Predictions
A registry of falsifiable claims, each with a resolution criterion a stranger
could adjudicate and a resolve-by date. Claims are never deleted or renamed —
only their status changes. Anchors (/predictions/#<id>)
are stable and safe to link. Current entries derive from
The Jagged Frontier,
whose essays link back to each claim.
open (20)
- Resolves
- by 2028-01-31
- Criteria
- SteamDB or equivalent public release counts for calendar year 2027, checked January 2028.
games
markets
- Resolves
- by 2028-12-31
- Criteria
- Technical reports and credible third-party analyses of major 2026–2028 frontier releases attribute the main gains to post-training or inference-time methods; no release achieves a generational jump credited chiefly to parameter scaling. Disputed attribution resolves to ambiguous.
scaling
capabilities
- Resolves
- by 2028-12-31
- Criteria
- Platform feature documentation or press releases of the three largest music-streaming services by subscribers (e.g. Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple/Amazon Music) document a user-facing AI-content label or verified-human filter in production.
Revisions
- 2026-06-14 — Supporting regulatory context noted; status unchanged. (The EU Commission's final Code of Practice on marking and labelling AI-generated content (June 10 2026), operationalizing AI Act Article 50 transparency obligations from August 2 2026, creates a regulatory tailwind toward content labelling across generative-AI providers in the EU. It does not establish the music-streaming-specific feature this claim requires (a user-facing label or verified-human filter on the three largest services), so the criterion remains unmet — but the direction of travel supports it.)
culture
music
- Resolves
- by 2028-12-31
- Criteria
- Platform disclosure or credible third-party analysis (publishing-industry research) showing AI-generated titles above 50% of new releases in at least one major serialized genre-fiction category.
culture
publishing
- Resolves
- by 2028-12-31
- Criteria
- DORA annual reports and comparable telemetry (Faros-class, 10k+ developers) through 2028 show individual task/PR throughput gains substantially exceeding organization-level delivery-performance gains. If the gap closes (org-level gains comparable to individual gains), resolves incorrect.
Revisions
- 2026-06-14 — Supporting evidence noted; status unchanged. (Anthropic's "When AI builds itself" (Favaro & Clark, June 4 2026) states Claude wrote more than 80% of code merged into Anthropic's production systems, while self-reported productivity gains remain 20-40% (per the Redwood Research calibration). A high throughput/merge share alongside far smaller realized productivity gains is exactly the individual-vs-organization wedge this claim tracks — but it is one firm's internal figure, not DORA-class telemetry, so it informs rather than resolves.)
software
productivity
- Resolves
- by 2028-12-31
- Criteria
- Retraction Watch database or Crossref retraction counts: calendar-year 2028 total at least 1.5× the 2024 total, or equivalent growth in documented paper-mill detections.
science
publishing
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- As of 2030-12-31: documented, reproducible failures of frontier models on tasks most adults find trivial still exist, AND no consensus in credible expert surveys (majority of surveyed AI researchers) that human-level generality was reached. Both conditions required for resolved-correct.
Revisions
- 2026-06-13 — Supporting evidence noted; status unchanged. (DeepMind's From AGI to ASI (Genewein et al., 2026) independently adopts the jagged framing, stating that capability profiles of concrete systems "may well be jagged w.r.t. human-level intelligence" and that AI progress "may equally be jagged and non-uniform" (Remark III, citing Morris et al. 2026). A heavyweight establishment source endorsing the conceptual frame, though it does not settle the 2030 condition.)
agi
capabilities
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- Absence of any case widely credited in mainstream cultural criticism where an autonomous AI optimization loop originated a new mass-culture genre or form. A disputed case resolves to ambiguous.
culture
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- Award nomination records and platform annual top-10 lists through 2030. "Predominantly AI-generated" means AI generated the majority of footage and performances, per credits or credible reporting.
culture
film
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- Requires a commercial release (paid or ad-supported, not a research preview), technical reporting confirming a frame-generation architecture without a conventional engine, and documented persistent rule-governed state across sessions totalling 10+ hours.
games
world-models
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- US Copyright Office policy and controlling court decisions as of 2030-12-31 still deny copyright to works with no human creative contribution. A statutory change or controlling precedent granting such copyright resolves the claim incorrect.
law
games
culture
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- FAA/EASA certification guidance and the documented development process of any certified system through 2030. A certified flight-control system whose code was AI-generated without human-auditable traceability resolves the claim incorrect.
software
safety-critical
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- Industry implementation surveys (Panorama ERP report or successor): reported overrun and failure rates for large ERP implementations through 2030 show no step-change improvement versus 2020–2024 baselines.
software
enterprise
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- Count problems open for at least 10 years, resolved with substantive AI involvement, with a machine-verified (e.g. Lean) proof — per the Erdős problems database, formal-proof repositories, and credible mathematical reporting. Threshold: 50 by 2030-12-31.
science
math
- Resolves
- by 2030-12-31
- Criteria
- No case through 2030 where credible mathematicians attribute both the choice of problem and its resolution to an autonomous system. Disputed cases resolve to ambiguous.
Revisions
- 2026-06-13 — Supporting evidence noted; status unchanged. (DeepMind's From AGI to ASI (Genewein et al., 2026) classifies AI achievements to date — Move 37, automated theorem proving, AlphaFold — as exploratory creativity within human-provided conceptual spaces (Boden levels 1-2), and frames transformative creativity and the autonomous origination of significant problems as the unmet hallmark of ASI. Consistent with this claim that problem-selection stays human through 2030; conceptual support, not resolution.)
science
math
- Resolves
- by 2031-06-30
- Criteria
- BLS Occupational Employment Statistics for the "Software Developers" category: 2030 headcount no more than 20% below the 2025 figure. Resolution mid-2031 to allow for data publication lag.
software
labor
- Resolves
- by 2031-06-30
- Criteria
- Standard industry analyses (BIO/Citeline/FDA-based) of programs concluding by 2030: median first-in-human-to-approval time > 6 years AND overall likelihood of approval from Phase 1 < 25%. Resolution mid-2031 for data lag. Both conditions required for resolved-correct.
science
biology
medicine
- Resolves
- by 2032-12-31
- Criteria
- "Predominantly AI-generated" means design, code, and content majority-generated autonomously, per credits or credible reporting. Checked against Metacritic score (≥ 85) and sales data (≥ 2 million units). Any single qualifying title resolves the claim incorrect.
games
- Resolves
- by 2035-12-31
- Criteria
- Prize records: no top-tier literary award given to a work publicly known at the time of the award to be predominantly AI-authored.
culture
literature
- Resolves
- by 2035-12-31
- Criteria
- No experimentally confirmed beyond-Standard-Model (or comparable fundamental) theory whose origination is credibly attributed to an AI system, as of 2035-12-31.
Revisions
- 2026-06-13 — Supporting evidence noted; status unchanged. (DeepMind's From AGI to ASI (Genewein et al., 2026) gives a mechanism for this expectation: the abstraction barrier and embodied bottleneck argue models trained on human data lack a demonstrated way to discover novel conceptual primitives, and Hassabis's cited test — could an AI have originated general relativity from 1900s knowledge, "today the answer is no" — frames AI-originated fundamental physics as still out of reach. Conceptual support for the stall, not resolution.)
science
physics