A public record of predictions made by well-known people: their exact words, when they said them, and how things turned out.
| Person | Category | Predictions | Scored | Accurate | Late | Partial | Wrong | Accuracy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Fauci | Scientist | 9 | 8 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 69% |
| Geoffrey Hinton | AI researcher | 7 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0% |
| James Hansen | Scientist | 11 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100% |
| Michio Kaku | Scientist | 8 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 33% |
| Paul Ehrlich | Scientist | 9 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0% |
| Yann LeCun | AI researcher | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0% |
Accuracy counts accurate as 1, late or partial as ½, inaccurate as 0. Pending predictions don't count.
“So the whole process is going to take a year, a year and a half at least.”Health
“first to the moon, using the moon as a base, and then on to Mars perhaps around the 2030s.”Space
“It [a shattering collapse of civilization] is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems.”Climate
“We will definitely get surprised in the next few years.”Health
“It's just completely obvious that within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.”HealthAI
“In 10 to 20 years, we will have a human body shop at which we will simply order organs on demand”Health
“In about 10 years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore's Law”Technology
“The falling cost of solar, hydrogen, renewable, wind power, geothermal power and the rising cost of fossil fuels will cross within 10 years”EnergyClimate
“Well, as you mentioned, we’re going to have the internet in our contact lens, perhaps within 10 to 15 years.”Technology
“Calculating the energy output of the planet, we can estimate that we will attain Type I status within 100 years.”Energy
“barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on the record.”Climate
“the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century”Climate
“there is a high probability of warming in the 1980s”Climate
“before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity”Economy
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”PoliticsEconomy
“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come”ClimateHealth
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born”Health
“At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”Health
“I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”Health
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”Health