16 big predictions about 2019, from Trump’s impeachment to the rise of AI

Predictions are hard, especially about the future. But for 2019, Future Perfect is going to try to get better at forecasting all the perfect and less than perfect things that will happen.

We, Dylan and Kelsey, have made 16 specific predictions about what’s going to happen in 2019. The list of outcomes is hardly exhaustive, but it covers everything from US politics to the Chinese economy to progress in artificial intelligence.

We have put estimated probabilities on each outcome, as a signal of how confident we are in each forecast and so you can hold us to account accordingly if we get them wrong. And next year, we’ll hold ourselves to account too, looking back and confirming which we got right, which we got wrong, and what we learned from the experience.

These are merely our personal predictions. We don’t speak for anyone else at Vox, or even for each other (Kelsey’s predictions are hers, Dylan’s predictions are his). But this isn’t just an idle exercise. We think it’s really important to get better at predicting the future, and the best way to get better, as with any skill, is to practice.

It would be nice to be able to predict the future. It would’ve been helpful if the Bush administration had foreseen a lengthy, bloody quagmire after invading Iraq; if regulators and bankers foresaw that over-leveraged investments in mortgage securities would lead to a recession; if governments saw the 1919 Spanish flu coming while there was still time to prepare.

This isn’t just an idle thought; we can get better at forecasting! That’s a major finding of Philip Tetlock, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who holds forecasting tournaments to learn how humans can better predict the future.

As Zack Beauchamp explains in a Vox piece on Tetlock’s work, Tetlock and his collaborators have run studies involving tens of thousands of participants and have discovered that prediction follows a power law distribution. That is, most people are pretty bad at it, but a few (Tetlock, in a Gladwellian twist, calls them “superforecasters”) appear to be systematically better than most at predicting world events. Tetlock even found that superforecasters — smart, well-informed, but basically normal people with no special information — outperformed CIA analysts by about 30 percent in forecasting world events.

So what do they do differently? Tetlock and others are still trying to figure that out but have a few suggestive conclusions so far. Superforecasters change their minds a lot. They’re open to being wrong. They’re comfortable giving numerical probabilities, which makes their assumptions more explicit and easier to test.

But most of all, they practice! They make lots of predictions, see where they went wrong, learn from their missed calls, and do better going forward. And a number of other writers — like Scott Alexander, Rodney Brooks, the Financial Times staff, Zachary Jacobi — have been practicing for the past few years too, making predictions and then looking back to see how they did, as a kind of annual tradition we’ve decided to emulate. If you want to try your hand, the site Metaculus is a good place, and the successor company to Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project also runs competitions.

So, without further ado, here’s what Kelsey and Dylan think will happen, and will not happen, in 2019.

The United States

Donald Trump will still be in office (90 percent)

Why would Trump leave office by the end of this year? He could resign, but I highly doubt even the most damning report from special counsel Robert Mueller could lead him to something so ego-shattering. The odds strike me as extremely low. Same with the odds of his impeachment, which would require 20 Republican senators to vote for his removal. And same for 25th Amendment removal, which requires supermajorities in Congress to uphold. That leaves death, and at the risk of being super morbid, the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables suggest a 2 to 3 percent annual risk of death for men Trump’s age. Adding up each of these individual risks, I get something like 10 percent odds of him leaving office. So I put 90 percent odds on him staying put. —DM

No Democratic presidential candidate will become a clear frontrunner in the political prediction markets at any point in 2019 (60 percent)

My standard here is PredictWise, a website that collates odds from bookies and prediction markets to estimate the likelihood that bettors — people putting down actual money predicting the 2020 primaries — assign to various candidates. This prediction will hold up if no Democrat’s odds of winning the nomination break 50 percent at any point during 2019.

Someone in the crowded Democratic field might truly break out and start trouncing everybody. In 2003, Howard Dean’s star rose so much that the Iowa Electronic Markets started giving him a greater than 50 percent chance of winning the nomination. But that seems unusual. Bob Dole didn’t crack 50 percent until pretty late in the 1996 cycle, which he dominated to a far greater degree than I expect anyone to in 2020. No Republican in 2007 came close. —DM

The US will not enter a recession (80 percent)

From 1945 to the present, there have been 12 recessions — one every six years or so, on average. So if I had no information at all about the current year, I’d expect about a one-in-six, or approximately 17 percent, chance that one will start this year. I can adjust my expectations from there by thinking about whether this year looks more likely than typical to be the start of a recession. There are some reasons to suspect it does. It’s been a while since the last recession, which officially ended in 2009. And now there are trade wars and tariffs making the markets nervous. So I think I lean toward saying a recession is a little likelier this year — maybe a 20 percent chance. —KP

Congress will not authorize funding for a full-length border wall (95 percent)

I say “full-length” because, as my colleague Dara Lind would hasten to remind me, we already have fences and barriers of various kinds on certain stretches of the US-Mexico border. I’m not confident that Congress will authorize or fund no additional barrier construction this year. House Democrats might buckle and throw over a few billion to reopen the government or achieve some other priority. But I’m very confident they won’t authorize the wall we all remember Trump touting in the 2016 campaign: continuous barriers stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. —DM

US homicides will decline (80 percent)

The decline in crime rates in the US since the 1990s has been incredibly pronounced. Between 1993 and 2017, violent crime fell by 49 percent, according to data from the FBI. (If you instead poll Americans on whether they were victims of a crime, which sometimes gets different results than looking at arrest rates, violent crime looks to have fallen by 73 percent.) Violent crime rates declined almost every individual year, except 2004-2006 and 2014-2016. We don’t know all of the causes of the fall in crime (lead poisoning likely has something to do with it), but I expect the trend to continue. —KP

The world

The United Kingdom will leave the European Union (80 percent)

The things that would have to happen for the UK to backtrack on Brexit before its planned departure from the EU on March 29 seem, on their own, quite unlikely to me, and less likely when put together. Option 1 is that Theresa May calls a new referendum (PredictIt odds: 22 percent) and then “Remain” wins, which polling suggests is possible, though the margins are close. Option 2 is that the Conservatives’ Democratic Unionist Party partners break from the coalition, forcing a new election (PredictIt: 14 percent), Jeremy Corbyn and Labour win (it’s tight), and they either cancel Brexit unilaterally or call a new referendum. Corbyn publicly pretended to support Remain during the referendum, but I think it’s pretty obvious he wants to leave the EU, and in any case, he’ll never go that far out on a limb to prevent Brexit from happening. —DM

Narendra Modi will continue as Indian prime minister after the 2019 elections (60 percent)

My prior here is very weak (I don’t know a ton about Indian politics) and based almost entirely on Modi and his National Democratic Alliance’s polling lead over Rahul Gandhi and the United Progressive Alliance. But the party just lost ground in state elections, which led me to increase my estimate of the probability that Gandhi and the UPA will recover. There’s a real chance NDA loses its majority and has to lead a minority government, but I suspect Modi would hang on as PM in that case. —DM

Neither India nor China will enter a recession (70 percent)

My prior here is a bit stronger. One of the lessons I took from the Great Recession is that developing economies are remarkably resilient even in the face of a massive global downturn. Neither China nor India ever fell into recession in 2008-2010; indeed, I have struggled to identify the last time either of them was in recession, as it appears to have never happened in the 21st century. As Vanguard likes to remind me in emails about my IRA, past performance is no guarantee of future success, but the safest prediction here is that both economies will stay the course. —DM

Malaria deaths will decrease (80 percent)

Speaking of past performance, here’s a remarkable fact: The World Health Organization estimates that the number and rate of malaria deaths fell from 2010 to 2011, from 2011 to 2012, and so on up until 2017. Toward the end of this year, WHO will release its 2019 Malaria Report, which should give us the death numbers for 2018, so we can see if the decline continued.

But the rate of improvement appears to be slowing somewhat, and the 2017 death toll was some 435,000 people, according to the report. An increase in deaths in Venezuela amid its economic collapse hurt progress in 2017, and given that the situation there if anything deteriorated in 2018, there’s still a chance the trend will reverse. —DM

No additional countries will adopt a universal basic income (90 percent)

I say “additional” because Iran arguably has an unconditional basic income program in the form of an oil revenue dividend. Alaska, though obviously not a country, arguably does too, through its oil dividend. Here I’m defining “basic income” as an unconditional payment to all adult citizens, not subject to any work requirements, means-testing, or other restriction. The best chance basic income advocates had until last year was India, where chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian championed the idea. But Subramanian has left office since, and other countries that seem like natural places to try a basic income (like oil-rich Angola or Nigeria) don’t show any signs of adopting the policy either. —DM

Animal welfare

More animals will be killed for US human consumption in 2019 than in 2018 (60 percent)

In 2016, more than 9 billion animals were killed for food in the US. Meat consumption per capita has stayed steady or arguably fallen, but as the population is increasing, overall meat consumption has been rising. Plant-based foods might change this someday, but for now the biggest factor that drives meat consumption is actually the economy — people buy more meat when they’re doing better financially. I expect that if we see a strong economy for another year, more animals will be killed for food. —KP

Impossible Burger meat will be sold in at least one national grocery chain (95 percent)

The spread of plant-based meat alternatives was one of the big stories of 2018, and it’s a trend that looks like it’ll keep gaining momentum in 2019. The Impossible Burger, a plant-based burger famous for tasting more like slaughtered meat, is currently available only in restaurants, but the startup dramatically expanded production last year with a new Oakland facility projected to eventually produce 1 million pounds of plant-based meat a month. Last fall, it announced that the burger would hit grocery stores in 2019. Nothing is a sure thing until it’s on the shelves, but I think the company is very likely to hit its target. —KP

Technology

Fully autonomous self-driving cars will not be commercially available as taxis or for sale (90 percent)

Waymo, the division of Google’s parent company Alphabet that works on self-driving cars, is the leader of the race to get them on the roads. But Waymo isn’t that close. The company announced in the fall of 2018 that it would have fully autonomous self-driving cars — cars that don’t need a human driver or guide at all — offering rides, like Uber and Lyft, on the streets in Arizona by the end of the year.

It made that target (though there were still humans in the cars for nearly all rides), but it doesn’t look like a commercially competitive program. Despite all the effort and energy companies with top talent and deep pockets have poured into self-driving cars, the technology just isn’t really there yet. That could change next year, but I think there’s still enough ground to close before a real commercial product that I don’t expect it all to happen in one year. —KP

DeepMind will release an AlphaZero update, or new app, capable of beating humans and existing computer programs at a task in a new domain (50 percent)

DeepMind, the AI startup acquired by Google five years ago, has turned out some impressive work, surpassing the best humans and best computers at Go and Chess with AlphaZero and taking the lead in the field of protein folding with AlphaFold. But 2018 didn’t see as many impressive releases from DeepMind as the previous few years. If we don’t see anything from DeepMind this year, it’d suggest that new AI innovations are harder to capitalize on than many enthusiasts predicted. I think a big 2019 result is about as likely as not. —KP

The environment

Average world temperatures will increase relative to 2018 (60 percent)

My intuitions about questions like these are often surprisingly off. I intuitively consider the question, Is this trending upward or downward? But that’s far from the only thing that matters when predicting whether this year’s temperatures will be higher than last year’s. It’s also important to have a sense of how noisy the trend is. I looked at this data from NASA to see how I would have done making this prediction every year from 2002 to the present. I’d have been right 10 times and wrong six times.

My understanding is that if you have a clear understanding of El Niño and La Niña, and how they affect global temperature patterns, you can do better than that — but I don’t and I can’t. I give it a 60 percent chance that this year will be warmer than 2018. I’m much more confident that it’ll be among the five warmest years on record — all of the past few years have been. — KP

Global carbon emissions will increase (80 percent)

I used the same procedure to answer this question as the previous one: I looked up the trends in global carbon emissions, and checked how often I’d be right if I predicted an increase in emissions. This tactic is called reference class forecasting, and you’re only supposed to fall back on it if you don’t know any better. But as I’ve read analysis of the reasons emissions increased in 2017 and 2018 after remaining flat in 2014-2016, it’s become clear to me I don’t really know any better. I’d need a clear model of demand in developing economies and projected new energy investments in 2019 to get this right. Since I don’t have that, I’m predicting global carbon emissions are as likely to increase as they were in any given year of the 21st century. —KP

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