2020's Prediction Thread

Ben Goldhaber

Inspired by the 2010 prediction thread, I would like to propose this as a thread for people to write in their predictions for the next decade, when practical with probabilities attached.

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%

5orthonormal6y

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.

1Amandango6y

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 $X_{k}$ for $k$ from $1$ to $N$ , where $X_{k}$ equals $1 / k$ with probability $1 / \sqrt{N}$ . 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 we... (read more)

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2020's Prediction Thread

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