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

Seventy-eight nations are holding main elections this yr, and so they’re doing so in an setting the place pretend pictures have grown extra reasonable and extra prevalent. But take coronary heart—2024 can be the yr you’ll begin to encounter countermeasures to maintain you grounded in actuality.

To take your thoughts off these elections, you would possibly head to the Paris Olympic Games. But when you’re watching the occasions, a community of AI-enhanced surveillance tech will likely be watching you. If that creeps you out, figuring out that new privacy-enhancing chips imply that knowledge want by no means be decrypted would possibly cheer you up.

This yr may even see multiple moonshots; one will also have a human crew. If you’re fortunate, you would possibly watch these missions on a complicated show constructed with a greater sort of blue pixel. On its strategy to you, that show would possibly even be dealt with by a humanoid warehouse robot.

There’s rather more to 2024 inside this situation. We, the editors of IEEE Spectrum, hope you take pleasure in it.