China and the GCC began negotiations for a free trade agreement in 2005, and the parties are reportedly pushing forward toward a conclusion (Chinese State Council, GCC, Yicai Global, GCC- Member States). The signing of an FTA or the announcement of...

Amy Wax is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Dean Ruger of UPenn law has criticized her and sent a letter to the UPenn faculty senate, requesting a hearing to conduct a review of her conduct. Amy Wax has a legal defense fund..

Weapons in which the energy is provided by nuclear fission or fusion have only twice in history been detonated outside of a controlled test environment, in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events in World War II.

Since then, the world has nearly gone to...

Package delivery by drone has been a goal of companies such as Amazon, who in 2020 won approval from the FAA to deliver packages by drone.

Neuroscientist and fiction author Erik Hoel wrote the following about drone delivery in the year 2050 in a...

As of April 2023, the largest model currently known is GPT-4 and while information about the compute needed to train the model is not public, GPT-4 is estimated by Epoch to have been trained with 2.1E+25 FLOPs.

The largest Chinese-made model is...

A declassified assessment by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was made available on 2021-10-29 and is based on information available through August 2021. Notably, it found wide agreement among the U.S. IC's 18...

In the past, US presidents ran on the tickets of various different parties. However, since the administration of Franklin Pierce starting in 1853, all US presidents have been members of either the Democratic or Republican parties. This has granted...

After years of delays, Boeing is pushing for its first launch with a crew aboard in 2024 (NASA Spaceflight, Boeing - Starliner Updates). Confused? Check our FAQ or ask us for help. To learn more about Good Judgment and Superforecasting, click here..

Many AI experts worry about powerful AI getting into the hands of bad actors—those who might use such powerful AI to cause damage or for personal gain that inflicts costs on others—via hacking. A bad actor might be a black hat hacker, a terrorist...

On August 21, 2013, rockets with chemical payloads landed around the neighborhood of Zamalka, located in Ghouta (an agricultural area outside of Damascus), resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties. A UN team visited the area and confirmed that...

Related Questions on Metaculus:

• Will there be a complete 4 year interval in which world output doubles, before the first 1 year interval in which world output doubles?
• Will there be a complete 4 year interval in which world output doubles,...

The Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missile is a German-produced air-launched weapon with a declared range of 500+ km and is designed to destroy "hard and deeply buried targets" (HDBT) such as hardened underground bunkers. Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) may...

Will Insight Prediction become a unicorn -- that is, a startup with a valuation of over $1 billion -- by the end of 2025? If yes, this market will resolve at one dollar. However, if Insight Prediction gains a valuation of $100 million or more, but...

Machine intelligence has been steadily progressing since the invention of the digital computer, but this progress has arguably been accelerating of late, with widespread deployment of machine learning systems and dramatically increased funding of...

You can now see an excellent visualization of global catastrophic risks estimates produced in the Ragnarök series here.

The invention of nuclear weapons gave humanity the technical capacity to cause devastation on a hitherto unseen scale....

The original wager for this question appeared here on July 27, 2023 at 4:1 odds favoring (Metaculus forecaster) Matthew Barnett.

Caplan writes:

Matthew Barnett seems likely to beat me on our current AI bet. Even so, I’m ready to do...

Nigeria experienced nine attempted or successful coups between 1966 and 1993. The country exited military rule in 1999.

Recent (starting 2021) military coups or coup attempts in Western Africa and the Sahel region have occurred in Niger, Mali,...

Related Question on Metaculus:

• Will the U.S. phase out per-country caps on employment-based visas before 2025?

In the U.S., immigration visas are limited to 140k per year. Of those, a maximum of 7% from the same country are permitted. ...

Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is a former actress, activist, and author who married Prince Harry in 2018. She and her husband stepped back from their roles as senior members of the British royal family in 2020 and moved to California, where...

Global trade has increased from 27% of GWP in 1970 to 61% in 2008. This has brought benefits such as poverty alleviation and lower prices for consumers, but has also been targeted for deleterious effects on labour in developed countries, such as...