What's an outcome that you think is high-probability but also non-obvious?
This is meant to be like a time capsule. On Jan 1st 2030 we can dig up out predictions and see how they aged.
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There will likely be war crimes counterfactually due to military AI.
It may increase the likelihood/frequency of war crimes:
In the initial stages, AI drones / autonomous weapons may frequently misidentify targets.
AI drones / autonomous weapons may be programmed to not be capable of refusing orders from human or AI commanders to commit war crimes.
To achieve objectives, AI commanders may choose highly bizarre and unconventional solutions that involve committing war crimes, due to not having a complete intuitive human morality, like Yudkowsky's unsafe genies.
Human commanders that already want to commit war crimes may feel emboldened, that they can avoid personal blame, or that they can convince moderates, if an 'objective' AI advisor calculates that committing war crimes is the optimum strategy to achieve objectives.
Generative AI misinformation may become so effective and widespread that there is an impenetrable smokescreen of plausible deniability of war crimes ever being committed.
AI powered research may continue to discover vast numbers of new chemical and biological weapons.
It may increase the severity of war crimes:
AI drones/commanders/advisors may reach the point of universal significant outperformance of their human counterparts.
Due to the above point, they may become effectively impossible to defend against by non-AI forces, committing the intended war crimes faster and to a greater completion than would normally be practical.
Also due to the same point, if at any point an AI decides on the specific war crime of torture, it may vastly transcend the known limits of suffering
Between now and 2030, annual US commercial building energy use will decline. Three factors here:
Despite the gradual decline of remote work, new commercial building construction is essentially over. Companies want to refill their existing offices, but they won’t want to build new ones.
Soon, nearly every medium to large commercial building is going to start using AI to controls its HVAC system. I’m not talking about genAI/LLMs - I’m talking about a set of control schemes developed in the 2010s which use more traditional machine learning approaches. Currently, commercial buildings mostly use building automation software which is pretty similar to a programmable thermostat you might have at home. People invented much more efficient control schemes a while ago (10%+ reduction in HVAC energy use) but those are only now being deployed because the difficulty of getting older HVAC systems to talk to the cloud computers where these algorithms run.
Other critical energy saving technologies - heat pumps, new dehumidification technologies, etc. won’t necessarily be retrofitted, but they will be used in the vast majority of new builds.
Self driving cars will make road quality worse. In the past, when roads are improved and upgraded, more people will drive on the roads. It’s impossible to decrease traffic due to this issue. Also, most people believe that ai taxis will lower traffic and parking lots, however the taxis do not just disappear when they finish their job. They will end up going into parking lots, or worse, continue to drive around. Competition for ai taxis will cause companies to attempt to create a faster call time for taxis, giving more of a reasons for cars just to drive around when not in use. If they drive in high population areas (areas with the most traffic) they can get to their pickup areas faster, increasing traffic further.
China's demand for fossil fuel will decrease as the existing fleet of combustion vehicles age out and are replaced by EVs. This could be non-obvious in two directions, depending on how much you know about EV adoption in China and about their fossil fuel demand. Are you surprised I'm saying it'll take that long or does it feel too soon?
More widespread human genetic engineering aimed at curing or resisting more diseases as CRISPR-CAS9 tech matures and regulation changes. I also expect this guy was not actually the first: https://www.science.org/content/article/creator-crispr-babies-nears-release-prison-where-does-embryo-editing-stand
But I don’t know if we’ll find out about an earlier case by 2030
Cool bounty idea :)
Shame the favourite button seems to have disappeared
Are there rewards depending on how interesting our answers are?
An increasing number of people, mostly young men (who I must raise the white flag to - have shown themselves much more promising than my generation thus far!) will recognize that the current system -- that glorifies evil, such as pornography, transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion, and blasphemy -- does not work for them. We will see more people turn on this sham "democracy" to the rightful system of government: monarchy.
At least three EU countries are poorer (in nominal GDP per capita measured in year 2000 dollars, to be specific) than in 2024. At least one EU or former EU country such as the UK has exit visas.
China is a less significant player on the global stage than in 2024.
Sam Altman is in prison or dead.
I remain unimpressed by AI.