By Jacob Sargent
Think back to the autumn of 2013.
Snapchat is taking off, “Take Me to Church” is all over the airwaves, and Angela Merkel has just won her second chancellorship of Germany. Hindsight may be 20/20, but it’s not surprising at all that Snapchat would continue to explode for several years, Hozier’s booming voice would keep him on the charts, and Angela Merkel had eight more years of power ahead of her. Maybe this is outcome bias, but I think even eighth-grade me knew basically where the world was heading.
But not everything was so cut and dried. In the fall of 2013, Grand Theft Auto V became the first entertainment product — not just video game — to gross $1 billion in sales. Billion with a “B.” Would you have predicted that in the fall of 2025, *Grand Theft…
By Jacob Sargent
Think back to the autumn of 2013.
Snapchat is taking off, “Take Me to Church” is all over the airwaves, and Angela Merkel has just won her second chancellorship of Germany. Hindsight may be 20/20, but it’s not surprising at all that Snapchat would continue to explode for several years, Hozier’s booming voice would keep him on the charts, and Angela Merkel had eight more years of power ahead of her. Maybe this is outcome bias, but I think even eighth-grade me knew basically where the world was heading.
But not everything was so cut and dried. In the fall of 2013, Grand Theft Auto V became the first entertainment product — not just video game — to gross $1 billion in sales. Billion with a “B.” Would you have predicted that in the fall of 2025, *Grand Theft Auto VI *would remain unreleased?
Around Halloween in 2013, the word *spoopy *entered the lexicon. Would you have guessed at the time that it would become such a dated term so quickly, and become forever designated a “time-capsule word”?
My point is that some predictions have been easy to make, but others were total surprises. Now compare that to what’s going on in 2025. How sure are you about the future?
To be completely transparent, I don’t think I have ever been less certain about our future than I am today. From politics to technology to sports to music, it seems as though the universe is consistently cranking up the entropy. Even more destabilizing, those who seem most certain about the future often disagree with one another about what the world will look like.
For example, consider the role Large Language Models (LLMs) will play in our lives in the coming years. On his podcast back in March, New York Times journalist Ezra Klein made the following claim regarding Artificial Intelligence: “I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before.” Depending on where you look on the internet, this claim either has already been disproven by a lackluster track record of improvement in LLMs, or it has vastly understated the sheer transformative power of the new technology.
The AI hallucination problem is growing by some metrics, but that doesn’t stop some, like Bill Gates, from claiming that AI will replace most human tasks within 10 years. “Do you think AI is a powerful, positive technological force in our world?” will produce such vigorous, emotional, and differing responses depending on whether you’re asking a sociologist, a schoolteacher, or a Silicon Valley executive. Personally, I use LLMs for work on occasion, but I have no idea what the cutting-edge LLMs are going to be capable of in five years.
This discordance in thinking about the future is not limited to AI, or even technology. The economy is either the strongest it has ever been, or it is on the brink of collapse. We are baby steps away from a utopia powered by Universal Basic Income; we are also baby steps away from a dystopia caused by the planet catching fire and burning us along with it. The Democratic Party is poised to strike a killing blow to right-wing economic populism in the 2026 Midterms; the Democratic Party is also an irredeemably incompetent legacy organization and should be abandoned.
A few weeks ago, I was talking about how society is going to change in the next several years over dinner with my mom. My prediction — likely influenced by some Reddit post or techno-optimist podcast I had consumed that day — was that we would likely be able to step down to a 24-hour workweek within five years. My mom — not by any means technologically illiterate, though not as ingrained in the discourse as I am — thought I was insane.
Over the next few days, I wondered at how we could be on such different wavelengths, and how our visions of the future reflected our contradictory views of the world today. I also wondered whether my point of view at the time was truly my “thinking brain” predicting, or only subconscious hopes about my own future.
We need to, as a society, take stock of where the world is going. What will happen has become so intertwined with what we think should happen that we are losing our ability to make educated guesses about our very real future.
I created a website to try to tackle this issue: ontherecord2030.org. On it, you will find thirty questions about what the world will look like in five years. The topics range from the economy to politics to technology to culture. You can answer as many or as few questions as you want. If you include your email address (you don’t have to), we’ll send you your responses at the end of 2030. It’s free to use, free of ads, and your responses will not be monetized in any way.
**Most importantly, the survey closes for good at midnight on January 1st, 2026. **
Some may ask: what is the point of an endeavor such as this? Is a standardized survey for predicting the future just a natural consequence of “dunk culture”, providing pundits with a source of “I told you so’s” over the next five years?
That is certainly not my intent. For context, I am a non-partisan government employee who works in a very political environment. I spend most of my online time on internet forums discussing tech and sports. It’s never been more clear that most folks I engage with in these spaces are grounded in totally different realities. I will make no attempt whatsoever to tell anyone what the current facts and realities are, as we’ve seen how well that goes in the previous decade.
The only person who can truly gauge the validity of your own reality is you. By making predictions about the future, based on what you think is the current direction of the forces that be, you can see for yourself how “real” your reality was back in 2025. I hope that in 2031, we — myself included — look back on our answers and reflect critically on ourselves as we navigate our lives.
One final note before listing the questions below. I would like to thank Daniel, Natalie, my parents Heather and Tom, and everyone else who I bounced ideas off of for the survey — and certainly Tangle for running this essay. To answer the questions below and have the responses sent to you in 2031, visit ontherecord2030.org. And when you’re done, send it to a family member or friend. I’m sure it’ll make for a very interesting dinner conversation in five years.
U.S. Politics
- Who will win the 2028 Democratic primary?
- Will Donald Trump run for a third term in the 2028 Presidential Election?
- Which political party will win the 2026 Midterms? (House of Representatives and Senate)
- Which political party will win the 2028 Presidential Election?
- Will there be a major political assassination in the United States between now and 2030? (President, VP, Governor, Member of Congress, Cabinet Member)
- Will a President be impeached and removed from office between now and 2030?
Technology
- Renewables accounted for 24% of electricity production in the United States in 2024. What will this percentage be in 2030?
- Currently, about 72 million miles per year are driven fully autonomously, compared to about 3 trillion by drivers. How many self-driving miles will there be in 2030?
- Do Meta, OpenAI, and Google agree that we have created Artificial General Intelligence by 2030? (AI can do anything a human can do)
- Electric vehicles made up about 9% of new car sales in 2024. What will this percentage be in 2030?
- What percentage of American households have a humanoid robot for housework or other tasks in 2030?
- Will there be a human astronaut on Mars by 2030?
Economy
- What will annual growth of the S&P 500 be from 2026–2030? (not adjusted for inflation)
- 7% of Americans used cryptocurrency as tender (not just for ownership) in 2024. What will this percentage be in 2030?
- Will there be an American recession, as defined by 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, between now and 2030?
- What will be the highest recorded inflation rate between now and 2030?
- What will the highest recorded unemployment rate be between now and 2030?
- What will be the most valuable company in the world in 2030?
World
- Will there be any new major wars, defined as a conflict with 10,000+ deaths, between now and 2030? If so, between which countries/groups?
- What is the status of the Israeli–Palestine conflict in 2030?
- What is the status of the Russia–Ukraine conflict in 2030?
- Does the World Health Organization declare a new global pandemic between now and 2030?
- Is a nuclear weapon used in combat between now and 2030?
- Are there any major regime changes, meaning a change in the form of government, between now and 2030?
Other
- Predict any of the Time People of the Year from 2026–2030.
- Predict any of the Dictionary.com Words of the Year from 2026–2030.
- Will there be any new champions in the top 4 American sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB)? If so, which team(s)?
- Who will win the 2026 World Cup?
- What is something that will be ‘so 2025’ in 2030?
- Write a note to your future self in 2030.
Jacob Sargent is a former high school civics teacher and non-partisan legislative fiscal analyst who lives in Chapel Hill, NC with his wonderful fiancée Natalie. Daniel Sargent also contributed to the design and development of the website.