entire swaths of the capital, Port-au-Prince, have been captured by gangs, this violence risks increasing into an informal Civil War.
We could spend here all day listing and recapping geopolitical situations potentially spiraling into war, civil war, or genocide. You might also want to check out Guatemala, the cartel skirmishes in Mexico, and possibly even Taiwan.
TL; DR
The year ahead will be a rough one. From the deteriorating Internet to terrible heat waves, every aspect of life is expected to get a little bit harder in 2024.
It might seem like things are hopeless, but I genuinely don't think so. Yes, the current political regime has failed us, and these problems unfolding are the fruits of that failure. However, there is still time to change course. We do not need to live in a world of constant war, famine, and political instability. These are political choices.
But to change things, first, we must accept the world around us as it is.