Who could have predicted 2020 would turn out as it did? Let’s see how some actual predictions for 2020 turned out.
Entire industries are premised almost entirely on predictions, like the psychic-astrological complex, and the climate change racket.
Predictions play complex roles in society. They warn us what might happen if we’re not careful. They caution us to prepare for contingencies. They comfort us with the thought that present troubles will be overtaken by future success or joy.
Mostly, they serve as clickbait copy for opinionated columnists, whose predictions may be interesting and thought-provoking, but for whom the penalty of being wrong is usually trivial because predictions are largely forgotten by the time reality pours cold water on them.
Yet, as Milton Friedman once said, the only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience. So let’s do that.
Pandemic predictions
During 2020, we witnessed the widespread failure of epidemiological modellers to forecast the spread and consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In March, Neil ‘Professor Lockdown’ Ferguson, who was the head of the department of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London until he resigned in shame over breaking the lockdown regulations he had advocated, predicted 510 000 deaths in the UK and 2,2 million in the US.
Similarly, epidemiological models in South Africa forecast a minimum of 88 000 and perhaps as many as 350 000 deaths by the end of 2020. This was later moderated to between 40 000 and 48 000 by the end of the year.
The pandemic is hardly over, but at last count, the US stood at 334 218 deaths and the UK at 69 051 deaths. South Africa has recorded 25 657 deaths to date. The early worst-case scenario in South Africa was 13.6 times worse than the eventual outcome. The early best-case scenario for South Africa was still 3.4 times worse than what happened. In the UK, the initial forecast currently stands 7.4 times higher than actual deaths, and in the US the projection is 6.6 times worse than reality.
Prediction is very difficult, said Niels Bohr, especially if it’s about the future.
Not all pandemic-related predictions have proven to be so woefully wrong. Bill Gates, for example, has been warning for years that a major pandemic that could kill millions is not a matter of if, but when, and that healthcare services around the world are not at all prepared for this.
He was proven right not only about the pandemic, but also about the woeful lack of preparation and inability to respond, even on the part of rich-world healthcare systems. This is what led to the curse of harsh but ineffective lockdowns, which cost us so much more than the pandemic alone, or than adequately preparing for a pandemic possibly could have cost.
Let’s hope, as the pandemic year of 2020 draws to a close, that lessons about pandemic preparedness are learnt. If we can maintain a standing military against the very remote threat of war or invasion, surely there must be a way to maintain a corps of emergency healthcare workers who can be called upon to ensure that epidemics do not swamp public and private healthcare facilities. (And if we slash funding for the military to fund it, so much the better.)
Techno-utopia
Many predictions have been made about the future. I’m going to try to limit this article to those made specifically about 2020, and about which we know whether or not they have come true.
In 2005, Ian Pearson, then head of the futurology unit at British Telecom, told The Guardian: ‘It is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020. It would definitely have emotions – that’s one of the primary reasons for doing it. If I’m on an aeroplane I want the computer to be more terrified of crashing than I am so it does everything to stay in the air until it’s supposed to be on the ground.’
Of course, that is not what you want a computer to do. Fear causes bad decision-making. You want a computer pilot to stay in the air only for as long as it is safe. If something goes wrong with the aircraft, or the weather, you want that computer to attempt an emergency landing, not stay in the air at all costs because it is afraid of crashing.
The same Pearson also said: ‘We can already use DNA, for example, to make electronic circuits so it’s possible to think of a smart yoghurt some time after 2020 or 2025, where the yoghurt has got a whole stack of electronics in every single bacterium. You could have a conversation with your strawberry yogurt before you eat it.’
As lonely as the life of a columnist gets sometimes, I have yet to reach the point where I want to talk to my yoghurt.
Pearson also predicted video tattoos, thin films of polymer that would act much like smartphones, except they’d be stuck to your skin, perhaps using dermal chip implants.
He foresaw ‘virtual worlds’ in around 2020. ‘We will spend a lot of time in virtual space, using high quality, 3D, immersive, computer generated environments to socialise and do business in. When technology gives you a life-size 3D image and the links to your nervous system allow you to shake hands, it’s like being in the other person’s office. It’s impossible to believe that won’t be the normal way of communicating.’
As it happens, we did end up having a lot of virtual meetings and social gatherings in 2020, which actually turned out to be a bit of a boon for someone like me who lives in a small town and rarely gets to attend events held in the big cities. They’re also much more efficient than meetings in physical locations. However, one can hardly describe Microsoft Teams or Zoom as immersive 3D environments with links to the nervous system.
Being wrong so often has not deterred Mr Pearson. ‘By 2020, many people will be unwilling to admit to still using a smartphone,’ he told Mashable in 2012. Instead, we’d be using ‘digital jewelry and video visors.’ Yeah, sure. Smartwatches haven’t displaced smartphones, and the less said about Google Glass the better.
To the moon
By 2020, several spaceflight entrepreneurs promised space.com in 2010, people would be taking tourist trips around the moon and visiting space hotels in low-Earth orbit.
Although there have been a handful of civilian space tourists, and companies like SpaceX have made giant strides in private spaceflight, the vision of space as a popular tourist destination remains somewhat distant in 2020.
In 1964, the RAND Corporation published a report on a long-range forecasting study. By or before 2020, it predicted a wide range of scientific breakthroughs.
Automatic language translators we now have, but they were predicted for between 1968 and 1976. We were supposed to have reliable weather forecasts by 1988 at the latest. Unifying quantum theory and general relativity, they believed, would be done before the 20th century was out. It remains the holy grail of theoretical physics.
By 2000, they thought we’d be able to control the weather sufficiently well to affect regional weather at an acceptable cost.
Drugs that raise intelligence would be a thing by 2012 or thereabouts, the RAND prognosticators thought. Starting in 1995, and developing until 2024, we’d master chemical control of the aging process, extending the human lifespan by 50 years.
By 2020, we’d also start breeding intelligent animals like apes and cetaceans (presumably dolphins) for low-grade labour such as doing chores around the house or as chauffeurs.
Starting in 2000 and peaking around now, the RAND report predicted, we’d be in two-way communication with extra-terrestrials. Which we certainly would, if we could find any that governments aren’t keeping locked up in secret facilities at Area 51.
Education by directly writing information to the brain would be a thing by 2020, but we’ll have to wait a few years for control of gravity through modification of the gravitational field and for the use of telepathy and ESP in communications.
On the technology front, they were even more optimistic. By 2020, we’d have international agreements to guarantee minimum income to the world’s population paid for by the high productivity of automation.
We’d have automated rapid transit, automated highways and automobile autopilots. We’d have legislation by automated electronic voting. We’d have widespread use of robot services, ‘for refuse collections, as household slaves, as sewer inspectors, etc.’
They managed to predict several functions of the internet, such as ‘automatic libraries, looking up and reproducing copy’, but not the internet itself. Their vision of the future was still mainframe-based.
They thought we only needed to worry about centralised wire tapping by 2027, although as Edward Snowden disclosed, that prediction came true a long time ago.
Optimism
In 1997, during the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the dot com boom, Wired magazine published an optimistic piece about the ‘long boom’ that stretches from 1980 to 2020 and beyond. In many ways, it proved to be over-optimistic.
In nominal terms, China is still not the largest economy in the world, being worth about two thirds of what the US produces.
It predicted that global economic growth rates would rise to 6% in the new millennium, but that never materialised. Global GDP growth peaked at 4.4% in 2004, and settled between 2% and 3% after the shock of the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. I don’t even want to know the number for 2020.
We’d be on Mars by 2020, the Wired piece said, the world population would have stabilised, and the economy is roughly in balance with nature. The latter depends very much on how you view equilibrium, but the former two certainly have not yet come true. Nor has their prediction that the divisions between races and genders would ‘look strange’ by 2020. Both right-wing and left-wing populism have breathed new life into identity politics, which sharpened the divisions instead of healing them.
In 2014, a range of predictions for 2020 was published by the futurist publication The Next Web. Telepathy and teleportation would be possible by 2020, according to Michael J. O’Farrell, founder of The Mobile Institute.
Shannon Spanhake, deputy innovation officer of the City & County of San Francisco believed that city governments would become trusted exchanges for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin, creating additional revenue for cities and providing a safe way to buy and sell alternative currency. That never happened, and that never will happen. The entire point of these currencies is to establish a decentralised financial system independent of governments and big banks.
Sub-Saharan Africa would become a hub for the creation of low-cost but highly effective technology services to address major social challenges, said Timothy Kotin, the co-founder of E-Coach Solutions, and the region will embrace crypto currencies and smart property to lead the world in digital payments and remittance systems, according to technologist Sena Gbeckor-Kove. It hasn’t, and it didn’t, and at the rate it is going, it won’t do so any time soon.
Kelly Goto, principal at Gotomedia, foresaw driverless police vehicles on land and in the air, focusing more on digital distraction than excessive speed, and ticketing drivers electronically. However idyllic that sounds (if you’re into police states), it’s 2020, and I have yet to see a police drone on case of the texting-and-driving brigade. A thriving speed-camera revenue generation scheme infests the roads where I live, though.
We will reach the point of reverse engineering the human brain in 2017, according to Yuri Van Geest, Singularity University. No, we won’t.
We’d have nuclear powered vacuum cleaners by 1965, said Alex Lewyt, president of a vacuum cleaner company, in 1955. We’re making progress, but I’ve left it off my Christmas wishlist for 2020.
Climate catastrophe
The climate change industry is a prolific producer of apocalyptic predictions, most of which do not stand the test of time. The right-leaning website JunkScience helpfully catalogued ten predictions for 2020 that failed to come true.
In 1987, the then-head of the Goddard Institute for Space Science at NASA, which maintains one of the world’s three major temperature records, predicted that the world would be 3°C warmer by 2020. It isn’t. It’s about 0.5°C warmer.
In 1978, an article in the Vancouver Sun predicted, ‘if present trends continue’, a doubling of CO2 levels by 2020. In fact, CO2 levels have been rising remarkably steadily, to about 23% above 1978 levels by 2020.
In 2008, scientists predicted that Kilimanjaro’s snow cap would be gone by 2020. Al ‘alarmist-in-chief’ Gore parroted this prediction. Yet the glaciers atop Kilimanjaro stubbornly refuse to melt.
The Environmental Protection Agency in 1986 warned that sea levels around Florida would rise by two feet by 2020. In fact, they rose (and the land subsided) by a total of four inches, or less than 17% of what was predicted.
‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’, wrote Charles Onians for the UK Independent in 2000, headlining an article that no longer exists, but for which the paper published an apologia in 2011. It cited climatologist David Viner from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (of ClimateGate fame) to the effect that snow by 2020 would cause chaos because we’d no longer be used to it. Instead, snowfall remains just as common now as it was then.
In 2000, a Greenpeace report said that the economies of island nations would be ruined by global warming by 2020. That didn’t happen. In fact, they’re booming.
In 2004, the Pentagon warned that resource shortages caused by climate change would cause global war by 2020. It didn’t. Perhaps, the world is too locked-down to go to war over whatever resources global warming is supposed to cause shortages of. (Sunscreen?)
In 2013, climate scientists predicted the Arctic would be ice-free in summer by 2020. It wasn’t, by a long way.
In 2009, a US government ecologist warned that the glaciers of the country’s Glacier National Park would be gone by 2020. The park even erected signs warning of this impending calamity. By 2020, only the signs were gone. The glaciers are still there.
Thomas Sowell once said, ‘Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?’
The fallibility of predictions
Since the dawn of time, prophets of doom have warned us that the end is nigh. It never is. Although some predictions are much better than others, as a rule one should take predictions with a large pinch of salt.
Science is good at predicting how simple systems evolve. It is not very good at predicting how complex systems behave.
Society is a complex system, and human behaviour is often not predictable, even at a statistical level.
‘The climate system,’ to quote the IPCC, ‘is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.’
Technology predictions are often no more than wishlists or fantasies of what might be.
If someone makes a prediction about a complex system and attaches a deadline to it, be very skeptical. Such a prediction might be an interesting conversation starter, but I wouldn’t bet the future on it.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend
Image by Erin Alder from Pixabay