Riding the innovation wave MAINFinances, investing, lifestyle, safety & spending in 2024... and beyond.

Our world is constantly evolving. The big demographic trends of an ageing population, baby booms and baby busts are rippling through society. Technology is turning our lives upside down; in particular, artificial intelligence is revolutionising all of our interactions. Over the following pages we look at its impact... and where it is taking us.

- VANESSA WALKER

Not so long ago, when we gazed into our crystal ball, the future we saw was populated with hot-air balloons delivering wireless internet, power-generating kites, contact lenses that measure glucose, carbon-neutral fuel derived from seawater, and all of us wearing smart glasses that beam the daily news straight to our retinas.

In the tech world, these ambitious, exploratory products (think Apple’s newly released Vision Pro headset) and projects are known as moonshots. As Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin once said, moonshots are “far-out, sci-fi sounding technologies that could one day make the world a radically better place”. Naturally, they were also pegged as the revenue drivers of the future.

Fast-forward to today and the reality is that the big tech companies – think Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon and Meta – are shuttering their headline-grabbing moonshot projects and swivelling to advanced generative AI as the driver of change. Broadly, generative AI can create new content and data, while traditional AI solves specific tasks with predefined rules.

They are a world apart in terms of the impact on our lives; a fact implicitly acknowledged in the Federal government’s January 2024 interim response to the Safe and Responsible AI in Australia discussion paper.

With this in mind, Money brings you up to speed on the innovations you can expect to experience this year and beyond; the ones that will make a difference to you on the ground, so to speak.