Why 2024 was the tipping point, and what comes next

2024 represented something we can’t fully capture – both personally and, likely, for many of you as well. For me it was the year that I accepted things weren’t returning to normal. Yes, it was spreading war, Trump getting elected again, the economic malaise we seem to be navigating here in Australia. But it was something else as well…

Human existence is framed neither by facts nor by feelings. It is framed by the gap between what we expected versus what we are experiencing. My expectation gap was that I thought we were heading not for a new normal but for a slightly different version of what my life had taught me to expect for many years – that, broadly, things get better over time. I struggle with my desire to be concise and to capture what I actually feel underneath it all.

I thought the world was more predictable, safer, and it seems I am not alone. The biggest thread throughout the Western world is the lived experience of the era of abundance coming to what feels like…not that. If life was shopping, we all thought we were getting something great on special but turns out it's just something we came across on Temu. A world that feels more divided, more distrustful and more disturbed. One we would perhaps return to the shops if only we could remember where we left the receipt. If our age had karmic intention, it would be that for all we have changed in our world for the worse it has built us an attention economy as payback. A gilded cage of more and more competing for the attention of fewer and fewer.

Over the break (in between taking time to laugh, skate a few laps and arguably take far too many gummies, now so deliciously legal in Canada, than was a good idea) I tried to think about my own perspective. 2024 was a year. If you were the CEO of Nvidia, a Director at M&S or an investor in Ausmex cross-over brand Guzman y Gomez you had a tremendous year. 2024 was peak burrito in Brisbane and Bunbury and if you don’t know what a Tensor Core GPU is you should try and find out. We all make the mistake of projecting our own biases and our own desires (if we’re honest) onto the world at large. We are all less likely to agree on one reality but we are all part of one profound transformation.

If you were a typical small business in Australia you spent most of your year dealing with everything from not being able to find staff to having no need for them. This is our world and if you look through the noise there are clear reasons why fortune no longer just favours the brave. It favours the biggest, most well-resourced and of course, Deepseek. The disruption promised by the Valley of Silicon really was just a consolidation that nearly eclipses even what the Robber Barons of the 1920s were able to achieve. The Barons were able to control 40% of America’s wealth, the Tech Titans are around 35%. Progress :)

Some argue the turbulence of our times is part of a larger historical cycle, often described as the ‘Century Theory’. This theory posits that societies undergo dramatic shifts roughly every 100 years, oscillating between eras of consolidation and disruption. The early 1900s saw industrialisation reshape our lives; the 2000s are proving to be the dawn of the autonomous age that replaces it. While the framework is simplistic it does highlight what we often forget. This change goes well beyond the world of work or how we invest our time. The real tipping point is when influence and wealth directly correlate with who mastered the distribution of the technology of the day. The Industrial Age reshaped the structure of our societies so what is this age bringing? We are entering the Era of Autonomy and are in the last throes of the Age of the Machine. It is getting messy as we deal with the tensions that the age of AI and Agents is thrusting upon us.

Salary versus software

The return on typical labour was long ago eclipsed by the return on a typical investment. What is different now is that this is true everywhere not just in certain areas of the economy. It is creating a push from the new and a pull away from the old that is changing the economics of everything from cars to carpentry to consumer staples. Your local tradie is being pushed by the need to embrace task automation on the job site to remain relevant while being pulled by the desire to save labour costs through more autonomous machinery. Your strip mall car lot is being pushed to sell more EVs through the crashing cost of batteries while being pulled by the increasing cost of software to make all vehicles work.

Fuelling a car is a great analogy for what is to come. A petrol pump is a mechanical invention enhanced through digital technology, an EV charger is digitally native and enhanced through machinery. You can make this analogy for all industries, only this time everyone is the legacy company. In our own patch of the world, we reached our own tipping point in 2024. Fifty percent of the world’s ad spend is now controlled by Google, Meta, Amazon, and TikTok according to WARC. Our own big four communication groups are going to soon be three as a result. You can’t beat software with high salaried staff and with variable outputs. 

We are seeing this shift in all industries and AI will only increase the pressure to keep up. This is what we talk about when we say structural change. What this is creating in all industries is an arms race where to keep up you need to invest more in digital capability than human skills. Software ate the world, and it is now coming for your salary.

Resources versus renewal

The other arms race is one for resources as business-as-usual crashes into unfinished business across all advanced economies. We have a global need to invest in new technologies and energy sources, while at the same time renewing our existing infrastructure (everything from building more homes to fixing key transport infrastructure). The UK alone has over 70,000 bridges that require some type of repair and Canada has a housing gap of 3.5 million homes, which need to be completed in the next ten years. This is also put against the need to build the future while we fix the problems of today. Powering our new age of renewable energy systems, electric vehicles, and advanced AI will require more energy and more resources. Processing for AI alone will go from 2% of the world’s power use to 4% by 2030. It is not just energy in the sense of power but also the human endeavour required to replace the old and build the new at the same time. We need 500,000 engineers here in Australia alone.

The world is at a tipping point and the tug between the old and the new directly impacts us here in Australia. There are few better at digging than we are but we over index on legacy minerals rather than the coppers, nickels and other minerals required to run the Autonomous Age. Our decades long bull run of selling iron ore and thermal coal isn’t coming to an end anytime soon but it is no longer where the money or the valuation will be. Natural gas aside the future does look less rosy the less resources we have. This matters more here than anywhere, as so much of what we make as a country leaves our shores unprocessed, so when the value of the raw material drops the economy gets colder than a Greenland summer. Speaking of Greenland, there is a reason the US is suddenly interested in Greenland and turning my home country into a state very much in the same way everywhere you look through Sub-Saharan Africa and South America you are likely to come across a Chinese investment. All are home to the most important minerals of our millennium or sit in the middle of the new trade routes once the Arctic is no longer frozen only twenty-five short years from now.

Individuals versus institutions

I finally understand. Having recently returned from North America the whole Trump thing makes way more sense. They voted to see individuals take apart the institutions that have only delivered them inflation and a sense of disorder since Covid created a new normal. At an individual level everything from the interest rate they pay to the price of staples to the surcharge they pay for their gas has been increased by institutions that they don’t see as working for them. They clearly don’t, but not sure individualism on a mass scale will do any better.

2025 will bring just as many challenges as 2024. It will also be filled with as much opportunity as 2024. While in rural Maine I watched an old man pay for the grocery bill of a young Latino family who were clearly struggling. Not for glory but for good. That sense of being human in the Age of Autonomy filled my bucket. I reckon those are the types of opportunities we are all best to invest in during 2025 as much as we can.

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Be better to each other.