No, that does make sense because there's the, it really comes from TikTok and there are a lot of things like TikTok on YouTube, but there's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's not. And it would make sense that that kind of stuff wouldn't work as well. All right, let's turn to Dr. Nikki, who teased one of her predictions earlier. What's your first prediction for 2024, Nikki?

So surprisingly, I also went with AI. I mean, I thought we would all just say like, it's all going to be AI everywhere. So I think there's going to be, it's a very vague prediction, but there's going to be way more AI in science. It's almost the only science news that is like the first line today. But I went in like two different categories. I think in terms of research, there's going to increase discovery in areas that require a lot of computing, quantum physics, like coming up with theories for quantum physics, because it's just too much for at least my brain. So I would need an AI. But also things like protein structure. And this is something that's already happening with Google's AlphaFold. And I've had people at work come up to me and say that they have used AlphaFold to predict protein structure. So more of that and more precision in that because it's still not necessarily trustable. And then the other half of this two-parted prediction is getting AI used way more in medical diagnosis. And I think this has a pro and a con. It's actually probably already being implemented in cases. If you remember during COVID, there was a big AI thing that came out about looking at lung x-rays and seeing COVID patients, identifying them using an AI based on those images. Another thing that's going on right now is like looking at cells and if they have a specific shape, you could detect Alzheimer's disease. So predictions like that, where you just have a ton of data and you just need it to match patterns like tom was saying earlier um and lots of numbers that's where ai is good and i think we'll be seeing that in terms of like regular patient diagnosis and not just research um but then the problem with this is if it starts to get integrated with like health care and then it amplifies our biases and things like that that's where i'm a little bit concerned. So that's my number one prediction. Teja,

it kind of goes along with what you were saying earlier. What do you think of this?

Great. Yeah, I do completely agree because especially since we are already seeing so many developments in the healthcare field with AI, but I do kind of mirror what Dr. Nikki's saying in terms of the concerns. Like I'm here for the, you know, anything that can get people better care quicker, I'm absolutely here for as long as it's like accurate care. Another concern I have is in that healthcare space, like there's a lot of stuff already happening with helping like i want to say it's maybe like the mayo clinic has been doing this where they're using like ai algorithms and systems to basically couple the data from like a patient so like a doctor doesn't have to go to a million different places internally i don't mean like their personal external to gather like the history of a patient so if somebody presents at the hospital with something and you need to know immediately, like if you're treating them, like, you know, they're not conscious, like what, what are they on? Like, what's their medical history? They're able to like pull from this data set already, which I think stuff like that is really, really great. I just get concerned in terms of like privacy and like Dr. Nikki saying, um, accuracy also the biases in that as well. And like a lot of the biases come from the people that are building these AI systems. And the medical structure

as it exists already. Yeah,

exactly. There

was a really interesting discussion on this on The Economist about bias, where one of their guests was saying, we are noisy as humans. We're kind of unpredictable, we're inconsistent, and that covers our biases. And the reason we're seeing bias in AI more is because it's not noisy. And so all the human biases that it was trained on, because it's just trained on what we do, show up clearer because of that.

Yeah. If you say something like, you know, accidentally more redheads get high blood pressure, this is completely fictional. And it could just be that in that one hospital, there's just a lot of redheads that live nearby, but then like AI would amplify that because it's feeding off of that data set. And then I'll say like, oh, your blood pressure is bad. But that's the kind of thing I'm a little bit worried about to clarify. Jen,

what do you think? dr

nikki you made me so happy saying that they're working on it for alzheimer's because that affects my family greatly and yeah like any kind of early detection on that would be truly amazing so i'm gonna go with yay 100 let's go all

right let's get you go ahead oh go ahead I

was going to say, I'm actually, I do some Alzheimer's, very farly related Alzheimer's work, and early detection is the thing that NIH is dumping money into as much as they can. So hopefully that money dump helps. And I know there's going to be AI projects in the grant requests coming up. So that's the nitty gritty of that. All

right, let's get to your second prediction. Dr. Nikki, what do you think is going to happen in 2024? So

this is my more out in space one, but it's related to a DTNS topic that I covered this year. And I think we're going to have more nanobots, mostly because people love nanobots. So I was like, I got to talk about them. But when we brought them up earlier in the year, I think they were actually being used for antibiotic resistance, which we talked about already in the show. And I think that they were still kind of figuring out how to get them into the body without getting rejected. And then basically, once you get nanobots into the body, once you pass that hurdle, you can do so many things with them. So you could, for example, do antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and treat those drug delivery. You could like get one in there. That's a mechanical nanobot that could like cut out a blood clot. You could help with IVF. You could do all these things, but the problem to solve is fixing, getting them into the body and not getting rejected. So I'm predicting that we fix this next year, and then it's going to be an exploding field. Also, not necessarily in the human body, but NASA has a plan for an autonomous nanotechnology swarm called ants that are going to go into space. And I thought that was cool. So I'm going to add that to my nanobot prediction as well. So, okay. So talking about

nanobots, let's say I have a life-threatening brain clot, right? What are my options now and how would the nanobot revolution help me going forward?

Very good question. I think, and I'm not a surgeon or a human doctor, so I think the option now would be surgery or laparoscopic. Like you go in through an artery. I don't, you probably shouldn't do that up into the brain. I don't really know, but I'm assuming you should do that. And so nanobots, you just inject them into your bloodstream and they'll have, they'll be programmed for a specific target. So like, I don't know, probably there's a protein in blood clots that it can target for, and it'll like zoom up into there and then like mechanically destroy that blood clot without having to have any kind of surgery that's

amazing yeah that i mean that would be potentially yeah yeah

if that's maybe i want this i want this for us yeah we all do i don't know if there's downsides to nanobots though like they take over your body i don't know oh no they're hacked yeah yeah right or

they just like cholesterol is crazy oh the nanobots are mad yeah

they just start synthesizing cholesterol to get back at you they're angry yeah

i

could see the downside being some some kind of unintended side effect of them being in your system possibly but they're early early indications are there's nothing alarming about that right just

rejection um that the body will rejection which is surprising because they're very small. They're nano scale, uh, but still the body like can find them and then pretends like it's an infection. So it's just getting pissed off stage. Why

is the human body so amazing? A

trial and error. And cause we died a lot before we got this far. Yeah. I

mean, I would say amazingly annoying half the time, but also still amazing. I mean, here we all are. How about that? I

know. I hear about getting in the nanobots and my brain's going like, okay, but after they do their thing, then how did they get out? Hopefully you could just like pee them out or something.

Yeah, you pee them out like everything else no

you just ask them nicely to leave and they say okay a really big magnet don't

say pee them out and a big magnet uh yeah there's gonna be there's gonna be nanobot pollution from everybody yeah that's gonna be the problem. Yeah. Add more pollution. Well, folks, we know you've got predictions. If you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, get in touch with us. Let us know on the social networks. You know, we're sitting here on the holiday break waiting to hear from you. DTNS show on X, DTNS show at MastodonMSTDN.social, daily tech news show on TikTok and DTNS pics on Instagram and threads.

All right, Jen Cutter, it's time for your predictions. What's up first?

The first one is my depressing one. Video game layoffs. It's been bad this year, and I think it's also going to be dire next year. I had to write these numbers down because I didn't want to get them wrong. So in the last few months, we had Epic with around 830 people. Twitch, which I'm counting as gaming, not just IRL stuff. They gave up a big percentage. Amazon Games, 180. Newverse, a ByteDance, the TikTok company, dropped about a thousand people recently. And then Unity had their 265 people recently. But also people are forgetting that back in May, they dropped another 600 people. And that's not even counting the smaller studios like Paradox. I'm going to count Ubi as like a medium sized studio these days. EA had theirs. There's a site called videogamelayoffs.com, which has been keeping track of it if you want to be really depressed about the state of gaming. So I think next year is going to also be bad. I think the big companies are going to continue to scale down. Companies chasing trends are going to launch then die, which has happened a couple of times this year. And even a lot of the companies who let go of senior people who went on to build their own story, their own dev shops, I think they're going to run into trouble with the VC and private equity money that they brought in, because they're not going to want to wait two, three years for a game that is a maybe. So I think there's going to be a lot of bloodletting there. And that is my very sad prediction. Now,

do you feel like, you know, and jen i know you follow this pretty closely i mean do you feel like a lot of these companies were just bloated with too many employees because sometimes that does happen you know you have a little bit of a market correction and all of a sudden people go wait a sec you know who who are all these middle managers who maybe weren't contributing directly to something that you know too much hiring in the good

times right right

right you know and not that you know i i wouldn't pretend to understand what really happens inside a gaming studio but it does seem like gaming is on the up and up it's not that people don't care about games. They care about games more than ever. And yet people are still losing their jobs.

There was definitely a bit of a hiring boom during COVID when everybody tripled down and had access to more talent because a lot of studios went fully remote. But I think as a result of that, yes, some people had to let go. And I think a lot of the trend chasing has hurt people. And I think the unionization efforts have also caused some companies to be like, oh, I see who's doing this, we're going to find a reason to let them go. It's been making me happy how many studios are trying to unionize and QA especially, who never get any credits. And we would not have functional video games without QA.

They've had a lot of losses this year. My question is, what about, I thought this year we had like so many massive games. We had the new Zelda game. We had Baldur's Gate. We had another one. Starlink, I think. Starfield. Starfield. Sorry. Is that not helping bring new people on, those massive successes, or are those different companies? What's going on with that? Those

are great examples of what happens when a company stands behind their devs. There's still crunch problems. But those games took years and years of extremely talented people. Nintendo especially, they're known for keeping dev teams together. There are people who worked on Tears of the Kingdom who worked on the original Zelda. Like, that's just incredible. But that kind of seniority is getting more and more rare across the industry. And I think games are going to suffer for that a bit. It's why I'm rooting for the newer, smaller shops to see if they can bring that kind of magic and continuity of their experience. Because an average game developer career, if you last 10 years, you're a grandpa. That is a miracle. Worse than sports. Yeah.

Well, Jen, what is your next prediction? Well, as we're all going

for moonshots, my moonshot is AI related in a bit of a different tact. I am trying to again will into existence that next year's search engines will have a better way to filter AI sludge so that they do not become fully useless when looking for things. I'm sure I am not alone in being the tech support for an extended group of people. And it has been harder to teach them how to sort out the AI stuff from actual product reviews. My dad's been trying to buy a camera. He sends me all these links that are not real. So I've had to teach him, okay, search the name of the camera plus Reddit. So far Reddit seems to be, or at least is so far holding out from being all astroturfed. And yeah, I'm just finding it such a mess online and I want it cleaned up, please.

Yeah. And they can use large language models and other kinds of models to help clean it up, right? Fight fire with fire.

I want this to happen so bad. So I will agree with you that this will happen because it's such a pain. How is it? How is it so backwards that we have to Google everything with Reddit at the end to find an actual answer? Like, isn't Google supposed to be powerful? And they're just looping themselves into AI nonsense. Yeah, please make this happen. Yeah,

image searches, especially, seem heavily affected. Like there was back in the day when, you know, Etsy and Pinterest were taking over Google images. And there was ways that you could work around sorting that. But right now, I don't know a good way to sort around the AI images, especially for, you know, historical events. You can't do minus AI. Not yet. Not yet. Nobody

uses Google for search anymore. It's all you just use TikTok.

I

do that too, though. It's so hard finding like product, you said with your dad products or product reviews like i can't trust anything it's just ads or ai images yeah i'm still i'm

still unclear on how tiktok is a great search engine because we're old sarah well

i know i i

know i i feel old and i i have you know people who are older than me, you know, on earth being like, oh, yeah, TikTok is like where I find all my news. I'm like, how?

In the same way that Reddit is, it's because you can mostly tell that it's like a person and this person's opinion. And sometimes you can tell that they're paid. But at least you get more than just like, yes, this camera is best camera ever made. Please buy camera.