With help from Mohar Chatterjee Even in the frenzy of electoral politics, 2024 was a year where the future wasn’t just discussed, but actively built and shaped. Perhaps the biggest harbinger of that was President-elect Donald Trump importing ideas and talent from Silicon Valley for his next administration. Young industries like venture-backed defense tech and crypto are hitching a ride to the Trump White House. But throughout 2024, there were a host of advances in technology and shifts in policy that are already redefining the years ahead. Here are a couple of the noteworthy changes DFD chronicled throughout this year across all sorts of emerging technologies. The year AI legislation never came After the furor in Congress to pass legislation around artificial intelligence last year, the 118th session ultimately ended with nothing to show for it. The AI industry is adapting accordingly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's earliest appearances in Washington were meant to soothe concerns about AI, but the company's latest lobbying efforts are focused on promoting aggressive infrastructure spending for AI data centers and the requisite energy supply to power them. Both the Biden and the incoming Trump administrations have also signaled their appetite for executive action that will propel the AI industry to a position of global dominance. SpaceX to the rescue It was a bumpy year for NASA’s push to lean into partnerships with private industry, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX rose to the occasion. As Derek put it, “There’s only one company with the size and expertise to launch missions to the International Space Station, provide satellite internet access in crucial global war zones and break new ground by landing humanity’s first reusable rocket. And Musk controls it.” Yet Musk has put NASA’s leadership in a tough spot with his deepening involvement in MAGA politics, the Trump transition and global affairs, including secret communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Still, NASA’s growing dependence on SpaceX is partly due to missteps from competitors like Boeing. Few moments highlighted the problem better than the Starliner debacle, which has left astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore stuck on the International Space Station for over six months. Helium leaks and safety concerns with Starliner forced NASA to switch to SpaceX to bring the astronauts home, but that won’t happen until March 2025. NASA wants at least two dependable contractors for its ISS flights, so there’s a backup if similar issues arise in the future. (The ISS is retiring at the end of the decade, and guess who won the $843 million contract to help deorbit and destroy it? Spoiler: it’s SpaceX.) What the future holds for Boeing is a multi-billion-dollar question in Washington. Boeing’s ability to recover could impact more than just the U.S.’s ability to ferry astronauts to the ISS — it might jeopardize future lunar and Mars missions that have Musk excited. Aside from developing Starliner, Boeing is the most prominent of many partners in NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2026 under the Artemis program, and its mounting troubles have some space observers warning that the entire program may be at risk. The almost-robo revolution Robotaxis appeared poised to make a comeback after a rough 2023, but for one big player, things stalled out, again. An accident that dragged a pedestrian 20 feet, and subsequent federal investigation, resulted in General Motors recalling all of its Cruise robotaxis last year. The company relaunched this year and seemed to be back on track, announcing a multi-year deal in August to provide driverless rides through Uber starting in 2025. Those future plans are now uncertain after General Motors announced last week it will pull the plug on the Cruise division. GM cited the high cost and difficulty of scaling a robotaxi business — reasons that shed light on why many U.S. automakers have avoided the self-driving car business, and the few that have are unable to move past perpetual testing. It was a much better 2024 for Google’s Waymo and Chinese self-driving car platforms. Waymo surged ahead of its competition, quietly building a legitimate fleet of hundreds of robotaxis while its competitors stumbled through testing delays and financial woes. It hit a major milestone with 4 million driverless rides this year alone across Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Waymo’s service area already spans 500 square miles, with further expansions planned in Austin, Atlanta, Miami and Tokyo. Cruise’s downfall means it can expand into other countries without worrying about other legitimate American competitors. This was also the year Musk (finally!) unveiled the Tesla CyberCab at a buzzy launch — though Wall Street was disappointed by its commercial prospects and skepticism over whether it meets the bar for autonomy. But as always, Musk has bigger plans in store. He’s betting on a fleet of humanoid Optimus robots, calling them “the biggest product ever,” sure to usher in an “age of abundance.” In January, Tesla showcased Optimus folding laundry, and at Musk’s robotaxi event, robots bartended and mingled with guests. While robotic experts claimed they were actually remotely operated by humans in both demos — Musk predicts Tesla will have thousands of Optimus robots working in factories by next year, and says their horsepower could help make Tesla a $25 trillion company (reality check: that's more than half the S&P 500’s value today). Even further out, he envisions 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040 (that’s more than one robot per person on Earth right now). Quantum puzzle crackers The race is still on to find the best approach to building coherent quantum systems, with major developments from companies and research groups this past year. In September, Microsoft and Quantinuum set an industry record by demonstrating the largest and best-performing number of entangled logical qubits yet. (Translation: qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer that represent information using actual hardware components, and they take on a more stable and resilient form when combined through a process called entanglement). Their breakthrough tackled a major challenge in the field: the unreliability of physical qubits, which are prone to noise and errors due to their fragile states. Traditional thinking is that adding more qubits to a quantum system helps engineers counter the fragile quantum states that can lead to failure, using what is called “error correction.” Google provided evidence for that idea with its latest quantum chip this month, which crossed a key threshold by demonstrating an ability to reduce errors exponentially with scale and showing that useful, enormous quantum computers can be built. Known as Willow, it also performed a computation in five minutes that would take current supercomputers 10 septillion years. But there’s also been debate among quantum scientists, with some arguing that more qubits might not always be better. Their belief could reshape how other companies approach quantum computing as they compete to find practical applications for massive government investments. A March paper in Nature challenged the “bigger is better” mindset, when a team of IBM quantum scientists demonstrated a new form of code they say allows errors to be corrected on a large scale with fewer qubits. All these achievements make headway on the larger problem that current quantum computers are too error-prone for most commercial or scientific applications. The hype remains high, with promises that quantum can move beyond cracking technical puzzles and one day, revolutionize fields like drug discovery and gene editing. And there’s a push for federal support to help. This year, the first national quantum hub got funded in Colorado. In December, the Senate introduced legislation to renew the National Quantum Initiative, pumping $2.7 billion into the federal quantum ecosystem if lawmakers take up the bill next year.
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