A new year approaches. What do you think will happen? What won't happen?
Register your predictions here.
Artificial intelligence is close to human-level and is progressing fast. In 2026, it will start discovering new knowledge, and it will quickly become much better than humans at discovering new knowledge.
Continual learning will be achieved, knowledge workers will face mass layoffs, AI stocks will greatly increase in value, and there will be a period during which there is a robotics shortage and wages for human labourers increase dramatically.
Things that will happen:
- Republicans lose the House (90%) as well as North Carolina (90%) and Ohio's (60%) Senate races in a free and fair election; if Peltola runs, they also lose Alaska's Senate race (70%)
- Jim is still just as adamant we are living in his timeline (80%)
- The job market for young people seeking white collar jobs gets even worse (75%)
- US productivity growth continues at the same pace, or perhaps even accelerates (70%)
- By the end of the year, US culture has notably shifted back towards "woke" (70%)
- Autonomous AI coding models become significantly better than they are now (75%)
- The best models from each lab have different strengths and weaknesses and are still relatively close in quality; there is no clear "winner" of the race (60%)
- The public in the West becomes more anti-AI (90%)
- Israel and Iran exchange more missiles (70%)
- Zohran Mamdani's popularity (in polls) decreases a little but he remains popular (60%)
- Donald Trump's popularity decreases a little but stagnates around 40% (70%)
- Trump nominates at least one Supreme Court justice after Alito or Thomas (or both) retire, and the Senate confirms the replacement(s) (75%)
- Putin (95%), Netanyahu (60%) and Orban (65%) remain in power; the right-wing candidate wins the presidency in Brazil (75%); the Reform party wins the Senedd election (60%)
- Trump launches airstrikes against Venezuela (75%) and forces Maduro from power (55%)
Things that won't happen (percentage is my estimated chance it does happen):
- Stocks do not continue rising at the same pace (25%)
- AGI is not invented (10%)
- There is no massive AI bubble crash (20%)
- Trump does not die (5%)
- China does not invade Taiwan (15%)
- The Ukraine war does not end (25%)
- There is no massive continual learning breakthrough in AI (though there will be some improvements to memory) (25%)
- Chinese AI labs will not pull ahead of American ones (25%)
- The US Federal Reserve does not cut rates below 2.75%, despite Trump's new chair (25%)
@SaviorofPlant I'll take you up on America going woke again at 70%. Make some criteria.
@realDonaldTrump I'll look for polls that are a proxy for this question. For what it's worth I am not predicting a return to 2019-2020 levels of "woke" but just a shift closer to this from where we are now.