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.
“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
“It's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.”HealthAI
“we will not have a widely available, safe and effective Zika vaccine this year and probably not even in the next few years”Health
“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
“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
“I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs”Technology
“In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely this century.”Climate
“As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer.”Climate
“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
“barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on the record.”Climate
“the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century”Climate
“there is a high probability of warming in the 1980s”Climate
“since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”Climate
“before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity”Economy
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”PoliticsEconomy
“The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”Health
“air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”Health
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make”HealthEconomy
“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come”ClimateHealth
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born”Health
“At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”Health
“I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”Health
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”Health