❄️🎁🎄MAKE PREDICTIONS FOR 2025❄️🎄✨ & – Pick who did best with last year’s 2024 predictions?

I did terribly last year, hitting only half-ish of my predictions. To be fair, this kind of general lookout over a specific period is definitely different from modeling more specific questions in general, but it was not a good performance (although I did nail some weirdly specific predictions, including my prediction on open source AI). I suppose I’ll try again, but my usual caveats apply.

1. US politics becomes sclerotic and messy to a scale that’s unusual even for it (notably the House due to what may be the tiniest House majority in history and a likely incoming Speaker battle (I would have to double check to confirm, but I can’t recall one smaller off the top of my head)).
2. French politics also lands in the mire, yet again due to some underlying issues (essentially the right was expected to win, was stopped by the left, who were betrayed by Macron who they stopped the right for, and whose preferred PM was recently deposed by both the right and left).
3. Mass deployment of humanoid robotics. With Unitree pricing units in the low tens of thousands, and more competition incoming imminently it’s an industry geared up to begin scaling up rollout.
4. Automation of R&D takes off. While to date there’ve been some efforts here (E.G. the automated materials science laboratory), they’ve been hampered by lack of mass application and availability. While reasoning does not entirely change that, it does mean there are some significant increases in who could apply it and to what.
5. Ukraine is a mess. With an incoming US president who opposes concessions to Ukraine, and a Ukraine unwilling to surrender while it’s unclear what the result will be, it’s unlikely to be clean.
6. Gaza remains a secondary focus, but Israel continues to be embroiled in conflict (as we’ve seen here there are a lot of areas where either active or potential breakouts can occur, but it seems to have moved beyond that as the central focus of the violence – albeit I’m not sure what it looks like the long run). So far escalation has been avoided, and I do think that’s more likely than not to continue.
7. Recession. I thought it was slightly more likely to be this year (which appears improbable now), but I would actually start to head towards surprised if it didn’t begin the incoming year (if it didn’t hit by the next I would be outright shocked).
8. Breadth in AI. One thing that parallels adoption and competition new tech spaces is it essentially spreading out. You can see it with the internet, smart phone apps, streaming, etc. The early uses frequently look nothing like the long term ones, and I think we’ll start to see the beginning of that complexity.
9. Tariffs won’t be implemented on the scales discussed, but still cause problems.
10. Violence. We’ve seen the beginnings of something unusual in America with the attacks on a healthcare CEO, and I think this is just one expression of a potential broader trend (and not even the only one so far).
11. Immigration and migration issues. We saw this during Trump’s first term, but more so now as things like climate refuges have began and global instability has risen, I think we’re going to see both domestic and international issues with people who lack a stable home.
12. Homelessness, or more specifically (since that’s already extant), policies that worsen and target it – we’ve already seen some of this, but it’s also become a big touch stone of the culture war.
13. Conservatives win the Canadian election.
14. Democrats outperform in special and off year elections (in the US).
15. AI investment has it both ways (with both increased use/dominance/investment for some major use cases, but companies outside those areas see some major failures).

This is a mess, and even more ‘train of thought’ than my usual predictions in these.