As with last decade, I’m most confident about boring things, though less optimistic than I’d like to be.
Fewer than 1 billion people (combatants + civilians) will die in wars in the 2020s: 95%
The United States of America will still exist under its current Constitution (with or without new Amendments) and with all of its current states (with or without new states) as of 1/1/30: 93%
Fewer than 10 million people (combatants + civilians) will die in wars in the 2020s: 85%
The median rent per unit in the United States will increase faster than inflation in the 2020s: 80%
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will not go into force by 1/1/30: 75%
Human-driven cars will still be street-legal in all major US cities as of 1/1/30: 75%
As of 1/1/30, customers will not make purchases by giving each merchant full access to a non-transaction-specific numeric string (i.e. credit cards as they are today): 70%
Conditional on Pew Research Center releasing a survey on the topic after 1/1/28, their most recent survey by 1/1/30 will show that 60% or fewer of American adults identify as Christian: 70%
Conditional on Pew Research Center releasing a survey on the topic after 1/1/28, their most recent survey by 1/1/30 will show that 33% or more of American adults identify as religiously unaffiliated: 70%
More than half of American adults will use a Facebook product at least once per day in 2029: 60%
Real-time 24-hour news networks will still exist as of 1/1/30, and will average more than 1 million average daily viewers (in the USA) in 2029: 50%
The largest not-currently-existing US tech company (by market cap as of 1/1/30) will not have its primary HQ in the Bay Area: 35%
A song generated entirely by an AI will make one of the Billboard charts: 25%
California will put a new state constitution to a statewide vote: 10%
A rough distribution (on a log scale) based on the two points you estimated for wars (95% < 1B people die in wars, 85% < 10M people die in wars) gives a median of ~2,600 people dying. Does that seem right?
No. My model is the sum of a bunch of random variables for possible conflicts (these variables are not independent of each other), where there are a few potential global wars that would cause millions or billions of deaths, and lots and lots of tiny wars each of which would add a few thousand deaths.
This model predicts a background rate of the sum of the smaller ones, and large spikes to the rate whenever a larger conflict happens. Accordingly, over the last three decades (with the tragic exception of the Rwandan genocide) total war deaths per year (combatants + civilians) have been between 18k and 132k (wow, the Syrian Civil War has been way worse than the Iraq War, I didn’t realize that).
So my median is something like 1M people dying over the decade, because I view a major conflict as under 50% likely, and we could easily have a decade as peaceful (no, really) as the 2000s.
Yeah this seems pretty reasonable. It’s actually stark looking at the Our World in Data – that seems really high per year. Do you have your model somewhere? I’d be interested to see it.
It’s not explicit. Like I said, the terms are highly dependent in reality, but for intuition you can think of a series of variables Xk for k from 1 to N, where Xk equals 1/k with probability 1/√N. And think of N as pretty large.
So most of the time, the sum of these is dominated by a lot of terms with small contributions. But every now and then, a big one hits and there’s a huge spike.
(I haven’t thought very much about what functions of k and N I’d actually use if I were making a principled model; 1/k and 1/√N are just there for illustrative purposes, such that the sum is expected to have many small terms most of the time and some very large terms occasionally.)
As of 1/1/30, customers will not make purchases by giving each merchant full access to a non-transaction-specific numeric string (i.e. credit cards as they are today): 70%
This seems like the kind of bold prediction which failed last time around. Maybe you can make it more specific and say what fraction of online transactions will be processed using something which looks unlike the current credit card setup?
And then have it immediately satisfied by cash transactions!
I think you’d have to either predict reductions in credit card usage specifically, or get into a little bit more detail about what sort of transaction setup we are talking about.
For example, I could see the spirit of (my interpretation of) this prediction being met by something like the new NFC payment mechanisms which generate one-time use credit card numbers for each transaction. Why pointlessly break compatibility with the legacy system?
Dammit, dammit, dammit, I meant to condition these all on no human extinction and no superintelligence. Commenting rather than editing because I forget if the time of an edit is visible, and I want it to be clear I didn’t update this based on information from the 2020s.
Times of edits are not currently visible, though we do store all the necessary information, so if anyone ever wants to know whether a comment has been edited, an admin can look it up.
As of 1/1/30, customers will not make purchases by giving each merchant full access to a non-transaction-specific numeric string (i.e. credit cards as they are today): 70%
That certainly seems a very reasonable prediction, and perhaps too conservative. In many ways one might say that current chip based card transactions (which would also include all the mobile payments like Apple/Samsung/Google pay) have already departed that non-transaction-specific model. Similarly, for online purchases that use token technologies these are often linked to the specific merchant.
However, there might be two ways to interpret that predictions. 1) the payment mechanisms used for non-cash transactions will move towards transaction specific identifiers and cash will not be used or used significantly less than today or 2) we might see some form of transaction specific “money” (block-chain currencies seem to fit but I don’t think they are the future) and more transactions are conducted as “cash” rather than using these payment card mechanisms.
Either (1) or (2) (and some other possibilities) would satisfy my prediction. My prediction is just that, however we do things in 2029, it won’t be by handing each merchant the keys to our entire credit account.
As with last decade, I’m most confident about boring things, though less optimistic than I’d like to be.
Fewer than 1 billion people (combatants + civilians) will die in wars in the 2020s: 95%
The United States of America will still exist under its current Constitution (with or without new Amendments) and with all of its current states (with or without new states) as of 1/1/30: 93%
Fewer than 10 million people (combatants + civilians) will die in wars in the 2020s: 85%
The median rent per unit in the United States will increase faster than inflation in the 2020s: 80%
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will not go into force by 1/1/30: 75%
Human-driven cars will still be street-legal in all major US cities as of 1/1/30: 75%
As of 1/1/30, customers will not make purchases by giving each merchant full access to a non-transaction-specific numeric string (i.e. credit cards as they are today): 70%
Conditional on Pew Research Center releasing a survey on the topic after 1/1/28, their most recent survey by 1/1/30 will show that 60% or fewer of American adults identify as Christian: 70%
Conditional on Pew Research Center releasing a survey on the topic after 1/1/28, their most recent survey by 1/1/30 will show that 33% or more of American adults identify as religiously unaffiliated: 70%
More than half of American adults will use a Facebook product at least once per day in 2029: 60%
Real-time 24-hour news networks will still exist as of 1/1/30, and will average more than 1 million average daily viewers (in the USA) in 2029: 50%
The largest not-currently-existing US tech company (by market cap as of 1/1/30) will not have its primary HQ in the Bay Area: 35%
A song generated entirely by an AI will make one of the Billboard charts: 25%
California will put a new state constitution to a statewide vote: 10%
A rough distribution (on a log scale) based on the two points you estimated for wars (95% < 1B people die in wars, 85% < 10M people die in wars) gives a median of ~2,600 people dying. Does that seem right?
No. My model is the sum of a bunch of random variables for possible conflicts (these variables are not independent of each other), where there are a few potential global wars that would cause millions or billions of deaths, and lots and lots of tiny wars each of which would add a few thousand deaths.
This model predicts a background rate of the sum of the smaller ones, and large spikes to the rate whenever a larger conflict happens. Accordingly, over the last three decades (with the tragic exception of the Rwandan genocide) total war deaths per year (combatants + civilians) have been between 18k and 132k (wow, the Syrian Civil War has been way worse than the Iraq War, I didn’t realize that).
So my median is something like 1M people dying over the decade, because I view a major conflict as under 50% likely, and we could easily have a decade as peaceful (no, really) as the 2000s.
Yeah this seems pretty reasonable. It’s actually stark looking at the Our World in Data – that seems really high per year. Do you have your model somewhere? I’d be interested to see it.
It’s not explicit. Like I said, the terms are highly dependent in reality, but for intuition you can think of a series of variables Xk for k from 1 to N, where Xk equals 1/k with probability 1/√N. And think of N as pretty large.
So most of the time, the sum of these is dominated by a lot of terms with small contributions. But every now and then, a big one hits and there’s a huge spike.
(I haven’t thought very much about what functions of k and N I’d actually use if I were making a principled model; 1/k and 1/√N are just there for illustrative purposes, such that the sum is expected to have many small terms most of the time and some very large terms occasionally.)
This seems like the kind of bold prediction which failed last time around. Maybe you can make it more specific and say what fraction of online transactions will be processed using something which looks unlike the current credit card setup?
And then have it immediately satisfied by cash transactions!
I think you’d have to either predict reductions in credit card usage specifically, or get into a little bit more detail about what sort of transaction setup we are talking about.
For example, I could see the spirit of (my interpretation of) this prediction being met by something like the new NFC payment mechanisms which generate one-time use credit card numbers for each transaction. Why pointlessly break compatibility with the legacy system?
I guess Paypal, Amazon Pay, etc. could also qualify—they allow me to make purchases without giving a merchant access to my credit card number.
Dammit, dammit, dammit, I meant to condition these all on no human extinction and no superintelligence. Commenting rather than editing because I forget if the time of an edit is visible, and I want it to be clear I didn’t update this based on information from the 2020s.
Times of edits are not currently visible, though we do store all the necessary information, so if anyone ever wants to know whether a comment has been edited, an admin can look it up.
That certainly seems a very reasonable prediction, and perhaps too conservative. In many ways one might say that current chip based card transactions (which would also include all the mobile payments like Apple/Samsung/Google pay) have already departed that non-transaction-specific model. Similarly, for online purchases that use token technologies these are often linked to the specific merchant.
However, there might be two ways to interpret that predictions. 1) the payment mechanisms used for non-cash transactions will move towards transaction specific identifiers and cash will not be used or used significantly less than today or 2) we might see some form of transaction specific “money” (block-chain currencies seem to fit but I don’t think they are the future) and more transactions are conducted as “cash” rather than using these payment card mechanisms.
Either (1) or (2) (and some other possibilities) would satisfy my prediction. My prediction is just that, however we do things in 2029, it won’t be by handing each merchant the keys to our entire credit account.