Here are a few miscellaneous predictions for the new year:
- Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination. Joe Biden will be reelected president.
- Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any conditions. It will still be a couple more years before you can buy one, but it will exist.
- The odds are greater than 50% of a recession by summer. It will likely be a moderate one, maybe about the size of the dotcom bust. There's even a chance of a brief deflation.
- Israel will effectively destroy Hamas. But this won't accomplish anything because an even worse group will eventually rise from the ashes.
- Republicans will not impeach Joe Biden.
- Labor will win in UK elections, but by less than polls predicted.
- GPT-5 will be released. 2024 will be the first year when a significant number of people lose their jobs to AI, possibly as many as half a million or so.
- China will continue to get weaker and weaker. The headwinds of fertility declines, population aging, endemic corruption, youth unemployment, a property bust, and continuing stupid disputes with the west will simply be too great.
- Humans will orbit the moon for the first time in half a century.
- There will be at least one big scandal involving AI deepfakes during the 2024 presidential race.
- The world will become ever warmer. Duh.
Happy New Year!
I appreciate this. It would be interesting and useful, I think, to hear what your rough probabilities are for each of these. One thing I've seen others do is gauge how well-calibrated they are (i.e. bundle up all the 50% predictions and see if 50% of them came true).
Biden vs. Trump. A non-choice for Americans. One should retire and the other already an indicted criminal. Mark my words. A Trump nomination will set the GOP back by at least a generation.
Excuse me sir, this is a Wendy's???
Any thoughts on the Ukraine war? Does Russia cut its losses and withdraw? Does Ukraine capitulate and agree to cede territory to Russia? A lot of that probably depends on the outcome of #1.
I think Ukraine basically ends up having to cede Crimea in a ceasefire in 2024, and the conflict maybe restarts again in 2025.
1. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination. Joe Biden will be reelected president.
Agreewith both unless one or both have serious health issues (quite possible).
2. Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any conditions. It will still be a couple more years before you can buy one, but it will exist. I think you're extremely optomistic with this prediction. First most driving (by time) is not on highways and much is in poor conditions. I have a Tesla and driving in a small town in Canada I can see from its analysis, it would make serious errors most times I drive. Usually due to snow ice or rain, or road repairs. Much of the midwest and eastern US have similar problems let alone asia and europe. California is a best case situation for automated driving and I think it will take many years to be usable across the world.
3, The odds are greater than 50% of a recession by summer. It will likely be a moderate one, maybe about the size of the dotcom bust. There's even a chance of a brief deflation.
That may be possible but there is tremendous incentive for Binden to do anything he can to prevent a recession.
4. Israel will effectively destroy Hamas. But this won't accomplish anything because an even worse group will eventually rise from the ashes.
Because alot of Hamas' leadership is in Qater and/or the UEA I don't think Isreal will be able to destroy Hamas no matter how many Palestinians they kill.
5. Republicans will not impeach Joe Biden.
50/50 they will just because the Republican reps think it would help Trump.
6. Labor will win in UK elections, but by less than polls predicted.
I think Labour (there is no Labor party) will win but whether they do poorer than polls predict depends on how much tightening there is in the polls before the elestion (there has been some already).
6. GPT-5 will be released. 2024 will be the first year when a significant number of people lose their jobs to AI, possibly as many as half a million or so.
I think it will take longer at leastr in part due to the high error rate I see in lots of Chat GPT results. I think the AI story to watch is the NYT and other lawsuits.
7. China will continue to get weaker and weaker. The headwinds of fertility declines, population aging, youth unemployment, a property bust, and continuing stupid disputes with the west will simply be too great.
I general I agree but I worry about Xi Jinping getting desperate and invading Taiwan,
8. umans will orbit the moon for the first time in half a century.
Probably right but the may be a technical problem that pushes it back to 2025.
9. There will be at least one big scandal involving AI deepfakes during the 2024 presidential race.
Very likely.
The world will become ever warmer. Duh.
Unfortunately very likely although. if the El Nino event end sooner than currently predicted, 2023 may be hoter than 2024.
4. I doubt they can wipe out Hamas completely, but they can effectively render it neutralized within Gaza itself even if the leadership survives elsewhere. If some other group fills that vacuum, then Hamas becomes irrelevant.
5. Agree on this. Trump and conservative media will be baying for blood in early 2024 as Trump goes on trial, and that means congressional Republicans will be under enormous pressure to find some pretext for impeaching Joe Biden - and they will.
6. The big problem for OpenAI in the copyright case is the Warhol decision that was handed down this year. Basically, if the secondary use of the copyrighted material competes with the original use and is commercial in nature (very likely true for OpenAI and other AI developers), then getting Fair Use protection is much harder. I think it's quite possible they have to settle the case and effectively start over on retraining AI on licensed training sets.
That makes it extremely hard to get to GPT-5, unless they can figure out how to train accurately with synthetic training sets or get more out of smaller data sets.
7. Invading Taiwan is the type of thing where we'd have serious advance warning of it happening, because of how obvious the preparations would be. Although of course they could try to strange Taiwan with sudden military efforts in an attempt to starve it into submission rather than conquest, and that would be harder to predict.
C'mon now, this is the year we met...them. [points to the sky]
LIke
The bi-gendered sky, where the rainbows are. Will start talking to us.
RE: "Joe Biden will be reelected president."
Unexpected health events can't be ruled out. All it takes is one bad fall.
RE: [There is a chance of a] "recession by summer. It will likely be a moderate one"
Isn't that pretty much the definition of a soft landing? Does throttling inflation have to be perfect?
(Kevin's stance is there was no need for the Fed react to "COVID stimulus/inflation". but that's a minority view.)
Falls usually kill or seriously disable old people because of the delay in medical treatment. Since Joe is constantly in the presence of a doctor nearby with access to a helicopter to transport him immediately to the best medical facilities money can buy, it is much more unlikely a fall will have the same effect on his mortality. And as long as Joe is conscious and coherent, he’s going to be running for re-election.
I continue to believe Trump will not be the nominee at the end of the GOP convention.
I think it'll be a couple of years before Waymo has figured out highways. As it stands right now, it can't handle high traffic / congestion. When it goes into fault mode, will there be a lane to pullover to?
Most economists see a modest real GDP increase in 2024. Why do you keep doubling down on a recession?
GPT-5 will result in lots of tech people losing their jobs in India, specifically those working in customer service, extensibility, and data processing.
I think the odds are greater that China goes into recession, than the US. I think the odds are strong that the US will be one of the few countries that does not enter a recession in 2024.
a recession is just 2 quarters long, so mild recession with growth in GDP over the year are not mutually exclusive.
If they can make it reliable (and avoid copyright armageddon setting it back by a year or more), then the biggest impact will definitely be on phone and email customer service. It could really improve those infamously annoying automated phone menu customer service lines.
There are some spicy hot takes on this list, namely numbers 2 and 7.
Mildly spicy takes on 3 and 4 at least.
My prediction is that #2 is as ridiculous as all the FSD predictions Elon has made over the years. There's always 5% to go.
#3 is not really a prediction: "Odds are greater than 50%..." is not falsifiable. Will it happen or not?
3 scary breakthroughs AI will make in 2024,
https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/3-scary-breakthroughs-ai-will-make-in-2024
I wish more people would do this. I wish I would do this.
I might have been interesting for you to put consistent probabilities on these, or at least place them into categories such as low-, medium-, and high probability.
Electric train in China that operates autonomously without tracks,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/18v70w2/this_train_in_china_runs_without_any_tracks/
Seattle has a trolley bus, and a lot of cities have articulated buses.
More trolley than bus but no tracks so it can be routed anywhere.
So a trolley bus?
A lot of tracked trains probably could be automated completely, especially with Positive Train Control systems over most of the US rail lines. We just don't allow it because of regulatory issues.
If your #3 happens, it's hard to see your #1 happening.
I hope this recession + AI doesn’t mean I lose my job. Because I’d be mad and tempted to blame Mr. Drum (and the AI chat thingy which writes this blog) for all of it. I won’t vote for trump or any Republican.
Still, I’m thinking trump wins in some bizarre contested election decided either by the Supreme Court (like 2000) or because the various lunatics like Kennedy and Lieberman no labels make enough mischief to flip it. Never underestimate the stupidity of Americans and the far left.
I do not underestimate the stupidity of Americans (or the far left). Either one of them would be enough to undermine prediction #1. So I strongly doubt that prediction #1 will come to pass.
But I think that D-Ohrk's prediction of Trump not being the candidate after the GOP convention has a better chance of happening. Alas, this will make it even harder for Biden to win.
Good Lord! Did you check the latest approval averages on 538 today? Trump has an approval rating average of 42% to Biden's 39%. That plus the Republican advantage in the Electoral College will doom Biden against just about anybody.
I agree with most, but here are my disagreements:
2 -- Waymo will have cars that can drive on any highway -- No, not in 2024. Maybe 2027.
3 -- Recession in 2024. Nope. Even Covid, a worldwide pandemic affecting the world's #1 manufacturing hub, only caused a 2 month recession. 10 year interest rates falling from less than 4% in a 2% inflation environment is *not* high enough to trigger a recession. If China goes after Taiwan, all bets are off, but otherwise, no.
7 -- Half a million people lose their jobs to GPT-5? Hard to tell how you'd measure this, but GPT-5 will not be good enough to do anyone's job.
10 -- Will anyone believe any randomly presented video without any trusted path indicating its origin? I doubt it, so I don't see how you get a big scandal from one.
Have you not met any humans before? There may well not be any big scandal resulting from a faked video, but it will be because it will be common not because people in general view anything that confirms their personal biases with even an ounce of scepticism.
Assuming it's not too expensive (and copyright lawsuits don't set it back, which is likely in my thinking), then it could absolutely fill in for a bunch of customer service tasks. Think stuff like taking orders at a fast food drive thru, or replacing those automated phone menus that already exist. They don't need to be perfect, since they can connect people to a customer service rep or employee if there's an unresolvable issue - just cheaper and more useful.
Don't we already have this with those stubborn phone trees that insist they can answer your questions?
I'm sure AI will be blamed for job losses, but will only be responsible for a few of them. Reporters continued to be laid off, and though there have been some reports of AI writing articles, that did not cause the layoffs. Corporations want to turn every job into a gig, and the internet has hurt local newspapers and national magazines.
#3 isn’t going to happen, if the current trajectory of the stock market means anything. A lot fewer people seem to be betting real money on “recession coming soon.”
I predict that SCOTUS will affirm the Colorado Supreme Court judgment re the 14th amendment and Trump will not be allowed to run for president.
I predict the SCOTUS will simply decline to hear appeals from the Colorado case.
Letting it stand by doing nothing.
That would be a bad plan. It would probably lead to Trump being allowed to run in some states but not others, and all without any final determination of whether he is eligible to take office if he wins.
And every deep red state will invent a reason for removing the Democratic nominee from their ballots.
I hope the courts still have enough integrity to block invented reasons; if they don't, we're doomed any way. The fact that any politician, of any party, would be so lacking in integrity as to try to rely on invented reasons says we're already pretty far gone. Democracy relies on the good faith of most of its participants. I don't know how much the critical proportion is, but democracy fails when enough of the participants in it start acting in bad faith and/or dishonestly.
I don't see how they can just let it stand. You have 2 states on one side of a Constitutional question and 2 on the other side. Don't they have to resolve that?
My understanding is that the decisions in the various states have been predicated by differences in how their state laws are written. The ones who left him on the ballot have basically said "Yeah, he was involved in an insurrection, but our courts or our executives don't have the legal authority to keep him off the ballot."
Certainly not an ideal situation and one I'm sure we'd like to see resolved or given federal-level guidance, but I could see how if SCOTUS wanted to they could make an argument to let the various cases stand as they are.
The reports I've seen say that several state courts and California's Secretary of State have determined that their laws don't prevent ineligible candidates from running in primaries. They've invited the plaintiffs to try again if and when he gets the nomination. None have ruled that he can't be kept off the general election ballot if disqualified from office.
I'll predict that AI proves to be only half as disruptive as predicted. Where it will be disruptive is in advertising and web search (sorry Google). Nobody wants to have to scroll through 30 links to find the answer to a question, just answer the damn question (correctly). The entire industry of matching up advertisers with people who might want their products based on profiles is going up in flames as more of us refuse to have our data sold (sorry Meta).
If this stuff actually worked then they'd know I'm not interested in Lume Deodorant or the Camp Lejune lawsuit.
I don't know anyone who's made an effort to keep their data away from Google, and I'm not sure how you'd do it, anyway.
No one wants to scroll through 30 links to find an answer, but I've found that when I Google something like "What's the median income of Hispanics over 30?" it frequently pops up an answer in front of the links, and the answer is wrong at least 20% of the time. It's only when you click through the you see it dropped a bunch of the search criteria, and gave you the wrong answer.
IOW, you can't trust AI's answers. Maybe in another decade; maybe in never.
What I'm thinking is that eventually many questions that have actual data to back them up will winnow down to a single answer that can be verified. But who's the "verification" certifier? And how long does it take before the conspiracy crowd decides that the certification is a fake, thus negating the entire idea?
This is why I think AI will not be as disruptive as everyone thinks. It learns, but it can't distinguish right from wrong, scientifically backed data from conjecture, conspiracy from fact. Large numbers of humans apparently can't, either. The first time AI tells a MAGA that Donald Trump lost 2020 fair and square it loses credibility with 36% of the country.
The only real use of AI that I'm seeing so far is in putting together things that we humans missed - new ways of combining things to make more effective products. It isn't going to be writing anyone's term paper since not being able to distinguish fact from fiction is a huge liability.
I've read a lot of reports saying that the current generation of AIs are not programmed to be truthful. They have a tendency to make stuff up. Until they can be programmed not to make stuff up, they won't be useful for search.
I think you're wrong about most of these.
#1 is actually two predictions; the dependency between them, or even whether there is a dependency between them, is unstated, which is not quite fair.
#2 and #9: never.
#3 reflects your undue respect for nationally-aggregated statistics. In my part of the country, which is not on either coast, 2000 was much worse than 2008; the economy of my state has never even begun to recover from it.
#4 and #8: yes, but not so soon.
#6 (both clauses) is so safe that it is almost another cheat. "Labour" is the correct name of the party even in U. S. English.
Since humans have orbited the moon in the past what would prevent them from doing so again?
Can you explain why the Y2K recession was so devastating to your state?
Whoever wins the presidential election, it won't be Joe Biden. Next year will be a big one for independent candidates and they won't be pulling Maga votes from Trump; it'll be from Biden. Also, Gaza. way to lose the youth and Black vote at the same time. Biden also keeps repeating things that have proved untrue so he's either lying or too old to change his mind when facts change. He's also presiding over the biggest and fastest world isolation of the U.S. I ever saw. Frankly, I don't think he stands a chance and will step down - but too late for viable Dem candidates to compete. So it'll be Harris or someone picked by the DNC, who might win if given time to get name recognition. Whitmer, maybe. Or Klobuchar.
Yes, I agree.
You have given me the courage to step in with my big prediction. Joe Biden will drop out of the presidential race by the end of January.
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I make it only 2:3 odds that Trump is in the race come September. Seriously, the man is not well; the deteriotion in his speech patterns from even six months ago is noticeable. Also, remember that Tumps' primary motivation (IMHO) has always, always always been to stay out of jail[1]. If he thinks playing the Don in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask is more likely to ensure his personal freedom than winning an election, that's the way he will play it. Plus he gets to mug people with the equivlent of that high school football pass - if it weren't for his health, dang it, why, he woulda won 2024 in a walk! Everyone says so!
[1]And to keep what money he has left to go towards ensuring a comfortable old age.
Bigger issue is the first convictions will come by then. So essentially an indicted criminal running for President!
Well, the hits will keep coming, that's for sure. At some point -- assuming his brain hasn't deteriorated to the point that he can't make a rational cost-benefit calculation -- Trump will have to make the decision to either fish or cut bait.
Mike Judge is aghast that he missed that plot line.
No, the Supremes are gumming things up. I don't think any trial other than possibly the GA one will complete before the election.
Trump's has expensive lawyers who know how to delay, delay, delay, and know how to game a legal system which protects moneyed interests. He has a Supreme Court which defers to him.
Democrats who think Trump's legal problems are going to sink him and save Biden before the election are making a foolish mistake. That being said, I would like to be somehow wrong about this.
"Democrats who think Trump's legal problems are going to sink him .."
The best scenario is some of his supporters shoot a judge or a juror, and Trump response is something like "people are very angry." This will put off substanial number of undecided voters. (the judge/juror involved may not agree it is the best scenario).
#2: Waymo will get their cars to mostly work on American roads and in American cities, but would cause even more fantastic traffic jams than those that already exist in older European cities and would probably not be able to move at all in cities in the developing world. Having recently returned from Morocco and Portugal, self driving cars aren't any where near up to the task of replacing human drivers except in places where driving is really, really easy (relatively speaking).
"Israel will effectively destroy Hamas. But this won't accomplish anything because an even worse group will eventually rise from the ashes."
Doesn't matter. Israel will own a penal colony in Gaza to hold Palestinians who have not been pushed into exile. It will take generations to sort out the situation in the Middle East.
I wouldn't discount Israel doing more and even more heinous ethic cleansing come September, just to spite Biden and to split the Democratic vote.
That was supposed to be a reply to Swami.
To spite Biden, to wait for TFG to come into power, and for Bibi to remain in it.
1. I agree with both of these. I think even Democrats who are a bit shaky on support for Biden will come home to vote for him as we get closer to the election, just like how Republicans in 2016 who despised Trump voted for him.
2. This would be good news, although what I really want them to come up with is Self-Driving Buses. Personnel costs are the biggest cost of operating municipal buses, and self-driving buses or shuttles would allow for more frequent service on more routes. Sub-10 minute intervals between buses arriving mean folks don't even really have to be mindful of the pickup times anymore.
4. I think Hamas will return all the captives (that are alive), and the conflict will peter out. Netanyahu will try to drag it out as long as he can, to avoid getting removed in punishment for it and going to jail for corruption.
5. Hard disagree on this one. I think Republicans impeach Joe Biden by April 2024, right around the time that Trump is facing his trials. Conservative media will be absolutely desperate for anything to avoid having to cover Trump's trials, and will be baying for Biden's blood on something - anything - for impeachment.
And ultimately, it's conservative media and Trump that drive the agenda in the Republican Party these days. They have congressmen who do nothing but be conservative influencers, like Boebert and Cruz.
7. I think the copyright cases are going to throw a huge set-back in the teeth of most AI efforts. They'll settle with the NYT, but then basically every AI model that isn't trained on fully licensed training sets is going to have to be retrained, and that's going to seriously delay this stuff. GPT-5 will only get introduced if the trial drags on too long.
I doubt we'll see serious job losses or layoffs from it, either. More likely it will show up as fewer customer service and programmers hired, and stuff like fast food restaurants integrating it into their ordering systems (how often do you link the person taking your order through the intercom or online to whoever hands it to you?).
8. This. I don't think they'll do anything rash on Taiwan or the like from it, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get more mixed signals from them - efforts at trying to mend the breach with the US, mixed with "wolf warrior" hostility because of internal politics in China.
I think the fertility statistics are being overly skewed by a major collapse in birth rates among Chinese folks under 30, and the actual number of births will be higher among folks over that. Same for South Korea, which has the same fertility collapse. China apparently still has a pretty good ratio of workers to non-workers, and will for a while.
11. Absolutely. 2024 will probably be even warmer than 2023, due to a mix of climate change, El Nino, the after-effects of that Tongan volcano, and so forth. Apparently we're getting a boost in temperatures from that volcanic eruption in 2022 all the way until 2027.
I was pretty meh on Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, but the opening chapter was pretty chilling. I really hope we don't get some type of brutally humid heat wave that kills millions in a week in the poorer countries.
" I think Republicans impeach Joe Biden by April 2024, right around the time that Trump is facing his trials. "
The problem for Republicans with that is that the impeachment is tried by the Democrat controlled senate. which will use it to expose how much bulshit it is. Not obvious that will stop them, but maybe.
But, mere fact of impeachment could be used as a pretext to keep Biden off the ballot. I'm thinking election '24 is going to be one for the books; the highest voter turnout in half a century or more plus dirty trick after dirty trick after dirty trick.
It would be an interesting scenario to run if neither Trump nor Biden were on the ballot next November.
I'm pretty sure the GOP doesn't have a viable plan B, do the the Dems?
I'll take a bet on #2 and #7. Box of Krispy Kremes?
Re: Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any conditions.
The driverless car thing is fast becoming the fusion power "promise" of the 21st century. Somehow we are always just one breakthrough away.