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
Rushkoff: Gen Z will abandon the dissatisfaction of living like infomercials
“I feel like there's growing dissatisfaction among them for this, you know, influencer culture, you know, that, that, that, that living your life as some sort of an infomercial is not satisfying and that they're going to move on.”
Danny Meyer: Restaurant prices will rise as tipped wages disappear
“And as cities, states, and now the entire country move to a higher minimum wage, and then perhaps one day, one wage for everybody, as opposed to a second-tier For tipped employees, which I believe is not gonna last forever. Can't. You're gonna start to see res…”
Ridley: Humanity will win battles against most pathogens through ingenuity
“Yes, I think on the whole, we will win our battles against most pathogens, because we have so much possibility of ingenuity now, of human ingenuity to help us defeat them.”
Godin: Any Book Written for 'Everybody' Is Guaranteed to Fail
“So that book is going to fail. I happily put that in writing right this minute. That book is going to fail.”
Eyal: Facebook will not block feed-eradicating browser extensions
“I think the blowback would be so severe if they tried to do something about it that I can't see that on their radar.”
Mullainathan: Academic psychology will inevitably pivot toward applied self-help
“I think we're going to see a revolution both in behavioral science as a research discipline. So for example, here's a telltale sign. Psychologists don't work on self-help. That doesn't make any sense. There's a whole ocean of people who in good faith want to i…”
McGonigal: Future of work will resemble Fortnite more than traditional offices
“You know, we've every reason to think that the future of work will be, you know, more like Fortnite than the kind of office jobs that we have today.”
Chamath: Going long on high-growth companies is the decade's winning playbook
“Basically my solution is you've got to be long growth, higher growth, the better in the areas that matter for people. And I think that, you know, in 10 years from now, that'll be a playbook that really works.”
Chamath: Decarbonization will destroy the value of historical architecture
“I think that architecture will unfortunately have a lot less value in the future because of climate change.”
Chamath predicts workers will ultimately want to return to physical offices
“It's partially real, and I think the biggest implication is belongingness, community, feeling part of a group. And so, I think when we can go back to the office, we'll want to.”
McLean: Viable renewables will push oil into secular decline and trigger bankruptcies
“And it may bounce up and down, but it goes into secular decline. And then that means bankruptcies of fossil fuel companies, and I don't think we're being thoughtful about then what those companies obligations are for cleanup afterwards.”
McLean: Shifting to renewables will dramatically upend global geopolitics
“I have no idea other than that it's going to upend everything. If a nation's wealth and standing in the world is no longer dictated by geology, but rather by the innovation of its people, and which is renewables, how does that change geopolitics? I mean, drama…”
Ackman: Pandemic will force corporate America away from aggressive leverage
“I do think this is a depression era moment in the sense, psychologically, the same way that the generation of people that went through the depression thought very different about, differently about financial leverage, you know, than the generations that came a…”
Calacanis predicts Masayoshi Son will deliver very good returns for LPs
“Masayoshi-san is the last person in, and I think he'll ultimately wind up looking smart, because he picked some good companies, and I think he'll ultimately wind up having a very good return for his LPs”
Calacanis: No-code tools will enable 20% of people to build products
“I think we're going to see the pool of people who can build a product go from like, call it low single digits, four or five percent of the country. Or even the world, young people starting companies, old people starting companies, I think it's going to grow to…”
Srinivasan: COVID-19 Total Hospitalizations and Deaths Will Exceed Ebola Due to Scale
“It's nowhere near as lethal as Ebola, but its scale is likely to be much higher than Ebola.
And so the total number of people hospitalized or killed by it may be much larger.”
Stephenson: Hydrogen will probably succeed electric vehicles as next propulsion era
“The electrics will probably be with us for quite a while until the next probably hydrogen step comes in. And I see that as one day being probably the successor to the electric market or the electric age that we're going through now.”
Frank Stephenson: Full autonomy requires 100% intelligent vehicle adoption
“Until we can get a hundred percent of the cars working on the same level, I don't think we're going to see it.”
Frank Stephenson predicts full autonomy will arrive in aviation before ground transit
“I don't see a full system of autonomous driving cars working in the near future. It'll happen in the sky, I think, before it will happen on, on the ground.”
Scott Adams Predicts Virtual Reality Education Will Obsolete Traditional Classrooms
“At some point, watching either a two D or even a virtual reality lesson will be so superior to anything you could do in a classroom that the classroom just won't make sense anymore.”
Howey predicts self-driving robotaxis will reduce car ownership to 10%
“And car ownership is going to become a thing that only a minority of humans even own a car because of the way they'll even they'll never be parked really though because every car that can drive itself is a robot, basically, that can go earn money by running Ub…”
Haidt Predicts Overprotective Parenting Culture Will Reverse as Mental Health Data Spreads
“And that's why I'm actually optimistic that this is going to change, because as I said, two years ago, we didn't know the suicide stats. We didn't know the terrible things that are happening. It's only in the last year or two that it's really become public kno…”
Dethmer: Future organizations will be motivated by intrinsic reward, play, and love
“The organizations, the teams of the future, they're motivated by intrinsic reward, play and love.”
Gross: Core Google will fail to reinvent ads due to innovator's dilemma
“So, so the core Google unit, I think, will not be able to reinvent kind of the next ad model because of traditional innovators dilemma”
Scott Page: China's economic growth will slow without massive innovation
“The same is true of China, right? So if you do a linear projection of China, You know, five years ago, you'd have said, oh my gosh, you know, by 2040, China's economy is going to be just enormous, but the reality is growth's going to fall off, because what the…”
Wolfe: Users will soon control ambient technology using neural micro-gesture wristbands
“What that implies is that you will wear something akin to a bracelet or a wristwatch, and you will be able to gesture like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice to flick your fingers to turn on the lights, to swipe like you would swipe in three dimensional, three Rai…”
Wolfe: Computational generative design will make products look biological within a decade
“I believe that within a decade, you will see Architectural structures. You will see product design. You will see components inside of vehicles and industrial products that look way more biological because they were designed, interestingly, by a computer that a…”
Lütke: Human-assisting technology will have significantly more impact than human replacement
“And so I think humans assisted by technology are probably the thing that we should be going for instead of trying to replace people so much. And I think we will see that effect significantly more.”
Future job growth will stem from digital micro-businesses, not Big Tech
“And I think those are where the jobs of the future are going to come from. They're not going to come from A Facebook”
Cowen: Computers will not replace sales, marketing, or management anytime soon
“So there's always room for sales, for marketing, for management, including in the distant future. Computers will not be doing that for us anytime soon.”
Cowen: Regional economic divergence rather than convergence will continue
“I think countries and also regions within countries we won't see so much convergence. We'll see a lot of divergence. So it used to be in America, in the post-war era, America's poorer cities were essentially catching up to the wealthier cities. But nowadays, s…”
Cowen: Most newspapers will become ventures owned or supported by the wealthy
“I don't think you can fund most papers by ads. I think they will end up as ventures owned or supported by the very wealthy.”
Cowen: Local reporting will shift to blogs and expose scandals
“There'll be a lot of local reporting on blogs or blog-like entities, and if you want to find it will be there. So if you uncover a scandal about some local official, the world will find out.”
Cowen: The US is returning to 19th-century polarization and dynamism
“Maybe in some ways we're going back to the America of the late 19th century. With a polarized politics screwy media you know, in some ways, higher levels of violence, and more dynamism, too.”
Cowen: AI will soon outmatch human consumer decision-making
“Artificial intelligence will tell you what to buy and how to buy it, and at what price. People who think they can beat the algorithms will make a lot more mistakes, so know when you should defer.”
MacAskill: 21st-century human activity could cause civilizational collapse or extinction
“There's very, very many ways in which the activities that we, that humanity will likely do over the 21st century could lead to global catastrophe, civilizational collapse, or even extinction.”
Oakley: Predatory bad actors will adapt with less detectable workplace misconduct
“But they're really, really intelligent people, and so it will find other ways to manifest itself, and what I'm interested to see is how, how will that manifest? Because it won't manifest in a way that's as easily detectable as what's going on now”
External systems will soon know individuals better than their spouses
“Radical transparency is coming at you fast anyway. Because we're now living in a world where the data that you leave about yourself all over the place is meaning that people will, you know, strangers, systems, can now examine you and know you better than peopl…”
People will learn to trap autonomous vehicles with simple visual tricks
“Someone is going to find a way of hacking that driverless car. Within seconds. By which I mean, you know, they'll work out that by putting a particular pattern of balloons on the road, the driverless car basically starts just going around in ridiculous circles…”
Domingos: Human Common Sense Will Prevent AI From Quickly Replacing Workers
“I think as time goes forward, you know, the machine learning will get better using a broad spectrum of information. I think for a long time, there will still be Types of common sense knowledge that people have. So I don't think for most things you know, the hu…”
Domingos: Autonomous Cars Could Compete in the Indy 500 Within Years
“Well, I think we could at this point actually, and it might actually win. I think in the past, the technology wasn't ready. And then once the technology is ready that people have to let it happen, right? So the Indy 500 would have to let a self-driving car com…”
Baszucki: Photorealistic multiplayer gaming will rival the shift to color TV
“So I do think there's going to be a future world Where we have all the aspects of the multiplayer gaming interesting, but it feels like that. And I think that's going to be pretty mind blowing. It's going to be a little bit like going from black and white to c…”
Pincus: Vibe coding will let builders instantiate ideas with near-zero capital
“I think that the future state of all this is that we all get to live in some way like Elon. The ultimate vibe coding is life of the speed of play, and it's that you get to have an idea and bring it to life in some way for almost no capital. And get to instanti…”
Harik: Near-term robotics progress will center on purpose-built machines, not humanoids
“But I think in the near term, I think it's more purpose-built robots that are using AI to try to automate a certain task and make effectively the outcomes more efficient accordingly.”
Teskey: AI robotics adoption will happen slower but impact more than expected
“The role that robotics can play in so many production functions and industrial functions around the world. Now that that robotics can be reinforced by computers that can think and run a million simulations in real time, like everything what's, what's the term?…”
Tenev: Generative AI tools will increase creative output 100x to 1,000x
“So you can imagine to create really high quality Advertising collateral would have taken a lot of, like, deep work over a long period of time by great artists, but if you can empower those artists with the best tools, 11 Labs, Mid Journey, Runway, you know, th…”