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Will stage-3 trials of MDMA as a medical treatment be completed, with results submitted to the FDA, by 2021?

no

To the Stars! #4: Do Potentially Habitable Planets exist in orbit around Alpha Centauri A or B?

no

Metaknowledge Experiment Part A: Will Bernie Sanders be the Democratic Nominee?

no

Will the Allen Telescope Array discover anything in its SETI search of red dwarf stars over the next two years?

no

A is in the I of the beholder #4: Patently Obvious

no

Zapping Zika #1: First vaccine trials by January 2017?

yes

Zapping Zika #2: active transmission in the U.S. by August 2016?

yes

Zapping Zika #4: GMO Mosquitos in Puerto Rico?

no

Zapping Zika #3: 1 million infections in US and its territories by 2018?

no

Will we keep the global temperature rise by 2020 to < 1° C?

no

Will SpaceX launch for Mars in the 2018 window?

no

Will 2016 see the smallest extent of Arctic Sea ice in recorded history?

no

Will marijuana be voted legal in California in 2016?

yes

Will an independent conservative candidate gain a significant number of votes in the 2016 US Presidential election?

no

Progress in why the universe is 3+1 dimensional?

no

Apple virtual/augmented reality by 2020?

no

Will Julian Assange still be in the Ecuadorian embassy at the start of 2018?

yes

Will the National Ignition Facility announce a shot at break-even fusion by start of 2017?

no

Will NASA (re)join the (e)LISA space mission for detecting gravitational waves?

no

Will the Democratic Party control the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017?

no

Will the Democratic Party control the U.S. Senate in 2017?

no

Pandemic series: efficient human-to-human transmission of H5N1?

no

First human head transplant in 2017?

no

Pandemic series: how likely is emergence of a deadly new airborne pathogen?

no

Pandemic Series: new mosquito-borne pathogen by 2019?

no

Will General Fusion meets its plasma temperature targets by mid-2020?

no

Pandemic series: how likely is emergence of a deadly new blood-borne pathogen?

no

Pandemic series: reported theft of a potential bioterror agent in US by 2020?

no

Pandemic series: will a terrorist group reportedly obtain viable bioweapon sample?

no

Pandemic series: a bioterror attack against crops or livestock by 2020?

no

Will possible evidence for a new light particle be independently confirmed?

no

Pandemic series: attack using a genetically engineered virus by 2020?

no

Pandemic series: federal funding of "gain of function research of concern" in 2016-18?

yes

Pandemic series: pathogen research rejected for publication as an information hazard?

no

Metaknowledge Experiment Part A: Will the UK vote for Brexit?

yes

Will Clinton pick Elizabeth Warren as VP?

no

Is market volatility set to strongly increase?

no

Will the California Drought end in 2017?

yes

Announcement of evidence for aliens by 2020?

no

Will the UK submit article 50 notification to the European Union this year?

no

Will a personal computer based on "The Machine" technology be put to market by end of 2018?

no

A posteriori statistics and five for seven or better on stock dips?

no

Transiting exoplanet within 5 parsecs by 2018?

no

Will police officers in the United States shoot and kill more than 1000 people in 2016?

no

Will the Pound be equal to or less than the Dollar by Dec. 30, 2017.

no

Are we in a simulated reality? Part I

no

New Tesla "Top Secret Master Plan" revealed this week?

no

Will Edward Snowden tweet about Pokemon Go by July 26?

no

Major contentious CRISPR patent to be overturned?

no

Airships by 2019?

no

The Galaxy has disappeared from view for a third of humanity; will there be a growing movement to bring it back?

no

Will the banana plague reach Latin America?

no

Will the VITAL study show significant benefits of vitamin D and/or omega-3 supplementation?

no

Clinical trials of a "universal" snakebite antidote?

no

Funding for a study of anti-aging properties of the diabetes drug Metformin?

no

Zapping Zika #5: Clinical trials of IFITM3-based therapies?

no

Will Google release a chatbot in 2016?

no

Author, inventor, and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil is known as a public advocate for [the Singularity](http://www.singularity.com/), predicting that within decades, artificial intelligence will surpass that of human beings. In 2012, Kurzweil was [hired as Google’s Director of Engineering](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/14/google-hires-famed-futurist-ray-kurzweil), with a focus on projects involving machine learning and natural language processing. At a May 2016 conference held by [Singularity University](http://singularityu.org/), Kurzweil announced that his Google team is working on a chatbot to be released later this year. [One of the bots will be named Danielle](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11801108/ray-kurzweil-building-chatbot-for-google), after the titular character of Kurzweil’s [yet-to-be-released novel](https://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-ray-kurzweil). Kurzweil described a chatbot that, given substantial writing samples from a unique user, could be personalized to adopt the writer’s [“style, personality, and ideas”](http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11801108/ray-kurzweil-building-chatbot-for-google). The anticipated bots will be able to hold conversations that are [“interesting,” though not yet near the sophistication of human-to-human communication](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/05/31/google-chat-bot-coming-year-renowned-inventor-says/). The story broke via a video from the conference posted on technology and culture website [theverge.com](http://www.theverge.com/). The video has since been removed due to copyright restrictions by Singularity University; no official announcement of Kurzweil's project has been made by Google. Kurzweil’s announcement comes at a time of chatbot development among tech giants. The CEO of Microsoft recently declared that chatbots will [revolutionize computing](http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/11/microsoft-ceo-chatbots-will-fundamentally-revolutionize-computing/), although Microsoft suffered an embarrassing setback in March when its Twitter chatbot had to be disabled in less than a day [after learning hate speech from users](http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist). Facebook’s Messenger app features [over 11,000 chatbots for users to converse with](http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/30/facebook-messenger-now-has-11000-chatbots-for-you-to-try/). Earlier this year, Google itself released a [new smart messaging app, Allo](https://research.googleblog.com/2016/05/chat-smarter-with-allo.html), that learns a user’s texting style in order to provide intelligent suggestions for conversations with other humans.

Will 538 ace the 2016 US presidential electoral map?

no

SpaceX's blueprint to Mars presented in late September?

yes

Will a small Turing machine (< 100 states) be found with behavior that cannot be characterized by mathematical proof?

no

Will 2017 be the warmest year on record?

no

A merger of Bayer and Monsanto by Q1 2017?

no

Will Wikileaks release a significant augmentation to the Equation Group cyberespionage archive?

no

Will the DC federal court grant class certification for an ongoing lawsuit against the government for “charging excessive fees to access court records through PACER”?

yes

1 dollar/watt solar energy by 2020?

no

20 more languages extinct by 2021?

no

All major causes of blindness preventable or treatable by 2020?

no

Will AI automation of jobs be essentially ignored in the US presidential race?

yes

Dramatic recent progress in narrow (and arguably general) purpose AI has led to a myriad of practical but nascent technologies including autonomous vehicles, automated call-answering systems, highly automated factories, medical and legal expert systems, and so on. While the automation of repetitive physical labor is an old story, the advent of AI/robotic systems to perform essentially any repetitive physical labor, as well as many non-repetitive physical tasks *and also* repetitive or non-repetitive *cognitive* tasks, is likely to dramatically change the dynamics governing human labor and its place in the global economy. In [their book](http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/0393239357), Brynjolfsson & McAfee argue that we are in the early stages of this process, but that it is already underway and has contributed significantly to income inequality and other difficulties in the labor pool. It is thus quite possible that the cause of much of the anger and frustration being channeled by the Trump (and previously Sanders) campaign is fundamentally caused by an automation process that is likely just getting started. However, while a significant topic of conversation in tech and some economic circles, and while politicians *love* to talk about jobs, the automation of labor has played little to no role in the presidential election thus far. Will this continue to be the case?

Will Obama pardon Snowden?

no

World population forecast to peak before 2100?

no

2.5% S&P 500 change on November 9?

no

Stock market rise correlated with Clinton victory?

no

Will Disney own Twitter by the end of Q2 2017?

no

Will Metaculus add a meta discussion feature?

yes

Will the second Clinton-Trump debate move the market in real time?

no

Will the German Government bail out Deutsche Bank?

no

Will AI defeat human in the 2017 Angry Birds challenge?

no

[Angry Birds](https://www.angrybirds.com/games/) is a game requiring prediction of the physics-based effects of different-property flying-impaired projectiles on various porcine-sourced structures. This includes aiming the birds, using their varied properties, and using explosions and other effects. Video games comprise an interesting arena for the training and testing of AI and machine learning (ML) systems. Game-playing AI systems have been steadily advancing both in highly ruled-based (but difficult!) games like Chess and Go, and [videogames in which the AI system is just given the same input and output stream as a human player and must analyze the video](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/abs/nature14236.html). For several years, an [Angry Birds AI competition](https://aibirds.org) has been held to evaluate and encourage game-playing ML systems to play Angry Birds. In this competition the entrants are provided "a basic game playing software that includes a computer vision module, a trajectory planning module, and the game interface that works with the Chrome version of Angry Birds." Part of the competition is an [Man vs Machine Challenge](https://aibirds.org/man-vs-machine-challenge/results.html), pitting the best ML systems against highly skilled humans. In the 2016 competition, the human and AI players competed on four levels over the course of 10 minutes. Although some AIs completed four levels, none completed all four (some humans did, albeit with difficulty.) The best human players ended with approximately double the best AI scores. This is actually a bit *less* good than a followup to the [2015 challenge](https://aibirds.org/man-vs-machine-challenge/previous-results.html) in which an AI came within a factor of 2/3 of the best human scores.

Will a poker bot beat the best human players at online multi-player No Limit Texas HoldEm?

no

Human beings are no longer the best players of the games of Chess or Go, but humans are still fighting the good fight on the poker table. Simple variants of poker have been conquered by the bots, but more complex versions are still being defended. Texas HoldEm is the most popular form of poker, and its simplest variant (Heads-up Limit HoldEm) is widely believed to have been solved, with poker programs consistently outperforming human players. This variant is simple in two ways: "Heads-up" means that there are only two players at the table, and "Limit" means that bets and raises can only be made in fixed amounts, with a limited number of reraises. The least restricted version of HoldEm is multi-player No Limit Holdem, where there are multiple players at a table, and bets/reraises can range freely between a minimum amount and the entire amount of a player's chips. To date in 2016, [humans have eked out narrow victories in Heads-up No Limit Holdem](http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015/04/25/Brains-vs-AI-Computer-faces-poker-pros-in-no-limit-Texas-Holdem/6431429965877/ ), and no computer program has as yet made a serious showing in a multi-player No Limit HoldEm challenge. This dominance of the felt by humans is no doubt temporary, and victory by the machines is inevitable. When will humans be forced to acknowledge not only that they are descended from fish, but that fish they remain (as far as silicon-based sharks are concerned)?

Artificial pancreas goes mainstream in 2017?

no

Will the hole in the Ozone layer shrink in the next 5 years?

yes

Will one of the verified oldest living persons in the world reach 120 years of age?

no

How strong will the winning effort of the Ocean Discovery X-PRIZE be?

no

Will the US election be decided by Nov. 11?

yes

Will there be any faithless electors in the 2016 U.S. Electoral College?

yes

Will Planet Nine Emerge from Hiding Soon?

no

Will there be a financial crisis in China in 2017?

no

How important are "time crystals"?

no

New ultrasound Alzheimer's treatment to clinical trial in humans by end of 2017?

no

Solid metallic hydrogen: how much impact?

no

Solid metallic hydrogen: will it superconduct at room temperature?

no

Will the Italian constitutional referendum pass?

no

Hofer for president in Austria on 4 December?

no

Will Donald Trump be the President of the United States on January 1, 2018?

yes

Donald J. Trump is the President-Elect of the U.S., making it extremely likely that he will assume the Presidential office in January 2017. In addition to the usual mortal risks that might prevent a president from serving the second year of his term, the likelihood of either resignation or impeachment seem somewhat higher in Trump's case than for some previous Presidents-Elect. By some accounts he spent part of his campaign not believing that he would get the job, and may find it not to his liking. He also has legal cases pending, and due to his public-sector inexperience may be comparatively unaware of the the borderline between traditional exercise of presidential power and impeachable offenses.

More attention to potential evidence for a fifth fundamental force?

no

Is Arnold alive?

no

More "Live(s) you can save" in 2016?

no

Will the Extreme Light Infrastructure facility come online as planned in 2018?

no

Will the "Project Blue" campaign to kick-start a planet-imaging camera of Alpha Centauri reach its goal on Kickstarter?

no

Will recounts appreciably change US presidential vote count?

no

Will 2017 see the smallest extent of Arctic Sea ice in recorded history?

no