One of the most famous pieces of research on prediction was done by Philip Tetlock. He asked a group of pundits and foreign affairs experts to speculate about various geopolitical events, like whether the Soviet Union would disintegrate by 1993. Interestingly, the “experts” struggled to perform better than “dart-throwing chimps,” and were consistently less accurate than even relatively simple statistical algorithms. This was true of both liberals and conservatives, and regardless of professional credentials.
What Tetlock also uncovered was that people who preferred to consider multiple explanations and balance them together had superior results to those who relied on a single big idea. So since our guess can be as good as any, Reddit user Tasty_likesugar decided to ask random minds on the internet to share the things they believe will almost certainly happen in the next three decades. Below are the replies they’ve received.
Predictions For The Next Thirty Years: 1.
A horrific pandemic that will make COVID look like “the good old days.” I’m talking *Captain Trips* levels of global mortality.
The United States will be particularly hard-hit, as nearly 50% of the population will refuse to mask, isolate, get vaccinated, or take any other science-based action to slow down the spread.
Predictions For The Next Thirty Years: 2.
Climate change will begin to have a significant impact on society, we’re already heading towards it and there’s really nothing we can do to stop it without a major shift in policy.
Predictions For The Next Thirty Years: 3.
We are going to see some more bacteria beyond TB and a small number of others that are completely resistant to even last-line antibiotics, and many more that are resistant to first and second line treatments.
My group just published our first paper on P. Aeruginosa, it’s the biggest genomic study of isolates from patients that we know; we sequenced just shy of 3,000 genomes taken all across the world.
All of them bar the isolates from ONE patient had a group of 6 genes conferring increased resistance to beta-lactams (all of these), fosfomycin, aminoglycosides (eg. Streptomycin) , chloramphenicol, and two different mutations in a d**g efflux pump. The one patient that didn’t had the genetic region for the beta-lactam resistance deleted.
Antibiotic resistance already klls millions, and its going to kill millions more. Most of those are going to be the poor and people living in under-resourced countries.
Predictions For The Next Thirty Years: 4.
World War 3
I know I sound pessimistic but i truly expect it to happen.
We have too many issues that only will get worse and this will increase global frictions between countries:
Climate Change
Water/Food SHortage
Global Aging Population (a lot of Snowball Pension system collapsing)
AI (pushing all the profits into the 1% and leaving the middle class broke, the Law Makers will make sure UBI won’t happen).
