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Ask HN: What are your predictions for the world in 2023?
71 points by k2xl on Dec 31, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 110 comments
What are some bold predictions you have for next year?



Generative AI will turn into a crypto style echo chamber, where no meaningful business cases emerge but a bunch of true believers cant stop talking about how game changing it is. Deloitte will develop a generative AI consulting practice. The world will start to move on.


My prediction is that someone will create a Generative Photo app for real estate agents, every house listing will have a bunch of crappy generated "photos" of what the interiors could look like. The developer of it will become a billionaire. The fad will last 3 years and then stop as they realise it just puts people off.

I will then look back at this comment in three years time, and think "that cold have been me"...


This has already happened. I have gone to see listings where I didn’t realize until I was there that the photos were fake, and that the place was actually a mess.


Yup, it's called "virtual staging".


I’ve been seeing simulated decor in real estate listing for years. I think this could actually could persist for a while


Yes, but going by how badly written real estate listings listings are, imaging letting them loose on generative AI!


I'm generally anti-hype but this seems a very bad take, as others have noted.

Generative AI has already changed the game for early adopters, and this is just the start in terms of functional power and popular awareness. Days and weeks after launching in each case.

Cryptocurrency has still yet to find a convincing use case after ten years.


Aren't anonymous transactions a use for it? Like monero


What problem does that solve?


That it is tough to safely and anonymously transfer money for illegal purchases without using cash in person.


Paying businesses that have been abandoned by Visa / Mastercard.


Generative AI is already past the utility that Crypto ever had.

Copywriting industry is going to be AI powered going forward, Copilot is widely loved by programmers and generative images are also finding utility in things like AI powered logo makers.


Copilot is massively polarising.

Aside from that, I think that we are at a crossroads with Generative AI. ChatGPT is amazing, but that's because it's sources are all human.

What happens when Stack overflow gets a load of copypasta from these ChatBots, we already can see some small logic bugs in outputs and when it starts to see itself, or other lower quality bots, churning out buggy code will that impact it?

We could enter an era where developers become the person who can best express a technical requirement for ChatGPT to spit out working code. Or we could become proofreaders.

The people reading all the outputs and fixing the bugs that are generated from the bots, the best coders are those with the most experience with crappy outputs and can fix what the bot meant to do.


What happens when Stack overflow gets a load of copypasta from these ChatBots

This happens: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...

> The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce


And that's today.

My mind was thinking of the future, where the confidently wrong becomes the echo chamber due to the overwhelming volumes of responses in Stack Overflow, which is also the training source. The wrong would only get worse as they would train each other to be more confident, and more wrong.


If only stackoverflow had a voting system.


If the bots are replying, the bots are voting.


Funny but I have already started thinking/saying the same thing. Whenever there is something that becomes so popular so fast, it brings out the worst in people.

I think Crypto will not completely die but mostly fade off in the next 2-3 years. AI in theory has a lot more applications but due to the whole ChatGPT stuff where everyone is creating "content using AI", it will crash and burn as quality of output will suffer and ultimately will be useless.


Every day I'm seeing devs, designers, writers and other professionals showcase how they are already using Generative AIs at work.


Sticking to web tech (and reposting from twitter) my main prediction is a move away from “Rehydration” or “Resumability”, and a better understanding of holding state either on the server, or in the browser, (mostly) not both.

HTMX becomes the fastest growing frontend toolkit in 2023 as devs feeling stack fatigue migrate from React and other JS toolkits towards a simpler architecture. A draft “HTML 6” spec is written incorporating ideas from HTMX and HATEOAS. Smaller front end JS toolkits like AlpineJS, "petite-vue", and HyperScript will explode in popularity, accelerated by the move towards basic server side html rendering.

At the same time “offline first” and PWAs make giant leaps forward, off the back of WASM based SQLite and CRDT toolkits Yjs and Automerge. Offline first webapps will have their RoR/Django moment, a new BYOFE (bring your own frontend) framework based on SQLite in the browser, eventual consistency, and automatic schema migrations. Probably using Postgresql as the source of truth.

There will be a move away from React Native back towards WebView based toolkits such as Capacitor and Tauri (I think Tauri will win over Electron in the long run), as people realise that a web view is just as performant. Complimented by strategic use of NativeScript.

Ultimately there will be a split, if you need a fast initial reader and want simpler development, “HTML over the wire” and HATEOAS will become standard. No more “Rehydration” or “Resumability”. No more JSON APIs that are only ever used to render your html template.

Alternatively if you are aiming for an app-like experience you will go “offline first” caching as much data on the client, implementing traditional server side functionality in the browser. Again no more “Rehydration” or “Resumability” as (almost) everything is client side. No more splitting state between client and server, just pick which side your particular product sits best in.

(Originally posted in extended form here: https://mobile.twitter.com/samwillis/status/1608542221166587...)


> There will be a move away from React Native back towards WebView based toolkits such as Capacitor and Tauri (I think Tauri will win over Electron in the long run), as people realise that a web view is just as performant. Complimented by strategic use of NativeScript.

Exactly what we did with Standard Notes. Never looked back. Wrote about what this looked like for us: https://blog.standardnotes.com/40921/no-react-native-is-not-...


> HTMX becomes the fastest growing frontend toolkit in 2023 as devs feeling stack fatigue migrate from React and other JS toolkits towards a simpler architecture.

Haha, thanks for the laugh. Don't underestimate the network effects of a behemoth like React. Even React frameworks are starting to tend towards server side, like NextJS or Remix.

I would like to see the offline first philosophy adopted more thoroughly though.


> Haha, thanks for the laugh

So, it does seem funny, and I'm being a little OTT. But I do think it could genuinely be the fastest growing framework this year, it's absolutely not going to overtake React in total market share any time soon. But momentum wise it's going to be like a rocket.


easy to be the fastest growing when you are starting at zero!

https://htmx.org/img/memes/whowillwin.png


Infinite growth rate!


2023 is the year of the Linux desktop!


They said "prediction" not "wish list"


> Complimented by strategic use of NativeScript.

Why NativeScript vs TypeScript?


Very different things. Native script is a bridge between the iOS/Android apis and JS/TS. So in a single code base JS or TS app you can call out to native apis such a the camera or taptic engine.


1- Generative AI:

- The ecosystem will be flooded by crypto/NFT refugees and startups looking for business models will raise absurd amounts of money while the rest of us wonder if the world turned stupid again.

- Generative AI will result in obnoxious chat-bots and customer-support SaaS that will make the entire process even more kafkaesque.

- Developers will be able to just `npm install` their way into ML without having to learn the fundamentals

2- Augmented Reality:

- We will see A/R glasses from Apple, with privacy as a selling point.

- Zuckerberg will quietly and slowly drop the meta-verse and resume investing in Instagram as it fades away from cultural relevance.

3- Algorithms:

- Algorithms will be the de-facto and ultimate judge of character. If Tiktok says you like water-polo, that means deep inside you like water-polo.

4- Musk:

- Twitter will be assigned a ridiculous CEO and will start a 3 year dive out of media/culture relevance as Gen-Z don’t care for it.

- Tesla stock will continue to drop, as more established companies build better EVs more reliable and with better quality.

5- Social media:

- Mastodon will be successful, but nothing like Twitter or Facebook. The intended lack of features and fragmentation will prevent it from being a network for viral content or events.

- TikTok will lose creators to YouTube, especially if they don’t fix their monetization and bots problems.

6- Software development:

- React will continue to rule as the web platform at least for another few years, but the momentum will slow.

- Next.js will overshadow Remix, as the latter doesn’t offer enough competitive advantage to sway away users.

- SvelteKit will be the fastest growing framework but it will be mostly for smaller/hobby projects.

- Despite the initial hype, Rome tools, Deno & Bun will be quasi abandoned as the ecosystem outpaces their release cycle and the benefits don’t merit the headache of migration.

- Rust will leak in most software tooling and we will see attempts at a Django-like framework.


Regarding augmented reality, I think that necessity to be in cameras on Zoom calls all day is a perfect use case for it: Live deepfake masks. Do your hair and makeup once, scan yourself, and then you can hide behind your own (or someone else's) digital visage.


Big prediction thread from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628


Did someone read the 2022 predictions thread and score it? If so, who were the big winners?


No, but I've skimmed. Lots of people got the higher probability things correct:

-crypto plunge -queen dying -ukraine full invasion -etc


No, that's hard work.

Just making predictions, on the other hand, is easy.


Mountains crumble, rivers change their course, new roads replace old, stones are buried and vanish into the earth, and 2023 will be the year of linux on the desktop.


In North Korea, every year is the year of Linux on the desktop (Red Star OS).


Other than predicting a crypto crash exactly a year ago [0] and warning everyone to run out of the market [1] to prepare for a market crash with the 'four horse men' telling me about a tech crash years ago [2], I'm still predicting that startups that don't turn a profit will be struggling to raise further capital by VCs to stay afloat in 2023.

My crystal ball has done a long term prediction about other things in the decade [3] [4] and it seems to be slowly becoming true and somewhat very accurate.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29752372

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993919

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663119

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926473


1. The next wave of social. FB is dead. Twitter is imploding. The govt is trying to get rid of TikTok. Mastodon is too hardcore for your mom in peoria. But there's still a need, and someone is going to figure it out. So 2023 will see a flowering of ideas most of which will die and one of which will win.

2. Investors move into water. The US Southwest is at a crunch point now. Its not so much that people have seen evidence that makes them want to change as seeing evidence that there is money to be made trading rights to water. I actually thing water wars are a megatrend, but even if Im wrong there, the situation out west is dire.

3. There will be an implosion in corporate real estate as leases terminate. Some downtowns will collapse.


Pakistan to completely destabilize following more climate change driven natural disaster and start some limited border war along the line of control to try and shore up popular support at home.

The UK to slide into a deep depression, and lose much financial stability and jobs related to city trading houses moving to the EU. Northern Ireland to hold a border poll about rejoining the EU through a United Ireland.

Russian forces to continue digging in, exhausting Ukrainian attacks and causing a military stalemate and political deadlock. The Russian economy to continue to slide, corruption and gangsterism to encroach more on society there.

Saudi Arabia to attempt further sports washing to improve their international image. Some unlikely sports final to be hosted in Riyadh.

Vietnam to continue to crush the GDP growth rate, and start taking over some serious tech production from the likes of Shenzhen. Chinese COVID deaths to become a state secret, and the economy there to shrink while other Asian countries pick up the slack.

The GOP to split into pro and anti Trump factions, with the anti Trump faction to make some massively authoritarian laws to win over red state voters.


- Inflation will start a cycle trend. Next year down, then up again

- Earning compressions

- revenue compressions due to less wealth and consumer power

Multi year recessions and inflation.


How inflation but also less consumer power?


ML chat agents will pollute community forum spaces enough to start to turn humans away out of exhaustion they are the only person present


My prediction for the web is that this will be the year of HTMX.

My prediction for the war is that Russia will have full mobilisation.

2023 will not be the year for disclosure.

2023 will not be the year for the adoption of an international language.


Zuckerberg will stop developing the metaverse.


I think it's too late, he bet the company on it and has no other long term plans. With the inevitable implosion of online advertising and the declining interest in FB properties I think they are going to show more signed of struggling next year.


Whatsapp will include a newsfeed before Zuckerberg ragequits the metaverse.


Messages presented out of chronological order so as not to interfere with the ad business.. can’t wait.


At the end of the year, someone will make a generic post on HN asking what my predictions for 2024 are.

And I will again wonder why it made it to the front page of HN.


TBF I'm pretty sure they aren't just asking you.


- The mRNA vaccine for HIV will be successful.

- Cryptocurrency will continue fading into irrelevance.

- Russia continues to throw the kitchen sink at Ukraine, but will lose ground in the Zaporizhzhia oblast. The war will be effectively over after the Ukranians recapture Melitopol.

- Belarus will revolt and Lukashenko will be exiled to Russia.

- Biden dies of natural causes.

- Inflation in the US will continue to fall back down to the expected 2% rate.

- Blitzscaling falls out of favor as more venture capitalists focus on fundamentals and due diligence.

- The next wave of big tech companies will be founded in cities that are not known for being tech hubs.


If Biden passed that might be catastrophic


Apache Kafka to fall out of favor in HN


Franz will be first association again.


We'll get a message from aliens, but no one will understand what it means.


again...


The new ChatGTP will create lots of shitty spam over the internet.


The Russia/Ukraine conflict will get more complicated, and other regional disputes will be tied to it, but it still won't break out into a hot war with the US or China.


Well, a hot war between Russia/US/China will last 30 minutes. So no need to stress over it.


See last week's

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628 (781 comments)


*First, the macro economic and political:*

- The Ukraine war will either end with Russia withdrawing and gaining a few territories or a coup.

- The US and China will step up the military presence around Taiwan.

- China's covid situation is getting completely out of control. If it doesn't mutate into something dangerous, it will disappear as quickly as it spread.

- AI will become one of the most politicized areas. The discussion will be about bias, copyright, AGI and creativity. - There are voices in AI skepticism, so politicians will try to legislate in the area, especially the EU.

- San Francisco will continue to do away with its dysfunctional progressive legislation.

- The European countries will burn more fossil fuels than in 2022.

- Coal will be the "best performing commodity" (Denmark alone 7 doubled imports of coal in 2022).

- Investments in the green transition will be sharply reduced and several completely shelved.

- The housing market will crash (Already down 10% in the US in 2022).

- Credit card and loan debt will hit an all-time high.

- Savings will hit the lowest point in recent times.

- Energy will become more expensive, which means everything else will become more expensive.

- Most schools will ban AI, some of the more rational ones will implement it into their teaching.

- India will continue to develop economically, socially, technologically and become a power player on an equal footing with China and the USA.

- Most countries will see zero to minus growth (i.e. recession)

- Nuclear power is becoming more popular than ever.

- Many people's pension savings will be greatly reduced.

*And now for the technological/startups related:*

- Venture capital investments in AI-related software are breaking records because investors have total FOMO.

- We will see a bloodbath of companies going bankrupt or being bought as talent acquisitions.

- “What is our AI strategy?” replaces "What is our Big Data Strategy?" as the most important question a company can ask itself.

- Google, one of the biggest investors in AI models and chips, will be one of the companies that will be forced to publish how they intend to use AI while not killing their existing business.

- The number of new search engines based on AI will explode.

- The number of "AI optimized" products will explode.

- By far the AI companies will fail as early as 2023.

- GPT-4 will either be multimodal or have more direct access to the Internet.

- NFT's will continue their popularity in many areas that have not used them before.

- Crypto will finally get clear regulatory rules in the US. - We will see some pretty big advances in bio-technology due to Crisper. Especially cancer research.

- Sam Bankman Fried from FTX will either get life in prison or go completely free.

- Twitter survives despite cutting 70% of the company by asking: “Who is exceptional and who is indispensable?”.

- Blockchain and AI will be the new power couple. They need each other. One provides utility, the other identity.

- Many other companies will do what Musk has done and cut their staff.

- More crashes in the Crypto world.

- Mastodon who?

- Mr. Beast becomes new Twitter CEO.

With this I would like to wish everyone a good 2023 and hope to see many of you around where I come.


> With this I would like to wish everyone a good 2022

Too late!


LOL thanks. Fixed.


I think housing prices will come down a bit more in the US. The FED is walking a fine line with interest rates. I predict they will have to backtrack and lower the rates in the second half of 2023.

I think the new 3nm process from TSMC will help to accelerate new NVIDIA cards to support GPT like AI, but TSMC will have to rapidly expand fabs outside of Taiwan to offset the risk from China.


chatbot search engines


Russia will win in Ukraine. It will probably result from some sort of prolonged general strike in an utterly exhausted Ukraine. The only modern war that Ukraine is comparable to, IMHO, is the Second Congo war. All the powers around it rush in to grab the resources of a destabilized country with the infrastructure getting obliterated and a huge humanitarian problem.

AI will march forward completely unimpeded by law or regulation. A new AI bubble reminiscent of the early internet boom will start to form. "I use ChatGPT in my development workflow" will become the new "I know HTML." Crowdfunding for training open source models will be common. Someone will train a porn generating stable diffusion causing a moral outcry.

Oil production will fall slightly. The oil price will start to rise. Tesla trucks will launch and be immensely popular. Battery production will continue to be a big concern. Coal will continue to do well, surprising everyone.

Housing will continue to crash. This will delay a lot of redevelopment in San Francisco and other downtowns. That will start when interest rates fall again. That will be in 2024 or later.

India and Mexico will do well. China will see significant death because of COVID. Europe will continue to deindustrialize. The aftermath of the Ukraine war might cause serious political realignments.

Biotech will advance dramatically, but will receive little press. Stem cell treatments will go mainstream.

Google will fail to redesign their business or even come out with a sophisticated chatbot AI product because their corporate culture can't handle the social political risks of AI. They can't even handle the risks of their employees believing It's alive. Larry Page and Sergei will continue to stay disengaged from the business, though one might give an interview lamenting the hyperpolitization of the company.

Metaverse hype will continue. No one will care.

Crypto, mainly Bitcoin, will continue to trudge along and absorb most of the volume. It will become an enemy currency in the U.S when Russia starts using it for payments.

Food prices will continue to rise. There will be more Sri Lanka situations in which countries start experiencing extreme food insecurity.

Vax backlash will not pick up any more than it already has. Murmurs of something very disturbing going on will continue beneath the surface. There will continue to be staffing shortages in the medical, airline, and public sector. Many new companies will be born to replace people with robots and automation in these industries. Alternative health will continue to grow in popularity, especially radically new approaches to healthcare. Regulations will be a problem, but people will get creative.


> Someone will train a porn generating stable diffusion causing a moral outcry.

Unstable Diffusion was already booted from kickstarter. These projects have been in motion since the summer.


> Russia will win in Ukraine. It will probably result from some sort of prolonged general strike in an utterly exhausted Ukraine.

What does “win” even mean here? Russia’s goal seems to be some kind of prolonged occupation of the majority of Ukraine’s territory. I’m not sure how that sort of occupation ever ends.


The Russians can't negotiate with the Ukrainians, so their only alternative is total domination by violence. I think the west miscalculated how much the Russians had modernized and their war production capacity. The fight is much more difficult than they expected.

The average Ukrainian is probably at the point where they feel Russian domination would be better than more years of war given the extreme measures men are taking to make it out of the country and avoid the draft. The average Ukrainian can't say anything about it though because the SBU will kill them.


This is a weird narrative. It is almost as though you have take every fact about the war and turned it on its head.

1. Russia can certainly end the war any time it wants. They can simply move their forces back behind historical borders. 2. I have no idea where you’re getting your ideas about what Ukraine believes. It seems that you may have read headlines about men fleeing Russia’s mobilization and find/replaced the word Ukraine.

I don’t know if this is the famous “Russian propaganda trolling” we’re always reading about online, or if you’re just an amateur who spent too much time in the wrong corners of the Internet.


I have been saying the Russians were going to win since day 1 since I've followed their weapons development and capabilities deployed in Libya and Syria. I read pro-Russian telegram channels, but I read the mainstream western news too and in any situation where the two disagreed, the pro-Russian channels were later vindicated most of the time.

The west is absolutely slaughtering Russia when it comes to the propaganda war 100%. When it comes to the war of kinetic violence, Russia seems to be winning. The funny thing about the western perception of the war is that they believe you can win any war with only propaganda. That, and it's like 80% of the war. The Russians perception is that violence in 80% of war and propaganda is 20%.

My financial interest is in keeping Russia a slave state to the petrodollar which involves us winning. It would be very bad for my investments if we could no longer export inflation or trash other countries economies when we raise our rates. The petrodollar has been good to me, but this time I think they really got in over their heads and done fucked up. I will be amazed and mystified if they somehow pull a rabbit out of their hat here and win the war. I guess I should keep it down because there are children here who might be demoralized with this kind of talk, but I always viewed HN as an adult corner of the internet where we don't have to be so discrete. ;)

That you think I'm some sort of paid Russian troll is totally hilarious honestly. How many years of "Trump is a Russian asset" did we have and absolutely nothing came out of all of the innuendos and leaks and all that stuff. The left in America is the new full-on Doctor Strange love paranoid war party these days.

Oh hey, not my prediction, but I heard someone say John Bolton might win 2024 because America will be so backed into a corner by the losses in Ukraine that we'll be whipped up in a frenzy to reconquer the world.


Is this part of your dystopian novel?


It’s just more Russian copium, after all the good faith gestures and retreats over the past 10ish months it’s clear they have no idea what they are doing outside the realm of propaganda.


I searched a bit, and I think I'm the only HN predictor that thinks Russia is going to win the Ukraine war. I've been saying that since day 1. A lot of my thinking is influenced by J.R Nyquist who has been talking about the Russian plans to revive the Soviet Union since the 1990s. He believes that Russian defectors in the 80s were correct in saying the Russians were going to do Perestroika as a strategic retreat because they knew they couldn't catch up with the west with a centralized economy. He has generally been dismissed as a paranoid for many years for thinking that there was any chance of a revived Russian/Soviet empire.


> I searched a bit, and I think I'm the only HN predictor that thinks Russia is going to win the Ukraine war.

I really doubt this, theres a lot of pro Russian people on here.

> I've been saying that since day 1. A lot of my thinking is influenced by J.R Nyquist who has been talking about the Russian plans to revive the Soviet Union since the 1990s.

This may have been true during the Soviet Union but I don't think the hollowed Russian military is capable of capturing all of Ukraine, maybe if all the defense money went to actual defense instead of yachts it may have been.

Im interested in how you think Russia will win the war when they cant even capture a city thats a mere 400km from their own border in 10 months.


If Russia was so superior to what the commonly held belief was on Feb 24th... why have they underperformed even the most conservative estimates?

Even Gen. Milley thought they would take Kiev in 2.5 days lol.

Right now they are burning through huge huge amounts of stockpile from Soviet times, etc. They aren't producing much. And their manpower is coming from reserves and prisoners recrutied by Wagner.


> Right now they are burning through huge huge amounts of stockpile from Soviet times, etc.

And relying on arms supplies from Iran and, apparently, the DPRK.


> I think the west miscalculated how much the Russians had modernized and their war production capacity.

There are still no signs of this.

> The average Ukrainian is probably at the point where they feel Russian domination would be better than...

Not sure after what has happened in Bucha and other places.


> I think the west miscalculated how much the Russians had modernized and their war production capacity

A main reason the Western governments initially delayed in supplying lethal aid when the 2022 major invasion started is that they expected that the Ukrainian government would immediately be destroyed replaced with a Russian puppet regime which would control whatever was donated.

They did not underestimate Russia’s capabilities.


Russia wants Ukranian genocide, and this is the second time that they try it in a generation. There is not any oxygen left for negotiation when the other part wants your head. After all this months of "special operation" Putin is not fooling anybody in Ukraine about his real intentions.

"Winning the war" will just mean to add a few km of ashes to Russia.

The objective of disarming Ukranie has failed spectacularly. The battle to keep Nato boundaries far from Rusia was lost when they messed with Swedden and Finland. The separatist areas could not rely on selling anything in the Ukranian market anymore and will need a lot of money to be reconstructed.

And the rest of the world will not trust Russia in a long, long time.

At this moment I can't see any good way out for Russia to detach themselves from the huge mess created by Putin


Nothing hoppens in Russia, although it’s even closer to collapse than now. Happening any day. The war in Ukraine continues and Ukraine is slowly winning. Vladimir Putin is still in power but is rumored to be losing his grip.

Nothing happens legally to Donald Trump, although he’s even closer to bad things happening.

Twitter doesn’t collapse but is on the brink of financial ruin. Will collapse any day.


The U.S. economy will fall even more steeply into depression, the housing market bubble will pop, and it will be incredibly hard for a time, but will ultimately be good for most.


Why would the Fed let that happen?


I believe Skynet will takeover, release the zombies. While AI will be making useless TikTok video's. Definitely will be another global lockdown.


Things will get worse.


Hear me out – things will get better!


Johnny Silverhand will blow up Arasaka Tower


China and the United States will have one military incident next year that will bring us breathtakingly close to war.


- Bitcoin passes $50k and continues rising through $100k shortly before the next halvening in March 2024

- One of Biden, Trump or Putin dies of natural causes. Approximately 50% of people do not believe the official story.

- A NATO base is hit with a Russian missile, leading to increased saber rattling but ultimately not to any full-scale war

- There is no peace agreement in Ukraine but there is a temporary cease-fire which is eventually broken by a rogue faction of the Ukrainian military

- Excess deaths continue above pre-2021 levels

- China does not invade Taiwan, but there are large scale protests in one of Taiwan or Hong Kong.

- TikTok is not banned

- Twitter does not crash. By the end of the year there is news that Musk is shopping around to take it public again.

- Civil unrest in Egypt is violently oppressed but there is no change in power

- There is a tragic accident in the Space travel industry

- Zuckerberg steps down as CEO of Meta

- Jack Dorsey returns as CEO of Twitter

- At least one major VPN provider is found to be operated or sponsored by a US intelligence agency

- A new social network becomes popular after introducing an alternative means of consuming news stories


> - A NATO base is hit with a Russian missile, leading to increased saber rattling but ultimately not to any full-scale war

Theres a decent chance that Russia hitting a NATO base with a missile doesn't cause full out war but it will be more than sabre rattling.

> - There is no peace agreement in Ukraine but there is a temporary cease-fire which is eventually broken by a rogue faction of the Ukrainian military

I don't think there will ever be a cease fire in Ukraine, it only allows Russia time to rebuild their stocks and rearm themselves.


Why bitcoin back up?


Because it always goes up ahead of the halvening


Microsoft will buy Meta.

Oracle will buy IBM.

Amazon will buy Sony.


#2 and 3 I could see but #1 seems impossible. /s?


Well, I’m responding to the direction to be bold, so it’s not that I think these are slam dunk acquisitions, but they are halfway plausible and I wouldn’t be shocked to see them happen.

Amazon is hungry for content and needs a gaming play.

IBM is in long-term stagnation and Oracle has a more aggressive vision of owning “The Enterprise”.

Microsoft already has a stake in Meta, and I expect the price of Meta to freefall once they abandon the metaverse gamble. Microsoft could pick up the pieces and exploit the value of the network. They did it with Linkedin and they would just love to own consumer social/messaging and a big slice of the ad-targeting pie with which to challenge Google.


Programming and software development will change drastically over the next few years. It will no longer remain a niche skill. Product managers will be able to code up things.


Please don't take away my ability to feel smug because I told a bunch of other people what to do and they mostly did it. I can't go back to doing things myself, I just can't.


We will find Atlantis.


Someone that people loved very much will perish.


The woke ideology problem will only get worse.


-Elon Musk is ousted from Tesla/SpaceX; TSLA <$50

-Trump dies of heart failure

-New COVID strain from the USA

-Housing bubble pops


SBF, Clinton, Trump, Fauci will remain out of jail.


Academic research like https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798 and https://www.mdpi.com/2414-6366/7/8/196 will finally make it into the mainstream and people on the left will begin to acknowledge that there are nontrivial risks associated with the mRNA vaccines. Trump will continue to defend operation warp speed, and more conservatives will defect to DeSantis.


Can someone ELI5 please what that first link is talking about?


The bivalent vaccines are less effective than expected, due to a change in the type of antibodies induced.


Thank you. So it's not really about "nontrivial risks associated with the mRNA vaccines" as suggested in the comment I responded to. They might not have understood the paper either. Thanks again.


The US will be pushing hard for WW3.


1. Issues around Corona boosters will become more apparent. Reports and studies linking damaged immune and vascular systems to mRNA vaccinations will become more and more clear, until the whole "let's 'boost' children and young adults twice a year" push gets quietly dropped altogether.

2. This won't lead to any impactful accountability or reform.

3. Referencing new health studies will be considered 'impolite', and 'conspiracy-adjacent', as will any discussion of corruption or profiteering.


I don't know if I agree with your first point, but I definitely agree that it will become harder to ignore all the harm of the over-reaction to covid, but society will keep its head in the sand as much as possible and chastise anyone who points out any ongoing negative consequences as an anti-whatever or conspirationist


My predictions for 2023-2030

2023 will be a year of endings and beginnings. The endings will be dramatic and the beginnings will only be understood in hindsight. Here's what happens.

The collapse continues, manifesting now as a culture war that goes floor-by-floor throughout every industry. Twitter, sure, but everywhere, now, and faster.

2022's incredible advances in AI diffuse through civil society. Awareness that some fundamental contract with the nature of the world is straining, is perhaps breaking, seeps through the groundwater of the collective unconscious. This growing unease at the idea of productive capitalism without mass employment eventually becomes the stand-out story of the decade. Along with climate change, of course, which is now much harder to address, because democratic consensus becomes impossible because of the proliferation of bots and AI-gen propaganda.

Over the ensuing decade, politics polarize even further, but there is also a second faultline, running on a sort of diagonal, between naturalist/ecologist/conservationist sensibility on one side, and technologist/rationalist/transhumanist ideology on the other. For example, a serious ecologist might reject (say) AI and euthanasia (neither being wholesomely natural), while still mostly voting in a left-aligned bloc; meanwhile a conservative might endorse science-based medicines and vaccines. Eventually this will seem normal, but in 2022 people will still be surprising each other.

But maybe this is too fine-grained. Perhaps it is enough to say that, in 2023, the creeping sense of dread you've had for the past half-decade comes closer to a head, but not so close that you can actually be rid of it. That will come in 2025, after the bitter election, or 2030-ish if you make it that far.

For now, rest up.




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