Hey readers,
Happy New Year 2025! (Or if you happen to adhere to the French Revolutionary calendar — like those of us who have been reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety — "Joyeux 12 Nivôse, Year 233!" After all, the calendar, like so much else in life, is arbitrary.)
For the sixth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect convened in December to make predictions about major events in the year to come. Each prediction comes with a probability attached to it. That gives you a sense of our confidence.
As we always do, we'll be keeping track of how our predictions fared over the course of 2025, and report back to you at the end of December. You can check out how we did in 2024 here.
And we've done something new this year in partnering with the prediction platform Metaculus, which aggregates thousands of individual predictions on global events and scientific breakthroughs. You can check here to see how the community there came down on a number of our predictions, or click on the individual questions with links to go directly to them on Metaculus.
You can read all 25 predictions here, but I wanted to share a few notable ones for our first newsletter of 2025. —Bryan Walsh
Congress passes a major tariff bill (20 percent)
Donald Trump's 2024 campaign was perhaps the most pro-tariff of any candidate since William McKinley: He promised 60 percent taxes on imports from China, and 10 percent on everywhere else.
In victory he's only gotten bolder, calling for 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, in flagrant violation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free trade deal made by some past president named Donald Trump.
The bad news for consumers and the world economy is that Trump has substantial discretion to impose tariffs as president without consulting Congress. But that discretion isn't unlimited, and probably doesn't permit the kind of 10 percent across-the-board tariff Trump promised.
Plus, Republicans want a revenue source to help offset the cost of making Trump's 2017 tax cuts permanent before they expire at the end of next year. This raises the question: Will Congress pass a tariff measure on its own that not only implements Trump's ideas, but lets them endure under future presidents?
My guess is no.
There was a time in the distant past, let's call it "2015," when Republicans were the party of free markets and free trade, and some members of Congress haven't forgotten that. Early reporting suggests that many GOP figures in the House and Senate are hostile to the idea of including tariffs in a tax package. Republicans can only lose three senators and two House members out of their caucus and still pass bills, which gives them very little margin for error, and makes it very difficult to pass legislation that splits the caucus like tariffs.
Two caveats, though. One, I'm predicting about a tariff bill and not new unilateral tariffs from Trump because I think the odds that Trump does new tariffs using presidential authority are nearly 100 percent. Two, the only reason my estimate isn't lower is that there's been some bipartisan interest in a "carbon border adjustment," or a sort of carbon tax that only applies to imported goods. The idea has gotten Republican support because while it does acknowledge that global warming is real, it also sticks it to foreigners. That's a tariff, and I think the likeliest kind to make it into a tax package (though I still bet against it). —Dylan Matthews
There will be a ceasefire in Ukraine (75 percent)
The war in Ukraine is just short of its third anniversary. The very fact that Ukraine has continued to fight this long defies most early prognosticators, many of whom expected the government in Kyiv to collapse not long after the Russians invaded. (An exception there, as Future Perfect readers know, is the State Department's perspicacious Bureau of Intelligence and Research.) But the longer the war goes on, the more Russia's sheer size and willingness to sacrifice unbelievable numbers of soldiers has outweighed Ukraine's ability to fight back, even with the material support of the US and European allies.
President Biden has mostly been a steadfast ally, but he'll be leaving office on January 20, replaced by Donald Trump, who has made no secret of the fact that he has little interest in continuing to support Ukraine. Both sides are still fighting hard to gain and protect territory, but it seems clear that's being done by both Ukraine and Russia to put themselves in the best possible position before expected peace talks. Exactly what form that will take is difficult to predict, and a ceasefire doesn't mean a permanent peace. But I would be shocked to not see a durable pause in the fighting some time in 2025. —BW
A major lab will formally claim it has achieved AGI (30 percent)
For precision, let me clarify that by "major lab" I mean any of the following companies:
This is a purposefully broad list and includes companies that haven't made it a priority to be on the bleeding edge of deep learning (like Netflix) and ones whose primary business isn't in developing their own models so much as hosting or enabling models that others create (like Scale or Hugging Face). But, you know, I thought Nvidia wasn't in this race until it dropped a massive model in October with impressive benchmarks, so a lot of things can change quickly in the world of AI.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a vague term, and there is a large and growing literature in which AI researchers seek merely to define it, let alone to predict what it would look like or mean. That said, most definitions rely on an analogy to humans: an AI will be generally intelligent if it can do everything a human being can do, as well as a human being can, including meta-tasks like learning to complete new tasks.
This idea itself has holes in it. Different human beings can do different things — I cannot do everything, say, Katie Ledecky can do.
Luckily for us, the prediction here doesn't require us to know what AGI means. It just requires a major firm to claim to have achieved it, accurately or not. One OpenAI staffer took to X this past year to claim that the firm's models had already gotten there (though, importantly, the company itself has not made claims that grand).
So if the bar is that low, why do I think we'll make it through the year without a company making this claim? Mostly because a) this is a young field where firm reputation matters a ton and being discredited by a premature AGI announcement might make the difference between a company ending up like Apple and ending up like Atari, and b) this is the kind of technology where premature claims can be discredited really, really fast.
If a nuclear fusion company claims to have achieved net energy gain, it is very difficult for me, a non-nuclear physicist, to tell if they're bluffing. It's not like I can use the nuclear reactor. But an AGI would presumably come with text, video, audio, and other interfaces that average consumers could try out and use, and it'd be immediately clear if some AI firm claimed to have gotten there when they hadn't. —DM
Congress overturns California's animal agriculture law Proposition 12 (35 percent)
For six years, the US pork industry has been looking for a way to get rid of California's Proposition 12, a landmark animal welfare law, passed by ballot measure in 2018, that outlawed certain forms of extreme confinement on factory farms. That included a ban on the sale of pork raised using gestation crates — tiny cages in which pregnant pigs are kept continually, barely given any room to move. The practice, as we wrote last year, is "equivalent to living your entire, short life pregnant and trapped inside a coffin."
Having failed to convince courts, including the US Supreme Court, of their legal arguments for overturning the law, pork giants are now trying to get Congress to nullify Prop 12 through the Farm Bill, a massive legislative package passed every five years that shapes much of US food and farming policy. Last May, the House Agriculture Committee advanced a Republican-led Farm Bill that includes just such a measure. Always live to serve.
At the time, I didn't think this version of the bill would go anywhere. This year, Congress will need to finally pass the long-delayed Farm Bill, and with a majority in both chambers, Republicans' chances of axing Prop 12 will be much greater. Still, I don't really see it happening, in part because some members of the Freedom Caucus oppose it as a severe limit on states' ability to set their own policies. Much like their long-promised efforts to trash the Affordable Care Act, Republicans love to talk about repealing stuff but rarely follow through. —Marina Bolotnikova
A major sports gambling scandal leads at least one All-Star in the four major professional sports to be suspended (30 percent)
The evidence is adding up that the widespread legalization of gambling has been, at best, reckless. Putting a casino on the phones everyone carries around in their pocket has created social and economic harms that need to be taken seriously, before a deeper crisis sets in.
It is a world that is unthinkable to me, as somebody who grew up in the shadow of the Pete Rose scandal. Whatever you think of Pete Rose the person, the all-time hits leader is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame because his gambling was regarded as a violation of the game's most important values. Today, Major League Baseball airs on the FanDuel Sports Network in my area and the biggest name in sports media, ESPN, runs its own sportsbook.
Only scandal could break the spell, right? But the truth is, we have already seen a series of sports betting scandals since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that unlocked this new era of gambling. NFL wide receiver Calvin Ridley lost a year of his young career to a gambling-related suspension. One NBA bench player was banned from the league for giving tips to gamblers and allegedly altering his play based on bets.
But those players were not All-Stars, much less household names. We have not yet had a player of the caliber of LeBron James or Patrick Mahomes implicated by gambling allegations. But we have come close. Last year, National League MVP Shohei Ohtani of the MLB's Los Angeles Dodgers was ensnared when his personal trainer faced criminal charges related to his gambling, though Ohtani was ultimately found not to be involved.
It seems only a matter of time until a major sports star faces a serious gambling scandal. I don't know if this will be the year. It may not be. But I'm confident the next Pete Rose is already out there. —Dylan Scott
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