Scott Alexander’s predictions for the next year have become ever more cautious, thus ever more boring and ever less likely to be falsified. And then he came up with a pile of wild assed stuff for the next five years:
AI will be marked by various spectacular achievements, plus nobody being willing to say the spectacular achievements signify anything broader. AI will beat humans at progressively more complicated games, and we will hear how games are totally different from real life and this is just a cool parlor trick.
In other words, he will say it is spectacular, and I will say it is more of the same boring stuff.
AI translation will become flawless,
No it will not. AI translation is as good as it is going to get – gives you a good guess as to what the speaker is actually talking about, while remaining unacceptable as a finished product. You get the gist of things when AI translating between closely related languages like English and Spanish, and near gibberish when AI translating between distantly related languages like Chinese and English – a marginal improvement on what you would get by language dictionary lookup.
1. Average person can hail a self-driving car in at least one US city: 80%
2. …in at least five of ten largest US cities: 30%
3. At least 5% of truck drivers have been replaced by self-driving trucks: 10%
Nah.
4. Average person can buy a self-driving car for less than $100,000: 30%
But he will have to sit at the wheel, and will likely die if he falls asleep at the wheel.
The European Union will not collapse.
The EU is a branch of the US empire, and I have long predicted failure or similar crisis for the US empire in 2026. As long as the US stands, its servants in Europe will continue to do as they are damn well told.
Countries that may have an especially good half-decade: Israel, India, Nigeria, most of East Africa, Iran. Countries that may have an especially bad half-decade: Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UK. The Middle East will get worse before it gets better, especially Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula (Syria might get better, though).
“May have”? What sort of a prediction is that? Might be right, cannot be wrong.
Here is my actual prediction. Russia will have a great decade. South Africa will drift from a shit hole to a hell hole.
Religion will continue to retreat from US public life.
Scott has not noticed that the US has an official religion that daily becomes more extreme, deranged, puritanical, and oppressive
As it becomes less important, mainstream society will treat it as less of an outgroup and more of a fargroup. Everyone will assume Christians have some sort of vague spiritual wisdom, much like Buddhists do. Everyone will agree evangelicals or anyone with a real religious opinion is just straight-out misinterpreting the Bible, the same way any Muslim who does something bad is misinterpreting the Koran. Christian mysticism will become more popular among intellectuals. Lots of people will talk about how real Christianity opposes capitalism. There may not literally be a black lesbian Pope, but everyone will agree that there should be, and people will become mildly surprised when you remind them that the Pope is white, male, and sexually inactive.
OK, this prediction will come true, but this, like Europe continuing, is just the official religion of the US empire continuing. The official religion of the US empire will fall, but probably survive for more than five years.
1. Trump wins 2020: 20%
Trump will win in 2020, assuming no coup or violent death. Democracy has already expired. The question is how soon this becomes obvious, and to what extent violence will ensue when people realize it.
On the other hand, everyone will have underestimated the extent of crisis in the Democratic Party.
The misconduct of the Clinton presidential campaign was a manifestation of the fact that the pretense of democracy in the Democratic party was irrelevant to outcomes. It will go right on being irrelevant to outcomes. With the Clinton machine at best falling apart, and at worst being sent to jail, power in the Democratic party will fall into the hands of a Lenin type individual who realizes the irrelevance of electoral politics and proceeds to grab power directly. Primaries will remain irrelevant to the outcome, but the man seizing power will probably be radically left.
Slate Star Codex predicts politics as normal, the usual stuff in the usual ways, that something like what recently happened will happen again. I predict the unexpected – at least as startling as Trump himself, probably a lot more startling. Expect the unexpected. The Republic approaches its end. It will probably not end in five years, but the storms of its coming fall will rage.
The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.
Slate star predicts politics as they are now continuing, but politics as they are now are already extraordinary and remarkable by the standards of two years ago. Again, I predict the unexpected – a significant likelihood of democide or ethnic cleansing, with whites being driven out of large areas, and then blamed for the ensuing ruin that follows when they are no longer holding stuff together. More drama, more surprises, more shock.
The last two years have been very surprising for everyone except me – I predicted Trumps victory shortly after he announced. And I predict the next two years to be even more surprising, and the three years after that to be even more surprising, with a continuing drift towards civil war, democide and genocide, though we probably will not see democide, genocide, and civil war for about six years or so.
First World economies will increasingly be marked by an Officialness Divide. Rich people, the government, and corporations will use formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions. Poor people (and to an increasing degree middle-class people) will use informal gig economies supported by Silicon Valley companies whose main skill is staying a step ahead of regulators. Think business travelers staying at the Hilton and riding taxis, vs. low-prospect twenty-somethings staying at Air BnBs and taking Ubers. As Obamacare collapses, health insurance will start turning into one of the formal, well-regulated, traditional institutions limited to college grads with good job prospects. What the unofficial version of health care will be remains to be seen. If past eras have been Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Information Age, etc, the future may be the Ability-To-Circumvent-Regulations Age.
On this, we agree.
Cryptocurrency will neither collapse nor take over everything. It will become integrated into the existing system and regulated to the point of uselessness. No matter how private and untraceable the next generation of cryptocurrencies are, people will buy and exchange them through big corporate websites that do everything they can to stay on the government’s good side.
Nah. Bitcoin may well collapse, and its successor (probably Monero) may also collapse, but one cryptocurrency, maybe Bitcoin, maybe Monero, maybe something not yet on the radar, will eat the world. If it has not eaten the world in five years, the storm of its coming will nonetheless be evident, and will profoundly undermine the government’s ability to control the economy.
Multinationals will occasionally debate using crypto to transfer their profits from one place to another, then decide that would make people angry and decide not to.
Already false. Crypto transfers are already big – and already cryptic.
Skipping most of his predictions as boring and hard to decide what would constitute fulfillment of the rather vague prediction.
3. Paris Agreement still in effect, most countries generally making good-faith effort to comply: 80%
Already false. No one is making a genuine good faith effort to comply.
4. US still nominally committed to Paris Agreement: 60%
Already false. In 2017 June the US announced it had ceased all implementation of the Paris Accord. That is something a bit less than being “nominally committed”. That will not change, and people are already forgetting that there ever was a Paris agreement. The only real action item on the Paris accord was smashing Americans in flyover country, making them suffer, and providing political cover for smashing Americans in flyover country. If Americans in flyover county are not being smashed, not one gives a tinker’s dam about the rest of it. It is already sliding out of sight and out of mind.