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Many people use the occasion of the New Year to make predictions about the coming year. And frankly, while these sorts of predictions are amusing, and maybe even interesting, they’re less useful than you might think.
Some people try to get around this problem by tracking the accuracy of their predictions from year to year, and assigning confidence levels (i.e. I’m 80% sure X will happen vs. being 90% sure that Y will happen). This sort of thing is often referred to as Superforecasting. These tactics would appear to make predicting more useful, but I am not a fan.
At this point you might be confused: how could tracking people’s predictions not ultimately improve those predictions? For the long and involved answer you can listen the 8,000 words I recorded on the subject back in April and May of 2020. The short answer is that it focuses all of the attention on making correct predictions rather than making useful predictions. A useful prediction would have been: there will eventually be a pandemic and we need to prepare for it. But if you want to be correct you avoid predictions like that because most years there won’t be a pandemic and you’ll be wrong.
It leaves out things that are hard to predict. Things that have a very low chance of happening. Things like black swans. You may remember me saying in the last newsletter that:
Because of their impact, the future is almost entirely the product of black swans.
If this is the case what sorts of predictions are useful? How about a list of catastrophes that probably will happen, along with a list of miracles which probably won’t. Things we should worry about and also things we can’t look forward to. I first compiled this list back in 2017, with updates in 2018, 2019, and 2020. So if you’re really curious about the specifics of each prediction you can look there. But these are my black swan predictions for the next 100 years:
Artificial Intelligence
- General artificial intelligence, something duplicating all of the abilities of an average human (or better), will never be developed.
- A complete functional reconstruction of the brain will turn out to be impossible. For example slicing and scanning a brain, or constructing an artificial brain.
- Artificial consciousness will never be created. (Difficult to define, but let’s say: We will never have an AI who makes a credible argument for its own free will.)
Transhumanism
- Immortality will never be achieved.
- We will never be able to upload our consciousness into a computer.
- No one will ever successfully be returned from the dead using cryonics.
Outer Space
- We will never establish a viable human colony outside the solar system.
- We will never have an extraterrestrial colony of greater than 35,000 people.
- Either we have already made contact with intelligent exterrestrials or we never will.
War (I hope I’m wrong about all of these)
- Two or more nukes will be exploded in anger within 30 days of one another.
- There will be a war with more deaths than World War II (in absolute numbers, not as a percentage of population.)
- The number of nations with nuclear weapons will never be fewer than it is right now.
Miscellaneous
- There will be a natural disaster somewhere in the world that kills at least a million people
- The US government’s debt will eventually be the source of a gigantic global meltdown.
- Five or more of the current OECD countries will cease to exist in their current form.
This list is certainly not exhaustive. I definitely should have put a pandemic on it back in 2017. Certainly I was aware, even then, that it was only a matter of time. (I guess if you squint it could be considered a natural disaster…)
To return to the theme of my blog and this newsletter:
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
I don’t think we’re going to be saved by black swans, but we could be destroyed by them. If the summer is over, then as they say, “Winter is coming.” Perhaps when we look back, the pandemic will be considered the first snowstorm…
I think I’ve got COVID. I’m leaving immediately after posting this to go get tested. If this news inspires any mercy or pity, consider translating that into a donation.
I hope you are wrong about the war as well. But it’s been so long since World War II that I think we are suffering from recency bias about the prospect of a new all engulfing global conflict.
And if two nukes are exploded in anger, the big question is whether the situation can be de-esaclated at that point or whether it drags us all in.
Hope you get a negative result.
Indeed, it’s somewhat difficult to imagine how it would stop at two. And I also agree with the recency bias. Have you read “Better Angels of Our Nature”? I think Pinker is suffering from exactly that problem. I did a review of it here:
https://wearenotsaved.com/2016/12/24/reframing-pinkers-the-better-angels-of-our-nature/
I’m looking at the list of OCED nations and to be honest I’m skeptical of 5 of them vanishing. They seem either very tiny (Latvia, Costa Rica) which makes them more likely to hang in there because it isn’t worth a bigger nations effort to gobble them up or culturally very distinct and well defined (Iceland, Turkey) making it harder to either gobble them up or split them into pieces. Missing from the OCED list are some nations that I suspect will generate a lot of drama on the world stage, China and India, over the next century.
The US I could imagine getting less functional and even more partisan but I would bet against a breakup as defined by any of the 50 states leaving. Population wise 2100 is interesting to look at:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/world-population-2100-country/
Nigeria will be the #2 nation but in terms of numbers the US will be pretty much what it is today. A lot of action I predict will take place in Africa but today Africa isn’t represented in the OCED members (although there are more countries listed as ‘partners’).
A complete model of the brain I bet will be done. A month or two ago a group of scientists with some supercomputers did an atom by atom model of the Covid-19 virus. It was a few hundred million atoms for the virus and about a billion atoms for a droplet that it was inside. Some interesting insights came of it, such as inside a drop of water the top of the spike protein opens up a bit making it easier to latch onto a cell. Doing a complete cell would be an order of magnitude bigger and then a whole brain more, but I suspect it will be done in 100 years. That, however, is NOT the same as saying it will just be a ‘brain in a vat’ that you could have a conversation with and thoughts of its own.
The consequence of this is that a good portion of what we think happens in the brain will turn out to actually happen outside the brain. An atom by atom brain model is not going to be conscious because a lot of what we see as consciousness is actually offloaded to the ‘cloud’ of our relationships. The digital ‘brain in the vat’ will be like a book or magazine filled with Lorem Ipsum.
I’ll bet against the US debt causing a ‘global meltdown’ , although that has to be rigerously defined. In fact I would say given the ‘magic 100% GDP’ line was shown to be a rather pathetic error (bad Excel formula), it will be normal by 2100 for major nations to have debt to GDP ratios of 500% of GDP or more without hyperinflation.
I’ll bet against a 1M person single natural diaster (single….’climate change’ wouldn’t count). If you look at natural disasters by death tolls in recorded history, the only ones to break 1M are the 1931 Chinese river floods. I suspect those either will not be repeated or if they are China has the capacity to avoid suffering 1M+ deaths. I then will be betting over the next century a super-natural disaster like asteroid impact or super volucano eruption in Yellowstone or the like will not happen.
I’ll take a more complicated ‘saddle’ bet on war deaths. I’d bet against a war in the next 100 years that kills between WWII’s absolute number and, say, 1B people. In other words nuclear weapons make war a very binary affair. Wars will either kill less than WWII or many more times than WWII but WWII level deaths will not happen. In percentage terms WWII was about 3% of the population. World population is going to move from 7.8B to 10.9B by 2100 so let’s say 10% of population if you want to convert this into a percentage based bet making my claim the next century will not see a war that claims 3-10% of the world population.
Let me clarrify, we’re not including pandemics as a natural diaster. At the moment we are up to 5.44M Covid deaths worldwide.
I think I’ve done this before, but in WWII US debt to GDP increased from 40% to 110%. That debt was never paid off (there were a few surplus years after WWII but not enough to zero out debt).
Today even with interest, the debt from WWII could easily be managed by a medium sized state. As WWII ended about 77 years ago, we had almost a century where a large buildup in debt generated no crises. Of course past results do not guarantee future results but it does move the Bayesian calculation.
The WWII debt is a horrible example. WWII ended… We stopped racking up new debt. No one expects our expenditures on healthcare and retirement to end in the as obvious fashion as our spending on World War 2.
Also, I have never argued that we need to completely pay off the debt. I have argued that our debt is growing faster than GDP, and inflation, and population growth. That it is disentangled from all the things you think it should track.
Well looking at both the raw debt numbers and % of GDP we find that from 1945 to 1960 (nice 15 years) debt to GDP fell from 114% to 54%, so that’s a steady decline but debt in actual dollars increased from $259 to $286B. So all the work at reducing debt as a % of GDP came because GDP went up, not because deficits vanished or surpluses paid stuff down.
So it doesn’t prove everything is OK but it does prove the country doesn’t blow up if you cross 100%, or even 120%. It also demonstrates things don’t blow up if you get a surge of debt. At least over the course of nearly a century which is what your prediction is based on.
In fact Japan at the moment is closing in on 300% and that is a nation with an aging popultion, no signs of anything like the US’s post WWII boom about to happen over the next few decades.
This opens up a problem for the debt story, what counts and what doesn’t? In the 1980’s we agonized over deficits in the hundreds of billions. Suppose we rolled up our sleeves and balanced the budget then or we, say, didn’t do the Iraq War which probably equalled the entire deficit for the 1980’s. All that hard work would have been single handedly wiped away by Trump’s tax cut.
So suppose in 2121 the US suffers some type of massive crieses from its debt. Before I can let you say “I told you so”, what would it mean if say 80% of the debt in 2021 was incurred from, say, 2101 onwards?
If that’s the case then if we spend the next 80 years balancing every budget, even reducing debt we’d incur all types of hardships and then a few terms of Uber-Life-President Baron Trump III will blow it up in 2101 when he gets into office.
If you assume even very slow economic growth, the economies of tomorrow will simply be so big that the ‘debt’ we are sending to them simply will not command much attention. Imagine your grandfather somehow brought every bond issued by the gov’t in WWII. In 1945 he’d be one of the richest men in the world with a quarter trillion or so in assets. Today he’d only be in the B-level of the super rich, having to sit behind kids like Zuckerberg, Musk and so on. If Steve Job and his heirs held onto all of their Apple stock, they could buy and sell him 4 or 5 times over.
https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287