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.
“the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”AIEconomy
“Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years.”AI
“In 10 to 20 years, we will have a human body shop at which we will simply order organs on demand”Health
“Germany has demonstrated that it’s doable. They’re going to be at 65% renewable energy within ten years or so, which is almost unbelievable.”EnergyClimate
“In about 10 years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore's Law”Technology
“The falling cost of solar, hydrogen, renewable, wind power, geothermal power and the rising cost of fossil fuels will cross within 10 years”EnergyClimate
“Well, as you mentioned, we’re going to have the internet in our contact lens, perhaps within 10 to 15 years.”Technology
“Calculating the energy output of the planet, we can estimate that we will attain Type I status within 100 years.”Energy
“In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been underway for 20 years.”EnergyClimate
“I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs”Technology
“achieving even a conservatively high estimate of the information processing capacity of the human brain … will be achieved by conventional silicon circuits prior to 2020.”Technology
“Certainly within the next 20 to 25 years we will succeed in fully decoding the human brain just as we're now nearing completion of the decoding of the human genome.”TechnologyAIHealth
“Over the next 10 years we will be reversing most diseases like cancer and also aging processes”Health
“But 200 calculations a second times a hundred trillion-fold parallelism is about 20 million billion calculations per second, or about 20 billion mips. And we'll achieve that in a thousand dollar PC or equivalent by around 2019.”TechnologyAI
“Translating telephone technology (where you speak in English and your Japanese friend hears you in Japanese, and vice versa) is commonly used for many language pairs.”AITechnology
““Phone” calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses.”Technology
“Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity”Economy
“Individuals primarily use portable computers.”Technology
“A company west of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon Line has surpassed a trillion dollars in market capitalization.”MarketsTechnology
“Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices.”GeopoliticsTechnology
“Supercomputers match at least the hardware capacity of the human brain … 20 million billion calculations per second (20 petaflops).”Technology
“A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second.”Technology
“Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel. Once your car's computer guidance system locks onto the control sensors on one of these highways, you can sit back and relax.”Self-drivingTechnology
“The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing.”Technology
“Keyboards still exist, but most textual language is created by speaking.”TechnologyAI
“Rotating memories and other electromechanical computing devices have been fully replaced with electronic devices.”Technology
“Of course many people will say that genetic engineering on humans should be banned. But I rather doubt if they will be able to prevent it. Genetic engineering on plants and animals will be allowed for economic reasons and someone is bound to try it on humans.”HealthTechnology
“I expect super symmetry will be confirmed eventually by experiments at CERN in Geneva.”Technology
“Nevertheless I am confident we will discover it by the end of the 21st century and probably much sooner.”Technology
“Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.”HealthTechnology