Predictions from *Average is Over*

My book is from 2013, here are some of the key predictions:

1. Increases in the power and generality of artificial intelligence will prove a major breakthrough within a foreseeable time period.

2. Labor market returns will accrue to individuals capable and willing to work with such services.

3. Resources and land are going to significantly increase in economic value, as they will remain relatively scarce.

4. Marketing will continue to rise in relative importance.

5. Managerial and “soft skills” will continue to increase in importance for earnings.

6. What we now call “quiet quitting” will be a thing.

7. At many corporations it will be possible to dismiss large numbers of workers without any decline in output.

8. Cheating with AI will arise as an issue of major importance, starting with cheating in chess, and the work of Kenneth Regan will turn out to be significant.

9. AI assessments of everything will rise in importance.

10. AI will produce more and more outputs that are so smart we will not be able to evaluate them as humans.

11. Free or near-free effective on-line education soon would become available, though it will remain an open question how many individuals will be interested in learning from it.

12. Good teaching would evolve more toward coaching and mentorship, as information provision will be handled by AI.

13. Intelligent machines soon will become effective producers of science, yet how they arrive at their results will not be legible to us.

14. With the aid of AI, there will be a resurgence of amateur science.

15. Machine learning and its successors will take over economic research.

Of course not all of those predictions have come true, but many have or others are on the verge of realization.  The subtitle of the book is Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

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