A public record of predictions made by well-known people: their exact words, when they said them, and how things turned out.
| Person | Category | Predictions | Scored | Accurate | Late | Partial | Wrong | Accuracy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bill McKibben | Commentator | 9 | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 90% |
| Daniel Kokotajlo | AI researcher | 8 | 8 | 7 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 94% |
| Michio Kaku | Scientist | 13 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 30% |
| Ray Kurzweil | Futurist | 26 | 19 | 4 | 6 | 0 | 9 | 37% |
| Stephen Hawking | Scientist | 7 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 33% |
Accuracy counts accurate as 1, late or partial as ½, inaccurate as 0. Pending predictions don't count.
“I think it is very likely that we’re going to temporarily cross the two degree line during the hottest phase of the now-developing El Niño”Climate
“My prediction would be that electric prices are going to be to the 2026 election what egg prices were to the 2024 election”ElectionsPoliticsEnergy
“Prediction: the federal government won’t be able to find private parties to put up serious money for this project. It will be a taxpayer-financed boondoggle if it happens at all”EnergyPolitics
“85% of new electric generation in 2023 came from renewables, and the numbers for 2024 will almost certainly be higher.”EnergyClimate
“But here’s my prediction: this will be one of the first large oilfields that humans decide to leave in the ground because of climate concerns.”EnergyPoliticsClimate
“So at that rate, in about 10 years, we'll be getting all of our energy that way, and it'll keep getting cheaper.”EnergyClimate
“I think there’s little question this is emerging as the most important question for international climate talks—it will dominate this year’s COP in Baku”ClimateGeopolitics
“By 2029, you'll get back a full year.”Health
“So I'd say within five years we're going to start to reach quantum computers that are competitive with standard digital computers on select problems”Technology
“if Tuesday’s record isn’t broken today, it will almost certainly fall in the next few weeks, and then again next summer”Climate
“Chances are growing that the air temperature will set a new record this year; if not, then almost certainly next.”Climate
“We're talking about ten, 15 years in the future when quantum computers are so powerful they can break any code.”Technology
“In this century, there is a very good chance that we will pick up a signal from another planet.”Space
“You simply blink and you will be online…College students studying for final exams would be first to buy such contact lenses…”Technology
“By around 2025, the ITER fusion reactor in southern France will likely be turned on.”Energy
“This article claims the global market is around $2B/year in 2021 and is projected to grow around 30%/year. I predict it will grow faster.”AIMarkets
“Nowadays, hundreds of millions of people talk regularly to chatbots of some sort”AITechnology
“We’re in a new chip shortage.”TechnologyAI
“OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and DeepMind all have gigantic multimodal transformers, similar in size to GPT-3 but trained on images, video, maybe audio too, and generally higher-quality data.”AI
“China and USA are in a full-on chip battle now, with export controls and tariffs.”GeopoliticsTechnology
“Not only that, but they are now typically fine-tuned in various ways--for example, to answer questions correctly, or produce engaging conversation as a chatbot.”AI
“So, the most compute spent on a single training run is something like 5x10^25 FLOPs.”AITechnology
“After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts.”AI
“But by 2030, we think we'll have the first settlements on Mars, and by late 21st century, we could have a permanent Mars base on the Red Planet.”Space
“first to the moon, using the moon as a base, and then on to Mars perhaps around the 2030s.”Space
“Four years after that in 2023, we’re back to the moon with astronauts.”Space
“In the early 2030s, we'll have universal basic income in the developed world, and worldwide by the end of the 2030s.”EconomyAI
“In the 2030s we are going to send nanorobots into the brain that will provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will connect our neocortex to the cloud.”TechnologyHealth
“I have set the date 2045 for the 'Singularity' which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”AI
“2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence.”AI