Your 2023 predictions

[Ozzie guy]

I feel it is that time of year when we should start making our 2023 predictions put them in this thread.

2022 thread which contains links to previous threads viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2113

[erowind]

The War in Ukraine drags on for another year.

The economy keeps stagflating though an explicit recession or depression hits the western economies particularly the US in either Q3 or Q4 of 2023 as the FED starts actively cutting interest rates. It becomes clear to anyone who isn't already cynical that many of the metrics we've been told since 2020 have been farcical, real unemployment has remained high since 2020 and "new jobs" being offered to "ungrateful" workers during the "labor shortage" have been low paying service industry jobs that people understandably don't want to take after being layed off permanently from their higher paying positions in other more productive industries. In other words, the 2023 recession is a ripple from the 2020 recession that exaggerates the economic scarring left by the 2020 recession. Where, the 2020 recession itself is a result of bad economic policy since 2008; not the pandemic, the pandemic was simply the trigger event.

The rate of profit globally keeps falling though we likely won't know for sure for a few years as there aren't that many marxist economists capable of calculating it to keep us updated on a yearly basis who also publish their data for laymen.

(These are my sound econ predictions, tbh I'm so cynical I wouldn't be surprised if there's an outright liquidity crises panic that makes 2008 look tame. It's not likely this year, but possible. This kind of panic everything bubble burst where the financial system unwinds will become increasingly likely as the ecological crises puts pressure on the rate of profit and thus the foundations of this economic system. I expect that the market will get more volatile overall during the 2020s and 2030s culminating in systemic failure during the 2040s and 2050s, but that's outside the scope of this post.)

The ecosystem continues to deteriorate and global governments with the rare exceptions of a particular Himalayan mountain kingdom and a few Latin American countries do next to nothing about it.

AI makes rapid astounding progress but still doesn't change the lives of normal people just yet.

Longevity research has a breakthrough(s) though it's not quite as impressive as Dr Sinclair's work with the reversal of aging in mice in 2022.

Smartphones and tech continue to the stagnate in terms of hardware design, the wild wonderful days of the 2000s and early 2010s are gone for the time being outside of a few niche subsectors like virtual reality gear.

The metaverse is a market failure but not a real failure, for all the billions invested by multi-billiondollar companies VrChat is still the superior and more trafficked program. The reality is that the metaverse is doing great, it's just not coming from megacorps. 3D chat programs and VR based chat programs keep growing among teenagers and young adults. MMOs are as popular as they've ever been. It will still be some decades before a true Snow Crash-esque metaverse coalesces on the net, even so, some people, mostly people under 30 and in wealthy countries, are already living in a proto-metaverse.

[weatheriscool]

1. Russia will surrender in Ukraine and beg the world for mercy.
2. Putin will past away a few months later in the later part of this year from cancer.
3. Inflation will moderate and even start to go down in the later part of the year
4. China will threaten Taiwan some more and send airplanes into its airspace
5. A cancer vaccine or pill for one or more forms of cancer will be announced that increases quality of life and even sends it into remission at over 30%.
6. Anti-aging has a huge rat or fly break through doubling life span over all other experiments. This leads to real progress in the future towards a vaccine or pill as it will be later found to be effective in humans.
7. Renewable energy has a record year beating 2022 and 2021 combined for energy put online worldwide and within the United states.
8. Elon musk will show up aside Donald Trump at a campaign rally!
9. There'll be no recession in America in 2023. IN fact the economy will grow at least 2 to 3% a quarter.
10. A.i makes massive progress in 2023. Will produce things that scare people! Probably plays apart in medicine or the creation of more advanced robotics in the years to come.
11. A company will produce a robot is shown to do roles in the work place that are so far above what is currently on the market that it will be big news.
12. A flying car will be announced and approved be the faa but won't be ready for sale for a few more years.
13. A new VR headset that will compete with the Occulus 2 will blow peoples minds.
14. Wjfox will meet a woman and won't be seen for months later this year as he falls madly in love with her. He won't be doing any moderation of his board and won't be writing about the future!
15. Twitter becomes a right wing pushing republicans big time and most news is from breitbart and fox by the end of the year!
16. A el nino forms in the pacific allowing for the world to have its 2nd or 3rd warmest year in recorded history.
17. The Atlantic has 12 named storms with one of them hitting Florida as a respectable hurricane.
18. The republican house blocks funding for the government for 2 weeks and we face a government shutdown.

[urdestan]

I'm gonna be turning my own predictions into some time capsule for me to review. I don't use the forum as much, but I do come here at times for some synthetic media and AI updates. So here we go, 2023 predictions from me (14 new ones, I thought it'd be good to just focus on 14 annually):

• Russia will begin their counteroffensive in a "special military operation" in February to save their face of an already losing war, but would backfire miserably, forcing them to further withdraw. The year will continue to see no negotiations being met, so Ukraine will just take back more of their land, perhaps in a long shot, try to cross Crimea, turning it into a new front like in Donbas.

• Speaking of the Ukrainian war, Russia will begin to have internal unrest, with anti-war protests and backlash from the public being suppressed forcibly for the world to know. Kind of like China's lockdown protests. A sign of internal collapse is to come and even a re-election of Putin in 2024 will not save them.

• I expect the rise of various left-wing "alt-tech" platforms for Twitter, e.g. Mastodon, as Twitter continues to wreak havoc under Musk, but they won't be able to surpass the popularity of Twitter. The term alt-tech to me, just seems to be a term used around for fringe or smaller technological companies with a few goals in mind, rather than just the right making their own bubble tech industry. It will begin a long-trend of polarised social media platforms for everyone, catered to their own political ideologies, where Big Tech will slowly fade in relevancy as both sides hate them for different reasons. A few key exceptions would be TikTok, a Chinese social media app.

• Florida governor Ron DeSantis will make a surprise announcement to run as for the Republican primary as a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate. It will probably make some ripples against Donald Trump next year.

• Large-scale protests in India will happen in backlash to the right-wing government there and would persist for a while until the 2024 election there.

• A scandal for Elon Musk unfolds, perhaps a class action lawsuit of sorts. Tesla will see their market share decline over Musk's image, which Tesla is a big part of, with other car companies finally catching onto the electric car trend. But SpaceX, would probably continue to float. Being mostly led by Gwynne Shotwell, who knows a lot more about SpaceX's field than Musk could ever be, despite being the literal CEO of it, I think it'd be business as usual, just with a bit more scandalous.

• China will suffer at least a million deaths from slowly opening up to COVID after maintaining a zero-COVID policy through 2023. Perhaps it will also lead to a new variant as a result of mass proliferation, though it is the Chinese government, they don't like to record high cases- they'd rather proclaim victory.

• A long shot, but still probable: North Korea tests a nuclear weapon as relations between both Koreas continue to crumble. Perhaps to wrestle their strength, but also to cover their face as being the last country to keep a zero COVID policy.

• The metaverse hype dies down, as it continued in 2022. Horizon Worlds will likely have their services shut down late in 2023 as it was a bad gamble for Meta. However, the term metaverse would come to potentially supplant other synonyms, like virtual worlds or heck, VRMMORPGs in the long run.

• I expect more people will become a part of the "AI scary" train with a few more releases of models or papers. We've seen what the art community had reacted this year, so I expect a lot more ripples in other creative industries, like in music, where its much more litigious. If I remember correctly, Harmon.ai seems to be breaking that music ground where Jukebox had once left, although I might be wrong, that's just the latest AI quip I know so far. (I don't believe AGI as early as 2040 or by a long-shot, 2030, could be possible just yet, but that's my old, conservative brain for you.)

• Cryptocurrency will start to fall out of use slightly or even more to the normal user, even as governments begin to catch on and many are becoming aware of their risks. This is because of last year's major crashes related to it, from NFTs dying out to the collapse of FTX. It would make El Salvador's adoption of bitcoin as legal tender appear as a bad gamble that paid too much. Expect more regulation to such thing to occur this year or in the coming years.

• OpenAI will finally release DALL-E 3. (Yes, I am aware of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, but like please give me this. Clearly they've gone way behind their schedule.)

• Avatar: The Way of Water will make $2 billion in the box office, with $2.5 billion at a long shot, just enough to make Disney gain a profit. I don't think it could surpass its original film. Aside from Avatar, DC and the MCU films, where the latter had been a lot bumbling lately with their Phase 4 content, I expect box office successes for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves ($800 million), John Wick ($1,300 million), Dune: Part Two ($700 million), Mission Impossible ($1,800 million) and maybe even Super Mario Bros. Movie ($800 million) itself. With cinema returning to normal as usual, we see less of the big companies releasing their content to streaming services.

• Apple will finally announce their augmented reality or virtual reality device in one of their events this year.

Not so serious predictions:

• Haz of InfraredShow continues to be an irrelevant meme that only the online left and tankies know.

[Ozzie guy]

I had just dotted down what I expect in my life for 2023 the only thing outside of my life I recorded was AI due to its long-term implications. I will share the AI stuff here and may edit and add to this post to turn it into a proper predictions for 2023 post covering multiple areas.

AI

• AI in general will have a continuation of somewhat consistent exponential growth it won’t really feel different to 2022 but proportionally if AI
development could be measured it would be at least 10% better.
• GPT-4 will be the AI people remember when talking about 2023.
• GPT-4 will set some new benchmarks in areas such as natural language however it won’t be as general as GATO meaning progress towards
something resembling the singularity.tm or Utopia.tm will be minimal.

[bretbernhoft]

My one prediction for 2023 is that Artificial Intelligence continues to evolve at an exponential rate, both actually and perceptually. This will be true for both existing and yet-to-be-released services.

[funkervogt]

The Ukraine War will reach a climax in 2023. That means, by the end of the year, one side will have won, or the conflict will have significantly died down, with both sides (perhaps tacitly) recognizing that the battle lines were unlikely to change much from 2024 onward. I predict this because the economic, military, human, and political costs of the war to both sides leave it unlikely that either will want to continue at the current level of intensity for more than another year.

GPT-4 will be released. Though significantly better than GPT-3, it will fall short of many nerds' high hopes.

The U.S. will enter a recession.

China's abandonment of its failed "Zero COVID" public health strategy leads to a major surge in deaths across the country.

[caltrek]

Dr Dan Steinbock had a recent piece in Eurasia Review regarding predictions for 2023. I find myself being more of an optimist than he, but that could easily be because I have not studied the numbers carefully. Alternatively, he may simply be too pessimistic. Here is a link to the article:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/19122022 ... analysis/

Some points made and my observations:

In early 2022, the US, the Eurozone, the UK and Japan pledged geopolitical loyalty and ignored economic realities while promoting the worst military overstretch in decades. Thanks to the US/NATO-led proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the costs of the misguided economic policies and geopolitics were predictable already in March.

This is a bit too much of the “it is all NATO’s fault.” As argued in the thread dedicated to analyzing that war, I think it is more of the need to respond to an act of unprovoked aggression on the part of the Russian government. It is not so much an ignoring of “economic realities” as it is an understanding of geopolitical reality. Still, the point that policy positions that flow from that understanding will have economic consequences that will carry over into 2023 is well taken.

In the Eurozone, government debt to GDP remains close to 100%. Ironically, that’s 40 percentage points higher than the region’s own debt limit. In the UK, the figure has doubled since 2008 to almost 100%. In Japan, the figure is the worst among all high-income economies; close to 265%, thanks to over two decades of secular stagnation.

In the US, the debt ratio has doubled and is inching toward 140%. That’s over 20 percentage points higher than that of Italy amid Rome’s 2010 debt spiral. But unlike Italy (and its bygone lira), America is a global anchor economy and US dollar still dominates international transactions. So, when the US debt crisis ensues, adverse reverberations will be felt from the world economy to global foreign-exchange markets.

I am not so sure that we are on the precipice of a debt crisis. There is an awful lot of wealth out there to support high levels of borrowing. Sure, caution should be exercised in going down the route of excessive borrowing, and it is difficult to know whether boundaries are being crossed that may cause significant problems.

I like to use the analogy of an individual household. Such a household may borrow money to purchase a home. One could look at the size of the debt incurred and say OMG they have borrowed an amount that equals 140% of their annual income. Clearly unsustainable. Well, yes and no. One should take into account the benefits of owning that home, especially that of building up equity.

In a similar manner, borrowing can also have benefits. Mainly the extent to which economies are brought to levels of full employment. In such circumstances, the ability to pay off debt can be quite manageable. Meanwhile, infrastructure is being built, needed provisions for common defense are being provided, public health systems are being (often inadequately) maintained, research and development is occurring, manufacturing capacity is being increased, and…well you get the picture.

So why all of the anxiety about the debt?

A couple of somewhat legitimate motivating reasons are:

1. The desire to keep taxes to a minimum.
2. Concerns regarding inflation.

Conservatives are especially concerned about the first point. With huge inequalities of wealth, government policy makers may be tempted to increase taxes upon the rich toward paying off the existing debt and to avoid further deficit spending. Hence the desirability of a relatively low debt ratio.

Government spending can also introduce excessive demand for product and services into the economy. In such cases, inflation can be a result. Inflation can also be thought of as a sort of tax in that the purchasing power of everyone is reduced for everyone, including the rich, the middle class and the poor.

Now, Dr. Steinbock makes the additional point that we may be heading for a recession. This is because central banks are raising interest rates to keep inflation in check. The goal in the U.S. is for a so-called soft landing wherein inflation is reduced to 2% without triggering a recession.

So, what is my opinion as to whether they will achieve that soft landing in 2023?

Well, as wrote earlier, I am optimistic about those things, so I am hopeful that there will either be no recession, or that whatever recession does occur will be relatively mild. I don’t claim to be a very good prognosticator about these sorts of things, so we will see.

[Yuli Ban]

This is going to be dangerous, but 'ere we go.

Main Timeline Predictions

• Croatia adopts the euro
• The Aurora supercomputer comes online
• The Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE) is launched
• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory achieves first light
• Asteroid sample return mission
• Turkey celebrates its 100th anniversary as an independent republic
• Launch of China's Xuntian space telescope
• The first flight of Ariane 6
• IBM debuts a 1,000+ qubit quantum computer 

My Predictions

• Turing Test formally passed by a large language model, though still a somewhat handicapped version of the test (more meaningful than Eugene Goostman and Cleverbot's passes at least). A fully unrestrained, hours-long Turing Test is the final test and has yet to be passed.
• Gato's follow-up (Dolphin? Raven? Almost certainly not "Gato 2") is unveiled, and is comfortably able to be described as a "proto-artificial general intelligence" due to skill interpolation ability combined with larger, denser size. Almost certainly will still "only" be described as a generalist or super-generalist model, with DeepMind downplaying any consideration of it being a full-fledged or even weak AGI, but there will be begrudging tolerance of it being considered "proto" AGI. Main point is its extreme generality, rather than its strength, as it is still weak compared to other models
• GPT-4, coming within the first half of the year. Shockingly impressive performance, as impressive as GPT-3 was in comparison to GPT-2 if not slightly moreso, but not an AGI. Its context window length might be a major selling point, being double that or more of ChatGPT's 4,000 to 8,000 (?) tokens. Expect a "disappointing" parameter count in comparison to the rumors of 100 trillion parameters. Almost certainly unimodal, though "pseudo-multimodal" in that GPT-4 possesses the ability to synthesize rudimentary images and audio via pure text and code
• Possible follow-up to ChatGPT (ChatGPT2?) if GPT-4 is not publicly demoed
• PaLM follow-up, likely smaller than PaLM but much more powerful
• GPT-3.5's architecture is fused with Bing to create an LLM-enhanced search engine
• Essay and short story-writing AI becomes feasible on a more accurate scale, leading to upheaval in education
• StabilityAI unveils a suite of new applications, such as video diffusion, comic diffusion (i.e. coherent multi-image generation), and far more advanced image generation capabilities
• Similar improvements to Midjourney, whose later versions vastly outperform DALL-E 2 and eventually Imagen
• DALL-E 3 sees a release, perhaps based on architecture closer to Imagen and with vastly enhanced capabilities
• Video diffusion/novel video synthesis booms in both research and commercial applications, with a similar dichotomy in the middle of the year between the state of the art vs the easily available as existed with images the previous year (i.e. a DALL-E 2-level semi-open beta and a DALL-E Mini-level free-to-use "This Gif Does Not Exist" website). However, due to enhanced compute costs, video diffusion progresses a bit slower than static image diffusion.
• As a proof of concept, the first fully AI-generated movie is unveiled sometime during the year
• Text-to-3D modeling diffusion also begins to progress, with substantial programs by the end of the year
• Audio/music diffusion begins to catch up to image diffusion, though progress remains somewhat lacking compared to other modalities 
• OpenAI unveils the follow-up to Codex as a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4. This follow-up is explosive in its shockwaves in the programming world, such as being able to generate an entire Atari or even NES-level video game or an un-premade website from scratch from a simple request.
• Artificial neural networks undergo a commercial boom, as various applications are easily and unobtusely able to be used by the average person with minimal effort
• Specialized virtual agents begin to progress, capable of answering requests in virtual space using natural language (e.g. able to create a complex video in Source Filmmaker or gather multiple relevant files from the internet just by asking)
• An AI "solves" an advanced theorem for the first time
• DeepMind unveils AlphaFold 3 or an equivalent program 
• A new robot is unveiled that becomes a viral sensation similar to Ameca, Sophia, and Atlas
• Drone swarms continue to be used offensively in combat
• More drone vs. drone combat occurs
• 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), same as in 2022.
• Apple formally unveils their augmented reality headset
• Microsoft unveils a follow-up to HoloLens not long after
• Kernel finally begins shipping their BCI products
• Controversy continues to mire Neuralink, especially as rival invasive BCI companies progress without causing harm
• Total number of electric cars on the road reaches or is close to 30 million worldwide
• World largely shrugs off further disruption from the COVID pandemic. In a great irony, the pandemic returns to cause havoc in place it started: China.
• The war in Ukraine continues to drag on. Ukraine has the advantage due to Western backing, but Russia refuses to quit even as they lose more ground. Expect some saber-rattling and mobilization fears, but otherwise mostly unrest within Russia itself.
• World economy enters a recession with the US and China being the most affected. This may be China's first government-admitted recession since the 1960s, but the economy does rebound.
• Elon Musk resigns as Twitter head, and Twitter likely goes bust or shrinks in influence
• Ron DeSantis formally announces his candidacy for the presidency of the USA
• Mastodon continues to rise, and a small reflourishing of more niche and individualized web platforms begins to take place
• North Korea tests a nuclear weapon with a yield larger than 100 kilotons
• A room-temperature superconductor is formally found, perhaps with temperatures up to 50­°F. However, it is only possible at extreme pressures, perhaps 200 gigapascals, this time with actual peer-review and without the study being retracted
• Geoengineering proposals will slowly enter mainstream discourse
• Another nuclear fusion breakthrough as net energy as achieved a second time, this time more efficiently. Commercialization still remains a long way off, but it becomes clear that fusion power for energy might actually be feasible after all
• Total installed solar capacity reaches 1.4 to 1.5 terawatts worldwide, continuing solar's explosive growth
• The early days of mass-producible graphene begins

¡Wild Cards!

• A sizable meteor strikes Earth and causes damage, perhaps even death, akin to the Chelyabinsk meteor
• A BCI + AI is used to achieve two-way human-to-dolphin communication
• Basic income schemes enter mainstream discussion
• A "new" Wow! signal is detected, the most tantalizing hint of extraterrestrial life yet, but fails to be detected a second time
• President Biden holds a televised conversation with GPT-4
• Holograms/volumetric displays bizarrely become a hot novelty commodity
• An ASIMO-like robot is unveiled by a major company intended for imminent commercial release
• Elon Musk dies
• Orang Pendek discovered to actually exist
• An entire brain-to-brain conversation occurs, carried out via brain-computer interfaces
• Even deadly cancers become easily treatable with T-cell and mRNA treatments that are unveiled this year

All in all, 2023 is going to be a fine, fun, and futuristic year, though the most interesting developments by far will be in the area of artificial intelligence. Some people might lament that AI is progressing so quickly while other fields like robotics and biotech aren't quite developing as fast.
I stand by my statement from last year, though, that despite the increasing proliferation of ANNs, your daily life isn't going to radically change this year. It's only in 2024 when things might start seeming to get a bit weirder as AI begins to disseminate into everything from news and popular music to even this very website we use, including AIs as personal assistants and virtual friends. 2023 will see some of that pioneered, but 2024 is when it'll actually take off.

Now to address the elephant in the room for everyone else: the topic of how close we are to artificial general intelligence. 

I feel that 2023 will be a major inflection point for AGI discussion. The SOTA models will simply be too good, too spooky. It's not just a matter of AI being good, but of AI becoming strange. And that will start to shift opinions as people begin to realize that there might actually be something to predictions of AGI. That doesn't mean everyone is going to say "AGI 2024." Indeed, some will use models like Gato's follow-up and GPT-4 to say "Looks like we aren't close to AGI at all, even though it seems closer than ever" while others will maintain that, while these models are amazingly impressive and generalized, we're still "a generation away from AGI."
But there will start to be genuine doubts, even in some former skeptics. It becomes clear to a growing number of rather important people that maybe AGI isn't decades or centuries away after all, and that we ought to be having more discussions on AI safety than we are.

[BaobabScion]

If I may hazard a glance into the fog...

• The La Nina global weather pattern we've been experiencing for the past 3 years switches to an ENSO Neutral State. It will be in this intermediary phase for the next 18 months before finally, thunderously, reaching an El Nino state, with all the disastrous climate effects that that will imply.

• Kanye West will be found dead from either an overdose or a suicide.

• The Russo-Ukraine War will spread to Belarus and/or Moldova. Spread to the former will be a result of retaliation for the late January- early February offensive on Kyiv.
  • In the event of a Russian incitement and aid of the Transnistrian separatists in Moldova, a force gap will open enabling a huge Ukrainian offensive into Crimea. The mechanisms of this breakthrough are murky in foresight but will be clear in hindsight.
  • Jon "Bones" Jones will make his long-awaited return to the UFC
    • If the fight is against Ngannou, it'll be a draw.
      • If the fight is against Blaydes, Jones will win.
        • If the fight is against Gane, Jones will win by TKO.

• A class-action lawsuit will levied against Stability AI and/or other corporate creators of generative AI models on behalf of disaffected artists. The resulting legal back-and-forth directly related to this lawsuit will last until January 2024.
  • Verdict and its ramifications unknown at time of this divination.

• Ecofascism and RW Accelerationism become major headlines with major attempts made on the lives of power plant workers and non-trivial damage sustained to the US Northwest regional power grid.

• Gameplay footage emerges for Vampire: The Masquerade -Bloodlines 2, and it is revealed to have a Fall 2023 release date.

• Israel stages an attack on a suspected Iranian nuclear facility. The mission fails spectacularly and leads to a mass conflagration (metaphorical and literal) in the region.

• Another object from outside the solar system is detected moving through our sphere. Like with Oumuamua, many speculate about it origins and nature.

• Dmitry Medvedev is shot and killed. Considering the already high stakes, this does not lead to a major escalation.

• Elon the Muskrat steps away from Twitter, but Twitter does not implode...somehow.

• There will international outcry over reports of a new Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Azerbaijani government in Nagorno-Karabakh.

• John Wick 4 will release and enjoy major Box-Office success, grossing close to $ 500 million worldwide.

• Lake Mead will reach "dead-pool" status as its water level descends below 842 feet. (Dead pool status is marked if the reservoir goes below 895 feet.)
  • Major state and federal-level conversations commence over what to do with the millions of people who'll inevitably need to migrate from the Southwest in the coming years. Denial is still predominant.

• The architect of the past year's surge in bot participants on the Futuretimeline forum will reveal themself.