The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 295 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 32 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Robotics will make physical goods cheap, shifting status-seeking entirely digital
“With robots, the physical world should get super cheap. Eventually. And then all status seeking goes to the optional digital world.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Web3 services rivaling US tech giants will emerge in India
“I think you're going to see a whole parallel set of services arise that are the peers of the American tech companies, but in web three in India over the next 10 years, I think it's going to be one of the least anticipated things that's going to happen”
Balaji Srinivasan: Trump de-platforming leads to national stacks and neutral protocols
“So what happens is that the platform of Trump has set off a cascade of things that will lead to National stacks and neutral protocols.”
Balaji Srinivasan: India will become a tech and media superpower
“This is why I think if China becomes, has become a tech and manufacturing superpower, I think India becomes a tech and media superpower.”
McChrystal: The Next War May Be Won Before People Realize It Began
“And in fact, the next war may well be won or lost before people actually realize it's on. Maybe so fast that that's occurred.”
McChrystal: Future warfare will feature countless uncoordinated adversaries
“We can have countless opponents, and they don't all have to be coordinated. They just have to share a general common intent to do us harm, which makes them more difficult because you have to defeat each one, not, you can't defeat them as a network, and that's …”
Rushkoff: Deepfakes will force public to rely on trusted journalists and publications
“The thing that's going to happen, I guess, is as deep fakes and other, other kinds of media come out that make it really impossible to distinguish between what is being said and what is not. We're going to, again, just as we did before any video existed, We're…”
Isaacson: Commercialized gene enhancements will encode societal inequalities into human biology
“What about allowing rich people to buy better memory for their kids, but since this technology is not going to be free, it'll encode the inequalities of our society into our species.”
Immelt: Next-generation leaders must maintain manufacturing jobs where they sell
“If I sell in the US, I better have a certain amount of jobs in the US. If I sell in Germany, same thing. If I sell in China, same thing. And my generation didn't have to think that way, but the next generation is going to have to think that way.”
Dr. Z: Humans will travel to Mars within his lifetime
“I think we will go to Mars with humans in my lifetime, for sure.”
Zurbuchen: Space and asteroid mining will happen within our lifetime
“No, I think this is our lifetime kind of issue, the mining calling.”
Ridley: The first half of the 21st century will center around biotechnology
“By the way, the message of my argument that we had transport innovations in the 20th century, and then in the first half of the 20th century, and communications innovations in the second half, is that the first half of the 21st century may not be all about com…”
McGonigal: Humans will broadcast subconscious thoughts and feelings within 10 years
“I think it's fair to say in like 10 years, we're all going to be broadcasting subconscious or like pre-conscious thoughts and feelings in ways that we can't do it today.”
Mullenweg: Open source can power 80% to 85% of the web
“And I believe we have the ability to create a national monopoly of 80, 85% of the world's websites running on open source.”
Chamath predicts markets will financialize and fractionalize ownership of everything
“So we're going to financialize everything.
And we're going to fractionalize ownership of probably everything.”
Chamath: US will spend tens of trillions on recovery within a decade
“Whether you call it the Green New Deal on the left or the infrastructure bill on the right, we are going to spend in the next decade tens of trillions of dollars to try to dig ourselves out of this unemployment and GDP hole that has been exacerbated by the cor…”
Chamath Palihapitiya predicts the world's first trillionaire will be in climate change
“The world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change.”
McLean: Google and Facebook's models will be impaired if journalism dies
“Google and Facebook, right? They're siphoning up most of the advertising dollars that used to go to journalism, and yet Google and Facebook, it will deeply impair their business models if journalism ceases to function, right?”
Berkshire Hathaway's Next Leaders Will Aggressively Push Operating Margins and Efficiency
“It appears to us the next generation is going to be much more focused on, you know, extracting the most from the businesses Berkshire owns.”
Calacanis: US rules will let non-accredited gig workers invest in startups
“We're going to see some regulation in the United States where people are going to be able to be sophisticated investors, In other words, maybe they don't have the accreditation benchmark of whatever it is, a 152 100,000 a year in revenue of, in you know, incom…”
China will build a 'Great Biowall' for continuous pathogen surveillance
“There's a great wall of China, the great firewall, and I think we're going to see the great By the wall of China, okay, where, you know, they'll be sequencing and testing the heck out of everybody, scanning the country constantly to see, okay, is a virus risin…”
International travel will require real-time biological screening before boarding
“Now that's going to go to real time, meaning, you know, within a day or an hour before you get on the flight, you know, imagine a next generation TSA that was actually competent, you know, in, in, in countries around the world, which Needs your biological info…”
Diagnostic and imaging companies will receive defense-level funding post-pandemic
“This is going to be a gigantic shot in the arm for every diagnostic company in the world, every medical imaging company, all of those are about to get, like, defense budget level spending.”
Balaji: Many hardware companies will die from Chinese supply chain disruptions
“Hardware companies are just going to die, many of them, because they just can't get the parts from Chinese warehouses.”
Maples: Software-defined networks will replace traditional corporate hierarchies across every sector
“Every sector of the economy Is going to get reimagined from a traditional hierarchical corporation to a software defined network that has machine platform and crowd intelligence.”
Howey: Tesla will not win the autonomous vehicle race
“It's always someone you don't expect. It's never the first mover. It won't be, you know, Tesla.”
Haidt: Call-out culture and self-censorship will severely stunt Gen Z creativity
“And this means we have, we might have a generation that's afraid of, afraid to take risks, afraid to
Play with ideas afraid to challenge dominant ideas.
it's gonna lead to a lot more conformity and a lot more, a lot less creativity.”
Gross: Google will always beat Apple in services, but lose in hardware
“And I think this will always be the case. They will try to always fix this, but it will always be the case that Google will be amazing at services because ads requires a service business model, and Apple will be amazing at kind of user experience and hardware.…”
Gross: YouTube's algorithm will produce many more leaders like Jordan Peterson
“Jordan Peterson is, you can imagine the world basically has, YouTube is a massive fuzzer where people are trying every possible permutation in terms of communication style, oration, content language, and what emerges is the best and the most addictive and the …”
Marks: The ongoing U.S. recovery will become the longest in history
“So my guess is that this recovery will set a record for the longest recovery in history. Because of the slowness and the absence of excesses.”
Marks: AI developers will thrive while displaced workers face dystopian hardship
“The people who can develop the personless bookstore or the robot will be in great demand, and the people who can create artificial intelligence will be in great demand and very valuable, and they'll all live in a small community just south of San Francisco. An…”
Adam Robinson: Quantum Computing Will Crack Any Encryption in Minutes
“Anything that's encrypted with quantum computing, you'll be able to crack that, whatever the encryption is, in, I don't know, seconds or minutes.”
Tech giants will be disrupted by paradigm shifts, not direct competitors
“Their sort of upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches onto the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for, you know, the powers that be to compete.”
The traditional TV bundle will inevitably devolve into an expensive sports-only package
“The long run for TV, for example, the long run is likely that there's
The traditional bundle becomes basically all about sports because sports is better live.
Sports is, is,
Is advertising driven.
And so the business model on that side is going to be differen…”
Streaming will eventually cost consumers exactly as much as their old cable bundles
“What's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today.
There should be paying different people.
And I think that that's going to be the case.
This idea that there's going to be this, yo…”
The subscription economy will grow through niche breadth, avoiding subscriber fatigue
“People are like, oh, Yeah. How many subscription sites can there be? Like, not everyone can have, like, 50 subscriptions. And no, that's not the outcome. The outcome is breadth. There's gonna be so many niches, and there's so many people out there that, that t…”
Cowen: Automation will widen income inequality while boosting consumption for the poor
“So the world will be a lot more productive because of automation and smart software, and this will give us a lot of consumer goods for free. So we'll have this super sharp divide between the rich and the poor in terms of income, but in terms of actual consumpt…”
Cowen: Autonomous vehicles could worsen road traffic congestion via errand trips
“Self-driving cars could make the problem worse, you know, because you'll send out your car or your vehicle on all kinds of errands. Oh, go to Whole Foods and pick me up some smoked salmon. I'm hungry. And there may be fewer people on the road, but the people t…”
Cowen: Millennials face a high risk of impoverished retirements
“It's much harder for millennials to save, and I fear they will have impoverished retirements. Especially since the fiscal budget on the federal side is problematic as well.”
Cowen: Bitcoin is a legitimate, enduring asset and not a bubble
“I think it's a perfectly legitimate asset that will endure and have a high value. I'm not sure its value is going to go up any at this point but it's for real, and it's not a bubble.”
Dalio: Coders riding algorithms will displace workers and cause economic bifurcation
“There are going to be people who are riding the algorithms that will replace the people who are doing jobs. And so there's going to be a bifurcation, and I think that learning how to code is like learning how to read and write for the next generation”
Sutherland: Pedestrians will exploit driverless cars because they always yield without retaliating
“Now, if we take this in in the driverless car situation, we'll know that when we want to cross the road, we just walk out in front of a driverless car, because it's always going to stop. Now, this may cause the passengers in the driverless car to lurch around …”
Domingos: Computers Will Soon Discover and Store Most Knowledge on Earth
“So in the not too distant future, the vast majority of the knowledge on earth
Will be discovered and will be stored in computers.”
Domingos: Researchers Can Develop a Single Universal Master Algorithm for ML
“But what I and others believe is that we can Develop a true master algorithm, meaning an algorithm that is able to solve all the different kinds of learning problems that these different algorithms can.”
Domingos: Commercial Airplane Cockpits Will Transition from Two Pilots to Zero
“We already have two people in the cockpit instead of three, and then we'll have one and eventually we'll have zero.”
Domingos: Most Cars Will Be Self-Driving Between 2026 and 2031
“But I, my guess is that, you know, five years from now, there will be a lot of self-driving cars around and, you know, maybe 10 years from now, 15, Most cars will be self-driving.”
Domingos: Incremental Autonomy Wins Short Term, But Full Autonomy Prevails Long Term
“So, but I think that in the short term the approach of the Teslas and the Toyotas and whatnot will be the prevalent one. I think in the longer run, it will be the Google approach that prevails, right?”
Dixon: Virtual reality will be the next computing wave after mobile
“I think it will be, like, when we look back on the history of computing, it will be, the key milestones will be, I mean, I'm, this is, I'm at the extreme end of excitement here, but there'll be, you know, the PC, the Macintosh, or something like this, then the…”