Goodbye, 2023. Hello, 2024.

It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. At the end of every year, I like to pause and reflect on how much effort has gone into nurturing and maintaining my digital homestead. My decision to slowly retreat from social media prompted me to spend more time around here. So, how have I done? I could have done better.

Over the past 12 months, I posted 176 times (including this post). Yes, I did better than in 2022 when I posted 128 times, but not as well as my recent high-water mark in 2020 when I posted pretty much every day—307 times.

The raw data doesn’t tell the full story, however. I took a look at all the data I have since I started actively blogging on this domain in 2013. When it came to “total words” posted, this was the third-best year—after 2020 and 2015. However, 2023 was the best year in terms of the average words per post. So while I wrote less often, I spent more time on what I wrote.

It was the first year in a long time that I have been intellectually stimulated to the point where I woke up in the middle of the night, making notes in my offline journal. The dots seem to connect, and there are more questions than answers in my mind. I have been reading more, jotting down insights, and following up with questions more often. I have not felt this excited since 2003 when we were at the birth of the social era.

My writing was clustered around what turned out to be the “real” big stories of 2023—the rise of augmented (artificial) intelligence and how it was going to start influencing everything around us. AI and its influence have started to show up in how we think of computers, machines, and how we interface with technology. You can see the influence of digital augmentation in the increased automation of our world, including the hesitant arrival of self-driving vehicles. There were five themes I covered, and they are all interrelated. And there were three I didn’t even bother to write about because I am still in the learning phase myself.

What are these interconnected five themes?

1. The Start of Super Automation. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) 
2. New Compute Architectures. (1, 2) 
3. Social Era, RIP. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) 
4. The Post-Browser Internet. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
5. Self-Driving Arrives, Slowly. (1, 2) 

The missing themes where I could, should, and will do more work:

1. Rise of Machined Creativity.
2. Computational Science.
3. The Continued Balkanization of the Network.

So, to be clear, I am not thinking that any of these are really mainstream. Instead, my thinking is that none of this is fiction anymore. We are starting to see real-world impacts.

AI, or augmented intelligence, has finally given us tools to be more ambitious. The machines aren’t creative, but they are now able to work with us at a more personal level, and this, in turn, enables anyone who has ambition and creativity to do things they couldn’t because they were limited by tools. Whether you want to write or code beyond your abilities, in 2023, we took a step forward in how we incorporate technology into our world. This is a superpower we need to live on and with the network.

Now that you think about it, that was one heck of a year. So much so that it seems everyone in Silicon Valley has forgotten there was a run on the bank, and SVB collapsed this year, putting the entire Silicon Valley at risk. Since then, it has been all about AI, all the time. 

So, what’s next for 2024?

As I wrote in the last 2023 edition of my newsletter, ‘I plan to increase my blog activity, utilizing it for its intended purpose—a commonplace journal. This way, you can stay informed about my thoughts, reading materials, and what I find relevant in my quest for a broader perspective and a deeper understanding of our present and future. These are essentially brief notes to myself (and to you).’

I hope you join me in what will be an exciting year ahead. 

Top Posts of 2023

1. Why Vision Pro Will Change Photography.
2. Does Google Need a New CEO?
3. The Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.
4. A Conversation with Humane Co-founder Imran Chaudhri.
5. The Real Personal (AI) Computer.

Some of my favorite posts 

1. Why do companies become hostile to their customers?
2. Nostalgia is a curse in life and tech.
3. What Steve Jobs would have thought of our industry?

Etc. 

• I published 17 editions of the ‘A Letter from Om’ newsletter—well below the target of 24 I had set for the year.
• I recorded only two episodes of my podcast this year, falling short of my target of 12.

December 31, 2023. San Francisco