| Continuing my review of the predictions from the 2010 thread, here are my last set of judgments — the Hits (the predictions I think the commenters largely got right): Hits: 2010 Prediction: Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel
—JulianMorrison 2021 Review: Electric cars are now fairly common, if not yet dominant, and the governments of several large countries have legislated to phase out fossil fuel vehicles completely. 2010 Prediction: Still no fusion power.
—DrJokepu 2021 Review: Accurate for now, though progress slowly continues. 2010 Prediction: Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
—DrJokepu 2021 Review: Prophetic. Steve Jobs resigned as CEO the following year due to his health and died shortly afterwards. Apple went on to become the first publicly-traded company to reach a market capitalisation of a trillion dollars in 2018, and the first to reach two trillion dollars in 2020. 2010 Prediction: Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.
—DrJokepu 2021 Review: Arguably accurate. 2010 Prediction: I wrote my PhD on ubiquitous computing, and I can tell you that I heard "this is the year" for ubicomp every single year I spent writing it. I finished it last year, and stuff I wrote back in 2002 was still relevant. It's an incremental design that will slowly, slowly come, but nothing dramatic anytime soon, even across a decade.
—adw 2021 Review: Sounds right to me. 2010 Prediction: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are. he politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
—kngspook 2021 Review: The author of this prediction might not have had precisely what we see today in mind, but in broad terms this was very prescient. 2010 Prediction: A habitable (to some life, not necessarily to human life) extra-solar Earth like planet is discovered by 2020.
—kf 2021 Review: This still isn't known with complete certainty, but the science has progressed enough to identify many plausible candidates. 2010 Prediction: My timeline is that Kepler has discovered hundreds of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their suns by 2013.
—kf 2021 Review: Accurate. The Kepler Space Telescope had identified hundreds of Earth-size planets by late 2011. 2010 Prediction: I think this is finally going to be the post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool.
—jsz0 And... 2010 Prediction: By the end of the decade, the phone is the personal computer.
—ericb 2021 Review: Sounds more or less right to me. 2010 Prediction: Googles turnover exeeds Microsofts by 2015, if not earlier.
—jacquesm This happened around 2016. 2010 Prediction: People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.
—ericb And... 2010 Prediction: privacy as an issue for the common user
—slvrspoon 2021 Review: Correct, though not specifically due to concerns about facial recognition, even though that technology has been widely deployed for surveillance, particularly in China. 2010 Prediction: KidneyExchange.com has 10,000th successful transplant
—edw519 2021 Review: Non-profit kidney exchange is now a viable option for some patients and their families. 2010 Prediction: The Apple Tablet to Launch 1st Quarter 2020
—edw519 2021 Review: The iPad was launched in April 2010. 2010 Prediction: Trevor Blackwell's Robot Collects Rocks on Mars
—edw519 2021 Review: NASA's (not Trevor Blackwell's) Perseverance rover is currently digging up rocks on Mars for later return to Earth. 2010 Prediction: Spherical displays ("you inside")
—10ren 2021 Review: This has arguably come to pass, if Virtual Reality headsets count as spherical displays. 2010 Prediction: Multi-core, with identical cores, is abandoned in favour of highly specialized cores
—10ren 2021 Review: Multiple cores haven't been abandoned, but there has been a definite shift towards coprocessors/accelerators and ASICs. 2010 Prediction: By 2019 newspapers may still exist, but will be a niche and relatively expensive retro media format for fashionistas.
—motters 2021 Review: Pretty accurate. 2010 Prediction: America will pull out from Afghanistan, and the central government will fall before the decade ends.
—varjag 2021 Review: A couple of years too early but otherwise prophetic. 2010 Prediction: Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: A nearly perfect prediction. Facebook was not displaced by another social network, and the IPO took place in May 2012. 2010 Prediction: Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: All correct. Twitter became profitable towards the end of the decade, though Facebook is much larger richer. Twitter remains independent for now. 2010 Prediction: Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: IsaacL is the Nostradamus of the 2010 thread. 2010 Prediction: Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: There is a strong consensus — though not universal — that Moore's law is failing. No new paradigm capable of sustaining advances in general purpose computing faster than Moore's Law has been clearly demonstrated, though something of that kind might conceivably be in the early stages of development. Quantum computing might be such a technology, and quantum supremacy has been demonstrated in principle (albeit only as an academic exercise), but more advances in both theory and engineering are still needed for it to be practically useful (e.g. algorithms with the potential for universal, rather than problem-specific, speedups on the theory side, and easily scalable error correction on the engineering side). 2010 Prediction: An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: Another eerily prescient prediction from IsaacL. The Paris Climate Accords were agreed in 2015; both China and the US were parties to the agreement, though the US officially withdrew in 2020 before being readmitted earlier this year. 2010 Prediction: Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: Spot on again. IsaacL noted at the end of his post that he would save a copy of the predictions and look back at them when the time came (presumably last year), writing that he was 'probably laughably wrong on at least 2/3 of them'. I hope he did look back and congratulated himself; I think he deserved it. 2010 Prediction: Both solar and wind power will be produced at a lower cost than power from coal and natural gas plants
—DaniFong 2021 Review: This is now correct for many well-situated installations. 2010 Prediction: Internet will become for most people in developed countries as important as it used to be for "early adopters" in the past.
—antirez 2021 Review: I'd say this is right, but I think it was already true in 2010 to a large extent. 2010 Prediction: continued problems with islam, terrorists
—slvrspoon 2021 Review: There hasn't been another terrorist attack in the West on the scale of 9/11, but there have certainly been 'continued problems', and many lives lost in terrorist incidents. 2010 Prediction: we'll see a good-sized shift in our political base representing the un/under-skilled and unemployed.
—lallysingh 2021 Review: This is difficult to assess, but my sense is that rising resentment about employment opportunities, related to concerns about offshoring and immigration, was indeed a significant factor in the 2016 US presidential election. |