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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Fauci | Scientist | 16 | 14 | 10 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 82% |
| Demis Hassabis | AI researcher | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — |
| Geoffrey Hinton | AI researcher | 11 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0% |
| James Hansen | Scientist | 17 | 10 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 90% |
| Michio Kaku | Scientist | 13 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 30% |
| Paul Ehrlich | Scientist | 13 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 10 | 5% |
| Stephen Hawking | Scientist | 7 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 33% |
| Yann LeCun | AI researcher | 7 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0% |
Accuracy counts accurate as 1, late or partial as ½, inaccurate as 0. Pending predictions don't count.
“We're talking about ten, 15 years in the future when quantum computers are so powerful they can break any code.”Technology
“The "hard take-off" scenario is utterly impossible.”AI
“global temperature in 2024 is likely to reach +1.4-1.5°C”Climate
“2023 should be notably warmer than 2022”Climate
“the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to”Climate
“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
“Finally, we suggest that 2024 is likely to be off the chart as the warmest year on record.”Climate
“If you train a machine as powerful as could be…your GPT-5000, it's never gonna learn about this.”AI
“I would imagine, given the size of our country and the diversity of vaccination versus not vaccination, that it likely will be more than a couple of weeks, probably by the end of January, I would think”Health
“if you have just a couple of percentages of the isolates being Omicron, very soon, it's going to be the dominant variant.”Health
“We certainly are not going to eradicate it,”Health
“By around 2025, the ITER fusion reactor in southern France will likely be turned on.”Energy
“If you project realistically, when we will be able to get enough data to be able to say that elementary school children will be able to be vaccinated, I would think that would be, at the earliest, the end of the year, and very likely the first quarter of 2022,”Health
“by the time we get to April, that will be what I would call for better wording 'open season,' namely that virtually everybody and anybody, in any category, could start to get vaccinated”Health
“The current La Niña (Figures 4 and 9) is moderately strong, so this year – 2021 – should be notably cooler than 2020.”Climate
“We will know whether a vaccine is safe and effective by the end of November, the beginning of December.”Health
“But by the time you mobilize the distribution of the vaccine and get a majority or more of the population vaccinated and protected, that's likely not going to happen until the end of 2021,”Health
“We feel cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine by the end of this year and as we go into 2021.”Health
“I still think there is a reasonably good chance that by the very beginning of 2021, if we're going to have a vaccine, that we will have it by then,”Health
“the idea of having treatments available or a vaccine to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far”Health
“we will have coronavirus in the Fall. I am convinced of that because of the degree of transmissibility that has the global nature.”Health
“I would say between 100,000 and 200,000 cases. But I don't want to be held to that, because it's -- excuse me -- deaths.”Health
“I can say we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now,”Health
“So the whole process is going to take a year, a year and a half at least.”Health
“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
“It [a shattering collapse of civilization] is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems.”Climate
“We will definitely get surprised in the next few years.”Health