What actually happened was that the U.S.S.R. crumbled under the costs of a costly war in Afghanistan coupled with an extremely inefficient agriculture plus a very expensive arms race with the U.S. and ultimately saw a collapse of the economic and political system that hitherto held sway there. China, on the other hand also underwent a significant transformation, albeit in a totally different way. Today both countries are solidly capitalist (but still very undemocratic) although China continues to pays lip service to communism. But the point is that the prediction turned out to be totally untrue or at least irrelevant. On the other hand, I know of nobody, literally nobody, who foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union, neither people on the right nor those on the left!
I just thought it might be worthwhile to keep track of predictions people make and preserve them for posterity and this is what I want to achieve with this blog. I may not live long enough to know how some of these predictions turned out. As an example, I think I remember having read an Arthur C. Clarke book a long time ago wherein he had predicted that human beings would achieve immortality by 2100 A.D :-). I am pretty sure I cannot test that (unless we achieve this by 2022 when I will be 60 years old).
I had assumed that there would be a site http://www.predictions.com/that would have such a list but I was disappointed to see that as of December 15, 2008 it only had predictions about:
- football prediction
- college football predictions
- pro football picks
- football odds
- psychic reading
- psychic online
- tarot reading
Anyway here is the list of predictions that I will update on an ongoing basis:
- My friend SB, a hedge/mutual fund manager predicted that the U.S. economy will be worse off in 2018 compared to today (2008). This was in response to my observation that the quality of goods and services obtainable in the U.S. today is significantly inferior to what I saw in the late 20th. century. In general, I think the U.S. population feels much poorer compared to ten years ago. And this is something I noticed in 2007 before we had the country going into recession.
- On April 7 2009 Michael Stonebreaker predicted that "in the next decade the database market will shift from elephant one-size fits-all databases to specialized databases". In other words people would be using specialized databases for different types of workloads such as transaction processing, data warehousing, text data oriented applications, scientific applications, streaming applications etc.
Successful Predictions
And here are some predictions that people I know had made in the past that turned out to be true:
- In 1989 my friend Deepak Khemani had made a prediction that I had been extremely dismissive of then but has proved to be remarkably prescient - he said that by the year 2005 software would be the dominant technology. I think he also went on to say that by 2020 it would be the only technology. Incidentally, Khemani is now a Professor of Computer Science at I.I.T. Madras and his web site is http://www.cs.iitm.ernet.in/khemani/ (correct as of December 15, 2008)
- The Bridge World predicted in 1957 that Canasta would not displace bridge in its popularity (but see below under "Failed Predictions")
Failed Predictions
- The Bridge World predicted in 1957 that the new fad called "Television" would not displace bridge in its popularity
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