Sergi Reboredo/ZUMA
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Now, let’s see if I can come up with ten predictions.
- We will recover pretty nicely from the pandemic. Personal savings are high and stimulus spending has been generous.
- Things will mostly return to normal when the country opens back up. A few little things will get a boost, but humans are fundamentally social animals and will remain so. We will very quickly return to nearly all of our old habits.
- Mitch McConnell will do his best to block every single thing Joe Biden tries to do. (I know, this is kind of a gimme.)
- Within a few months of January 20, Donald Trump will be forgotten like a bad nightmare. Virtually everybody has an incentive to ignore him, especially after the wholly deranged behavior of his final two months.
- Self-driving cars will not hit the mainstream. But they’ll come very, very close. Probably 2022 will be their breakout year.
- As usual, the world will continue to do nowhere near enough to make a dent in climate change.
- Congress will reschedule marijuana and it will be effectively legalized. This is not a prediction I have high confidence in, but public support for legalization has passed the two-thirds threshold that often means a subject finally has enough public support to move Congress to action. Legalization even has very close to majority support among Republican voters.
- I’ve already predicted that the 2020s will be the decade of CRISPR, and this year additionally saw advances in protein folding, cheap genome sequencing, and unbelievably fast development of mRNA vaccines. I don’t know what will happen in 2021, but I suspect that something fairly spectacular may emerge from the biological sciences.
- Cats will continue to rule the internet.
- Cats will continue to rule the universe.
