I recently met up with my old corporate colleagues for a happy hour reunion, and as usual, we spent our time relitigating old work politics (somehow, 15 year old gossip still hits) and also talking about the future of work, how things are changing, and what’s the next big thing that will upend everything. When we all worked together, there were some trends in the corporate world that all of us were involved in: offshoring to lower-paid workers in other countries, primarily India and the Philippines, moving workers out of expensive real estate to work-at-home arrangements, and consolidating the user interface platforms (you would not believe how outdated travel booking systems can be) to create global team structures. Anyone still awake out there?

Obviously the next big thing is AI which we all agreed is going to greatly automate the types of jobs a lot of our employees were doing back when we all worked together. AI holds the potential to completely eliminate large quantities of jobs, and what will happen to the people who either were doing those jobs or who would have done those jobs and now have useless degrees? (Is human coding defunct now? What happens to psychologists? How much paralegal work is going to be automated? I assume nearly all of customer service will be.) There’s been a lot of talk about what we should do with such a radical upheaval in the jobs market. My favorite solution is to mandatorily cut the workweek to an assumed 20-30 hrs instead of 40 and provide UBI (universal basic income) to all Americans. After all, we may not have personally created AI, but it’s based on input of all of our data. We should get some compensation for that.

This prompted me to look into the difference between predictions and prophecies, especially given that the LDS church claims top leaders are “prophets, seers, and revelators” (and critics say they don’t prophecy, see, or reveal anything). Here are some key differences between prophecies & predictions:

  • Source of knowledge. A prophecy is claimed to be from a divine source, something spiritual. A prediction comes from human observation, data, or insider information (like Congress buying stocks). Experts who are earliest in seeing new patterns or trends emerge are often revered for their insight–their unique observations, if the warning pans out (usually in a bad way) make us view them with awe for seeing the early warning signs. Predicting something once it’s becoming common knowledge, even among less expert people, makes it not really “prophetic” in any sense.
  • Epistemic Authority. An accurate prophecy by someone someone who is not an expert in that field bolsters faith in them as having a connection to a higher power or divine source. This is different from predictions which just show that the person who was accurate had more expertise and more insight as an expert. Not having expertise makes it feel prophetic. Having it makes it a prediction.
  • Purpose. A prophecy is usually seen as a warning to alter behavior to avoid a negative outcome. But a lot of predictions also feel this way, at least if they are interesting. For example, is climate change a prophecy or a prediction by this criteria?
  • Verification. Prophecies tend to be subject to interpretation and post hoc rationalization (“it wasn’t God’s time” or “it meant something different”), and this has been the case since time immemorial. The Oracle at Delphi was famous for cryptic prophesies that were easily misinterpreted by the receiver, leading to disastrous outcomes that others could later cluck at in disapproval of the one who didn’t understand it. By contrast, predictions by experts are testable and can be either confirmed or disproved using new data and future events.
  • Emotion. Prophecies are designed to instill awe, fear, or reverence, leading to faith or obedience. Predictions aim to inform or persuade through rational argument, planning, and action.
  • Religious component. Prophecy often adds a religious element to the warning–divine intervention will happen based on faithful actions or as punishment for bad actions. Predictions are more dispassionate about cause and effect and often avoid moralizing (but not always–consider recycling, climate change, extinctions).

Of course, sometimes both of these approaches can co-exist. A scientist might use prophetic-sounding language to awaken the public to moral urgency (consider Greta Thunberg or the show Don’t Look Up). A religious prophet may incorporate empirical reasoning to make their argument more credible. This is one that feels particularly salient in the LDS Church. For a church with a spotty history of respecting experts (consider the ridiculous 14 Fundamentals), a whole lot of church members are quick to point to the expertise of church leaders. I’ve heard many times the claim that “God is in charge” because the Church president during Covid was a doctor, and now that the constitution is under threat, a constitutional lawyer is Church president. Whatever gets you through another Sunday I guess. We definitely like to have it both ways.

This discussion was similar to a thread I recently read on Reddit. The prompt was: What’s something that’s about to happen which most people aren’t aware of? I popped some popcorn and settled in. I was marginally aware of some of it, but also completely unaware of a lot of it. Also, who knows whether things will play out this way or not? Whenever you predict the near future like this, it could be because a subset of people are all talking about it (as with AI, or similarly when Joseph Smith sort of predicted the Civil War–along with a whole lot of people of his era), or it could be because only the insiders know something.

So, just to wet your beak, here are a few of the near-term predictions:

  • On November 21, you will be able to see Uranus with the naked eye (prompting many crude jokes). Also, “naked eye” may be a stretch. I’ve often been told something is visible with the naked eye and then been able to see jack all.
  • The soil fungus that killed off the Gros Michel banana (the predecessor to today’s much worse Cavendish bananas) has evolved. It’s likely that the Cavendish will become vulnerable and go extinct as well, unless there is a genetic modification to prevent this. (Someone clarified that the Gros Michel is still available through non-commercial growers–so we’ve been fed LIES, but not fed Gros Michel bananas).
  • It will become impossible to tell the difference between human interactions and AI or bot interactions online very very soon. This will dramatically change the ways we use the internet and interact with online communities. This is also called the “Dead Internet Theory,” in which the quality degrades so much that it’s not worth being online anymore. I mean, let’s get real. A whole lot of Twitter outrage is people arguing with bots, and possibly bots arguing with bots.
  • Insect populations are undergoing a massive collapse globally which will create dire consequences downstream for agriculture and the natural order.
  • The Klarna bubble is about to pop. People will end in collections because they agreed to a payment schedule for a Doordash meal. Seems like this is a new trend, though, because I’m suddenly getting ads for a different version of this where you get a second mortgage that you pay back (yeah right) “whenever.”
  • Diseases are becoming more antibiotic resistant which will result in worse pandemics in the future. The biggest issue (according to one commenter) is that when people don’t complete their antibiotic regimen, they don’t kill the virus. They just make it more resistant for its next attempts.
  • Serbian students have been protesting for a full year due to a train station canopy collapse that killed 16 people. Given that Serbia was in the midst of an extremely bloody civil war only three decades ago, that’s not great for stability in the former Yugoslavia.
  • Sudan is on the verge of collapse which will make Gaza seem minor by comparison. The RSF (Rapid Support Forces) took over Darfur, murdering thousands in the process. They were responsible for the last Sudanese genocide. This war has been going almost 5 years, with more casualties than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 32 journalists have been killed in the conflict, and 90% of the in-country journalists have fled or lost their jobs.
  • The water crisis is coming to a head with clean water being bought up by venture capitalist and private equity firms.
  • As the wealth gap continues to grow, there’s something to be said for the fact that many of the world’s wealthiest people are building bunkers to survive an apocalypse rather than doing anything to help us prevent calamity or improve human flourishing. Even if they are wrong about our future peril, hoarding wealth is a mental illness, and it does not lead to good behaviors. Building a bunker to protect your wealth doesn’t sound that far removed from bottling your own urine.
  • Beech and ash trees in North America are dying and will probably be gone within 20 years.
  • African swine fever may wipe out the pork industry when and if it reaches North America. Load up on those carnitas now.
  • The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current is collapsing. This is the ocean current that creates mild climates in Europe by bringing hot water from the Caribbean up the Gulf Stream. Without it, Europe becomes inhospitable. Some climate scientists consider this “conveyor belt” to be the Earth’s cardiovascular system, and if it collapses, the Earth will change in radical and fundamental ways.
  • A dementia boom as the population continues to age, and many of the early health deaths have been put off with early detection and better treatements, leaving people living longer and a higher percentage experiencing dementia. Additionally, the majority of retirees do not have retirement savings, let alone what it would cost for dementia care facilities, and the social security system is in the political crosshairs.

I don’t share these because they are the most anxiety-provoking ones, but because they are slightly more niche worries, the kind of things people make prophecies about. If everyone knows about a thing, the worry is probably too generally known to qualify as a prophecy (like the AI thing–widely discussed, many pearls clutched, probably rightly so). Prophecy is supposedly based on revelation from God, not being a scientific insider or a specialist who deeply understands a topic that most people don’t. But both function the same in a community. You can heed the warning and take action, or not. (Although hey, a few of these are just things that are apparently going to happen). Within religion, prophecy is often used as a “proof” that someone is a prophet, cherry-picking the predictions they made that turned out to be right, or can be reinterpreted as being right. To misquote Forrest Gump, “prophet is as prophecy does.”

  • Have you heard these predictions before? Are there any of these predictions that you think are completely off base? Are there some you think are especially concerning?
  • What other near term predictions would you make or have you heard?
  • How do you think prophecy works? Is it just something everyone predicted that happened to come through? Is it based on specialist knowledge? Is it only prophecy when someone correctly predicts something they don’t know much about? When has that happened?
  • Do you think the Church relies on experts to plan for the future, or prophecy? Both? Neither?

Discuss.