Data · From the ledger
Sci-fi predictions that came true.
65 predictions from the films, books and shows we review that have already arrived, in the order they arrived. Each one is checked against at least one source.
| Arrived | Prediction |
|---|---|
| 2003 | People spend leisure, money and working time inside a persistent shared 3D virtual world, as avatars. |
| 2007 | An ordinary person's daily life is broadcast live, around the clock, to a public audience. |
| 2007 | Random mass killings by lone attackers ('muckers') become a routine category of news. Predicted by Stand on Zanzibar (1968) · 39 years after · Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation / Texas State University |
| 2008 | Images sent over a network are used as weapons to injure the people who look at them. |
| 2011 | A single global computer network is used every day by billions of people. |
| 2011 | The world's population reaches about seven billion by 2010. |
| 2013 | A domestic security agency secretly collects bulk records of ordinary citizens' communications, and the dragnet mostly catches the innocent. |
| 2013 | Almost every adult carries a networked handheld device that continuously transmits their personal data to companies and other people. |
| 2016 | A text chatbot built from a dead person's own messages and posts can hold new conversations in that person's style with the people they left behind. |
| 2016 | People pay to watch recorded first-person experiences through a head-worn device. |
| 2016 | Police officers routinely wear cameras that record their encounters from their own point of view. |
| 2016 | Service workers' jobs depend on customers' star ratings, which can get them removed. |
| 2017 | Companies implant microchips in employees to control access to the workplace. Predicted by Severance (2022) · -5 years after · Source: Washington State Standard (via Wenatchee World) |
| 2017 | Officials at the border can make travellers show them their recorded recent past. Predicted by Black Mirror: The Entire History of You (2011) · 6 years after · Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection |
| 2018 | A dating system chooses your partners for you, rather than leaving you to browse. |
| 2018 | Genealogy databases expose people's family histories and are used to track down individuals. |
| 2018 | Ordinary neighbourhoods are covered by networked cameras whose footage a company can access and search. |
| 2018 | People with a poor record in a rating system are refused plane or train tickets. |
| 2018 | Police send camera drones over the city routinely, and the footage is used in investigations. |
| 2018 | Water becomes a privately controlled commodity whose price is set by markets. |
| 2019 | A household device secretly records intimate moments, and the footage or audio is retained in ways owners were never told about. |
| 2019 | A low rating from the people you deal with can get you cut off from an everyday service. |
| 2019 | Officials can confirm who someone is from a DNA sample in about the time it takes to pass a checkpoint, without a laboratory. |
| 2020 | A fast-spreading respiratory pandemic grounds most of the world's passenger flights within weeks. |
| 2020 | A new virus linked to bats emerges in East Asia and becomes a global pandemic within months. |
| 2020 | A vaccine against the new virus is developed, approved and being injected within a year of the outbreak. |
| 2020 | Cars with no human driver carry paying passengers on public roads. |
| 2020 | City dwellers seal themselves in their homes for weeks or months, living off stockpiles while an outbreak runs through the city outside. |
| 2020 | Employers score office workers' output minute by minute, tracking screens, keystrokes and idle time. |
| 2020 | Members of the public ride in cars that drive themselves through city streets with no human driver on board. |
| 2020 | Passengers arriving on a vessel carrying the disease are kept aboard it in quarantine rather than let off. Predicted by Station Eleven (2021) · -1 years after · Source: CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report |
| 2020 | The state presumes a person's organs are available for donation unless they object. |
| 2021 | A recording of police killing a civilian overturns the official account and leads to a murder conviction. |
| 2021 | An opaque score decides whether you can rent the home you want. |
| 2021 | Bereaved people can sign up to a paid consumer service that builds an interactive simulation of someone who has already died. |
| 2021 | Online influencers promote a bogus cure, and demand for it surges during the pandemic. |
| 2021 | Parents using IVF can choose between embryos ranked by their predicted genetic risk of common diseases. |
| 2021 | Proof of vaccination is required to get back into public places. |
| 2022 | As Lake Mead falls to record lows, the federal government imposes mandatory cuts on Colorado River deliveries to Arizona and the other lower-basin states. |
| 2022 | Russian aggression against Ukraine drives large numbers of Ukrainian refugees into Western Europe and Britain. |
| 2023 | A dead person's voice can be cloned from existing recordings and used to speak new words to the living, including over the phone. |
| 2023 | A helpful machine with safety rules can be talked into assisting with crimes by a user who frames the request the right way. |
| 2023 | A hit show is built around one real person who doesn't know everyone around him is an actor. |
| 2023 | Companies will build an interactive AI copy of a specific person from their recordings and data, so that family members can go on talking to them after they die. |
| 2023 | Homes on the fringe of metro Phoenix are cut off from their water supply, and new building there is halted for lack of water. |
| 2023 | Ordinary people form emotional and romantic relationships with conversational AI, and talk about it openly. |
| 2023 | Personal, intimate letters are routinely written for people by someone, or something, else. |
| 2023 | Public anger at automation turns physical and organised: machines are attacked in the street and unions write limits on machines into contracts. |
| 2023 | The dominant search and social companies build their AI from the behaviour and content of their users. |
| 2024 | A companion robot bought for a child stops working because its manufacturer has gone out of business, leaving the family to grieve it. |
| 2024 | A consumer AI assistant speaks in a warm, natural, real-time voice that people find hard to tell from a person. |
| 2024 | A government treats its falling birth rate as a national emergency and builds state machinery around it. |
| 2024 | A large share of the public, especially the young, gets its news from individuals streaming on social platforms rather than from news organisations. |
| 2024 | A single faulty software update knocks out computers around the world within hours. |
| 2024 | An AI agent handles most of a large company's customer-service conversations, with humans kept as backup. |
| 2024 | Commercial computers can be operated by mid-air hand gestures, so that users grab, pinch and fling windows of information without touching a screen or controller. |
| 2024 | Companies sell interactive digital versions of dead people to the people who survive them. |
| 2024 | Families can buy AI companions marketed as friends for their children, sold as ordinary consumer products. |
| 2024 | Staff at frontier technology labs are bound by sweeping secrecy agreements that stop them speaking about what they build. |
| 2024 | The most powerful computers belong to a private corporation and sit at the centre of its business and its dealings with governments, as General Technics' Shalmaneser does. |
| 2025 | A machine passes a Turing test, being judged human by people who know one of their conversation partners is a machine. |
| 2025 | Cheap, privately owned cameras everywhere feed a network that the public and the police can search. |
| 2025 | Donald Trump serves a second term as US president. |
| 2025 | People can search and replay a complete record of their own recent past instead of relying on memory. |
| 2025 | Toll tags and roadside readers log where every driver goes, building a searchable record of movements for the authorities. |
Built from the P(n) Board. How we check predictions.