Predictions - Second Batch and Review

A week before the Iran war started, I published my first batch of predictions. We are now 100 days later and time as come to see how the past predictions held. The article can be read here:

Let’s first make a quick recap of the four predictions that I made.

1. The UFO files release. I was essentially correct in my prediction that the release was going to be “new layer of Social Matryoshka nonsense”. It was not that hard to forecast, and might appear inconsequential. But if you take a step back this is nothing else than the question of “are we alone?” in this universe, and basically no one really cares in 2026. Both of the main churches about ufology remain on there pre-release stance. The debunkers still think that there is nothing to see, the believers continue to believe, and the conspirationnist still find material to present the whole phenomenon as a conspiracy of some sort. The lines haven’t moved, and this is the most interesting to notice: information releases don’t help you to understand better.

2. The Iran war. I had a good structure but the ordering was inverted from what happened: I thought regime change was least likely and a ceasefire most likely. The ceasefire did happen, but regime change got closer than I expected (Khamenei was killed in the first decapitation strike though it is not clear that the regime changed enough for the war to end). I also correctly anticipated Iran's saturation attack strategy: Iran launched a torrent of hundreds of retaliatory missiles and thousands of drones across the region. The framework was right, the probability ordering was imperfect.

3. The American looming civil war. This is way too early for this one. I have until the end of the Trump administration though. I am still thinking along the lines of what I forecasted

4. The unravelling of post WWII international order. The war has accelerated this breakdown down to the bedrock. When the war kicked off, the UN was entirely sidelined. Instead, we saw a chaotic, fragmented response: the UK deploying assets independently, the US unilaterally altering sanctions on Russian oil to offset the Hormuz crisis, and Pakistan/Qatar acting as independent mediators outside traditional global frameworks. On the Tech Sovereignty Angle: My note about states lacking administrative capacity without big tech has been vividly vindicated. Cyber warfare, digital identity tracking for wartime transit, and the reliance on commercial satellite networks and private AI infrastructure during the initial February/March bombing campaigns proved that tech giants aren’t just vendors—they are sovereign-adjacent actors in modern conflict. This is an ongoing trend but I was directionally right.

All in all it was quite a good a batch.

Time has also come to produce a new batch of predictions for the next quarter and for longer time period. I am going to split between short term and longer term predictions. I am focusing on predictions that are linked with the ideas that are developed in this Substack and linked to the revolution to a digital culture. I am going to make it a recurring theme and produce a new batch of prediction and assessment over the past predictions at each quarter. More precisely, I am going to use the articles that I have published since the last batch to produce the next batch.

Short-term predictions

1. The return of scarcity. My first prediction is a bit unusual because it is inspired by a metaphysical article I wrote on the Katechon, in which I describe the material costs associated with AI development in a theological way. From a more mundane perspective, the idea is this: before AI, you had a clear idea of your IT costs. Basically, you signed a contract with the right SLAs, or you simply knew how many computers your company owned. With the rise of agentic AI, it’s a completely different story. Either you have a limited account and spend all your tokens in a few hours, or you might find yourself with a bill in the neighborhood of half a trillion dollars, as Axios reported. The point is that it is very hard to predict, both scientifically and economically, what an AI is going to do and how much it will cost. This marks a new phase in the digital revolution. One could say that the major disruption of digital technology was getting rid of the scarcity mindset, as the marginal cost of storing, broadcasting, and using information dropped to zero. Once you had network access, whether you used your computer or not made no noticeable difference from an energy standpoint (similarly, a computer doesn’t experience wear and tear the way a car does).

   But with AI and its massive power requirements, the issue of scarcity is making a comeback. My prediction is that more and more companies will realize this, which will cool down the current AI frenzy. Companies will start making trade-offs and evaluating whether using AI is truly worth it. You can easily imagine trade-offs like: “We are going to store the data, but we won’t process it, because only a fraction of it will actually be useful.” I expect this kind of arbitrage will grow and slow the adoption rate of AI within the IT industry.

   It is going to be interesting to see how the job market evolves and how IT companies communicate around this. A good place to study this shift will likely be LinkedIn, where I expect to see more and more messaging around this trend. After all, corporate hype and virtue-signaling trends have their merits too.

2. No clear cut ending to the Iran War. I don’t expect to have a clear resolution of the Iran war. This is a clear example of an absence of closure as discussed in “Closure and Leisure”. The cease-fire was never clear, and the war was/is never clear either. There are bursts of violence followed by days/weeks of apathy. There is no end in sight. Also there is no front line: strikes are all over Iran and in neighboring countries from Israel to EAU passing by Kuwait and Qatar. Both are trends linked to the digital revolution in that, this revolution produces a new kind of conflicts. The first point is based on interdiction that I called “Mutually Assured Dronization” in “Omniconvergence”. The second point is the discrete nature of those confrontations both in the form—strikes— and in the content—the theory of victory is a laundry list of changing items, a kind of Red Queen race applied to strategy as discussed in “The Draft for the Drift”—.

Broad-scope prediction

1. Decoupling lived experience and virtual presence. If there is one universally shared feeling, it is the hatred of being cheated. The advancement of AI across all domains has introduced an unprecedented ability to deceive in virtual spaces. Think of it like Cyrano de Bergerac helping Christian de Neuvillette charm Roxane with his borrowed words; the current shallowness of GPT’s poetic abilities only makes the scene comical, but the essence is exactly the same. I have previously written about this trend in “What You Get and What You See.” My prediction here is twofold that are the two sides of the same coin:

   1. The economy of trust will become a major trend in IT. The core objective will be to create social media platforms whose primary function is to help users separate the wheat from the chaff—essentially the exact inverse of self-promotion-driven platforms like Instagram.

   2. A growing distrust of, and lack of interest in, things that cannot be touched. This ranges from abstract institutions (which are merely shared ideas) to a renewed focus on personal, shared experiences. For instance, expect an increase in group holidays where people aim to build real-world memories rather than simply share pictures over an application. Think back to what happened to the music industry in the late 1900s and early 2000s.

   I expect the next counter-culture to take this physical form, although I have no idea, at the time of writing, exactly what shape it will take. The only self-evident truth right now is that podcasts are no longer the home of counter-culture—not when even the King of England has tried to launch his own.

I don’t have anything to add at the time of writing. Let’s get back to it in a hundred days to see how things have evolved.