Predicting Ten Years Out
With apologies to Mr. Armstrong, sometimes people also predict too much for the next ten. Consider these predictions for the year 2028, made in 2018. Are there any that haven’t come true yet but that you think still might in the next two years?
In 2018 a venture firm bet that by 2028 one in ten people in rich countries would spend eight hours a day inside a VR headset. It is 2026. Score the list.
Key concepts
- Form Factor
- The physical shape a technology arrives in, and the habits that shape demands. Most of the 2018 predictions turned on a new one — glasses, earbuds, a retinal display — beating the touchscreen, so grading them means asking whether the shape caught on, not whether the parts got built.
Every work — at a glance
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Kindred's Predictions for 2028 — Kindred Capital (prediction list)
Ten 2018 predictions for 2028 — the phone replaced, cash gone, 75% freelancing, 10% addicted to VR.
+ 5 more works explained inside
What to know
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01
A forecast can be right about the thing and wrong about the clock, and that is the usual failure. Autonomous driving, meat substitutes and cashless payment all arrived — none at the share of daily life the 2018 list gave them by 2028. So 'hasn't happened yet' is a verdict on the timing, and the honest scorecard — forecasters call scoring old calls calibration — needs three columns rather than two: happened, pending, never going to.
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Across subjects
Theme connection
"Are We There Yet?"
Practice — a sample
HISOld predictions are scored as happened, pending or never. Which case MOST undermines that scheme?
- A The Mayan Apocalypse
- B The 2008 collider fears
- C The Y2K bug
- D The 1974 Jupiter Effect
- E The AMOC tipping point
Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.
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