Main Timeline Predictions
- Level 3 autonomous cars go on sale in Europe
- Crossrail opens in London
- Germany phases out nuclear energy | Negative. It probably wouldn't have happened anyway, but the war in Ukraine all but assured nuclear's future in Europe.
- Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics
- Completion of the Northeast Corridor high-speed train upgrade | Negative. Most likely 2024.
- The first flight of Ariane 6 | Negative. 2023.
- India's first crewed space flight | Negative. Most likely 2024-2025.
- Qatar hosts the FIFA World Cup
- China's first space station is complete | Inconclusive, as only most of it is complete.
- New Horizons completes its study of the Kuiper Belt
- The AIDA mission arrives at Didymos | Impact did occur
- The Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE) is launched | Negative. 2023
- Water is becoming a weapon of war
- The X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Transport is tested over U.S. cities | Negative. 2023.
- Global reserves of antimony are running out | Negative. Reserves actually increased.
- Driverless hover-taxis are operational in Dubai | Negative. Plans are pushed back into the next four years.
- VIPER mission to the lunar south pole | Negative. 2024.
- First flight of the New Glenn reusable rocket | Negative. 2023 at earliest.
- Apple teases or unveils their first wearable mixed reality product
- The PSVR2 is formally teased or announced, though likely not released
- Next-generation VR headsets are unveiled by Meta, Valve, HTC, and others
- Volumetric displays begin some early phase of commercialization | Inconclusive
- Meta will formally unveil a generalized Metaverse hub, similar to SecondLife and VR Chat, but it will be unintuitive, overly censored, and poorly received | Inconclusive as no one even knows what the Metaverse is supposed to be, but what meet ups there were were indeed abject failures
- The chip shortage will continue throughout the year; GPUs will remain expensive | Negative and positive, as the chip shortage has ended, but GPUs are expensive
- A smartphone with projector capabilities is released, essentially allowing for ultra-wide screens on the go
- Nanomotors, nanoengines, and nanogears combined to create a (very simple) working hard nanobot | Negative
- First internationally successful powered exoskeleton enters the market, mostly for labor
- An AI will be released on the internet that will allow for users to create maps, characters, vehicles and even 3D models just from text descriptions. | Take your pick
- OpenAI goes on a blitz, unveiling GPT-4, Jukebox 2, DALL-E 2, and Codex 2 all in one year. | Only DALL-E 2
- GPT-4 will, at maximum, have 1.2 trillion data parameters and a context window of roughly 10,000 tokens. It will be multimodal, but not to a great extent. Despite hype, it is not marketed as or considered to be artificial general intelligence, proto or otherwise. | No GPT-4
- Jukebox 2 or some variant of it will refine audio-synthesis to be more coherent and will focus more on human speech and other sounds | No Jukebox 2
- DALL-E 2 will be able to generate editable HD images from text descriptions, including detailed text descriptions (perhaps up to a paragraph long)
- Codex 2 will be able to synthesize longer passages of code, possibly allowing for simple video games to be generated
- OpenAI will tease a "major project" that will be unveiled at an unspecified future date | Clearly GPT-4
- This Gif Does Not Exist" will be created, formally allowing people to view or generate short (perhaps up to 10-sec) and coherent visual-only videos | Multiple examples, though one of the first was CogVideo
- DeepMind will announce that their AI has achieved superhuman success rates at 3D and complex 2D games, as well as board games | Nothing in this area, but I'll consider it inconclusive
- Artificial intelligence is used in China for some sort of municipal automation, beginning the process of automating government and community jobs | Inconclusive, possibly negative due to vagueness of application
- Autonomous cars continue to progress, but development remains slow and fraught with skepticism. There are no major breakthroughs, only incremental steps forward (some of which are treated as major breakthroughs but lead to no major immediate changes)
- Deep brain/transcranial magnetic stimulation will see progress, especially for treating certain neurological disorders
- BCIs continue to advance, with a formal release for Openwater and Kernel devices, more progress from Neuralink and Stentrode, and at least one major news story involving texting-by-thinking | Mixed success, as there has been progress from Neuralink and Stentrode, and some news stories about texting-by-thinking. Shockingly, not much from Openwater or Kernel.
- MEG, portable MRI, fNIRS become the latest hot topics in BCIs, beginning to replace EEG | Negative, discussion is still dominated by EEG due to lack of impact or release of anything from Openwater or Kernel
- Starlink reaches 5,000 satellites in orbit | Negative, only 3,300.
- SpaceX will accomplish at least 1 launch per week throughout the year | Failure to achieve 1 launch per week, but success in that there has been more than 52 launches to make up for the scheduling failure, so I'll consider it a pass.
- The James Webb Space Telescope completes all functions and begins operations
- Solar power reaches 1 terawatt of installed capacity worldwide
- The total number of electric vehicles passes 20 million worldwide
- Nuclear energy fails to gain traction despite hype for a revival | Unfortunately, despite its death being staved off by the war in Ukraine, it hasn't grown either
- A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion as net energy is achieved. Commercialization remains a long way off
- The operating temperature for a high-pressure room-temperature superconductor is increased to at least 85°F/30°C, with the pressure requirement lowered to under 100 gigapascals (possibly as low as 10 gigapascals) | Worse than negative, as the original publication was retracted.
- COVID-19 resurges early in the year before becoming endemic as the year progresses
- Healthcare collapse early in the year in some areas causes the death toll to skyrocket beyond what it would otherwise be, but society and the economy recovers before the end of the year | No healthcare collapse, at least in the West
- The early effects of Long COVID begin taking their toll
- Official COVID death toll will easily surpass seven million by the end of the year; "true" death toll will pass 30 million | Thankfully negative on both counts; under 7 million officially, around 20-25 million by excess death toll
- Substantial progress is made in mRNA and T-cell therapies, such as resolving certain cancers and diabetes
- USA life expectancy continues to fall, even as the pandemic starts to fade
- Cultured meat enters store shelves, as a niche product carried only by a very select few retailers | Negative. Not quite yet
- The Biden administration formally starts a program to forgive some student debt, based heavily on income and employment status, up to $50,000 | Up to $20,000, so far.
- The Chinese GDP continues growing despite setbacks
- Nord Stream 2 is not canceled
- Russia and Ukraine come to blows, but it devolves into a higher-intensity extension of the existing War in Donbas. Ukraine fights back, but likely loses a large chunk of territory
- NFTs crash hard sometime in the middle of the year
- A directed-energy weapon destroys a drone in a combat situation
- China unveils a new next-gen fighter jet that can match or exceed American capabilities
- Brexit continues going very badly for the United Kingdom
- Marijuana and psilocybin legalization spread rapidly
- First passenger drones enter commercial use | Negative. Most likely 2024-2025
- Renewed hyperloop tests occur throughout the year | Mixed, as these are vactrain tests
- A major infrastructural disaster will occur in the USA, highlighting (but not prompting action) the dismal state of infrastructure in the USA | Surprisingly negative
- Internet infrastructure is boosted as remote work becomes entrenched, leading to the biggest improvements to internet speeds in years | Inconclusive; if boosts are happening, they're still underway
- Automation begins becoming an increasingly major political discussion, but has not become a dominant topic of discussion
- Work will resume on the new tallest building in the world, whether that be Jeddah Tower or Dubai Creek Tower | Work still suspended on both
- A major disaster will strike a major global city, with a death toll above 100,000 | Besides war, nothing like this has happened
- A putsch will succeed in Brazil, granting Bolsonaro dictatorial powers | Thankfully negative
- A drone swarm is used offensively for the first time
- Google Pathways is formally unveiled, with the project outright considered an "artificial general intelligence"... except Pathways is not actually yet built, only a schematic for the future (similar to the Metaverse)
- Quirky news story of someone getting killed by a rare means that hasn't been relevant in decades or centuries (similar to the Sentinelese and Cassowary deaths) | Purely subjective
- Queen Elizabeth II passes away
- A robot dog will kill someone (not autonomously), causing a major controversy
- A new strain of COVID arises midway through the year that's actually mild and begins the end of the pandemic. Before then, however, Omicron and a renewed Delta have caused the worst havoc of the pandemic.
Final conclusion for the average person: little changed in your life compared to 2021. You did not become transhuman; you did marry an AGI; you did not get to ride in a flying car; you did not hook your brain up to a computer. It's possible you got to use some VR or AR headsets, and maybe you rode in a level 2 or even level 3 AV. You might've seen a drone show. It was another year of watching glittery high-tech advance in the distance.
But there were some deeply profound changes beneath the surface, especially in the world of AI. Artificial neural networks are finally being commercialized, and average people were finally able to use tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and ChatGPT to see just what the future heralded. Indeed, in some ways in the world of AI and tech-bro culture, January 2022 and December 2022 are wholly different worlds; we started with generative AI barely better than DALL-E Mini/Craiyon and obtuse ways of using GPT-3, and we ended with Midjourney V4 and NovelAI and ChatGPT. It's almost difficult to imagine life without high-end generative AI like we saw just in the past few weeks and months.
2023 is going to feel the exact same as 2022, and no, by that, I don't mean there's going to be no progress at all. I mean definition number two. It's going to feel exactly like how 2022 felt.
