Reasons for AI: the basic tech has been here for a while but in 2024 the amount of cash thrown into it has yielded rapid progress and returns. Every grant I work on is ending up with some section about it. On the normal consumer side we got easily accessible CoT models like o1 which make more sense and appear more promising than “just” LLMs as a direction towards intelligence. In academia every library at top universities is full of students with chatGPT open and professors are slowly giving up on written assignments as a meaningful metric. These students will be joining the work force with a dependency on models for some tasks so it's only going to ramp up further even if no further breakthroughs on the tech itself happen (unlikely). We’re seeing python boom as a programming language and code churn on GitHub has increased massively as people with and without programming expertise are putting out a high quantity of code with varying quality. The end of the year is closing out with more widespread access to video models which lower the skill set required to make convincing fake clips and will further destabilize democracies

Reasons against “aliens”: the public panic about drones in NJ at the end of the year looks the same as previous public panics about killer clowns, satanic D&D, etc. Most likely outcome is business as usual because we have no evidence it's alien related and lots of evidence 20-30% of the general populace is stuck in the Middle Ages and freaks out if they notice planes too much in between watching tiktoks about how to become magical witches or churn butter.

Reasons for the presidential election: will certainly have widespread consequences. Could have huge impacts on AI. Could have huge impacts on climate. Could have huge impacts on rewarding or punishing Russian aggression which could end up as a flash point for destabilizing the world order and peace between superpowers. Could lead to a nuclear holocaust. Could lead to further weakening of US institutions and more rapid imperial decline, accelerating a series of proxy conflicts in the resulting power vaccuum. Could undercut public health further and increase vulnerability to future pandemics globally. Could lead to bizarre economic policy choices that destabilize the US economy and ripple out to destablize the global economy further.

Reasons against the presidential election: Any of these could turn out to be more impactful than anything else but we have no way of knowing what will actually happen and if some of the proposed policies and changes will be dropped, changed, blocked, etc. and which of them would have gone the other way had we had the other outcome in the election. We only know it will be more chaotic than the current situation of having a barely functioning cognitively distroyed figurehead with a series of institutionalist viziers running things.

can you add THE PIVOT as an answer? I will bet it up

Hey, I mostly just duplicated another market early cause I wanted to start my betting. But I'm not maintaining this too actively, so feel free to further duplicate/copy/etc so that the best version of a question like this gets traffic

@Ernie This year, I'm running a version which resolves to a poll:

😁
Although I have to note quite a few people were unhappy with my resolution of last year's market...

I propose adding the US presidential election, though maybe it's mainly impactful for 2025+

I think doing these markets about years far in the future is so fun. Particularly if we, say, also promised to close it on Jan 1 of the target year. That way you have to lock in your guesses before and can only watch. (I'm not doing that here; it'll be open til the new year and beyond)

@Ernie do you have a strong prior of AI being the most important thing in any given year? Would you say it was the most important thing last year?

@Joshua hmm I think this year a ton of people's minds were changed by AI. And a ton of money and effort shifted that way. I wouldn't say it had been the most important thing in many previous years

Just checking, is it intentional that this one isn't free response like the market you duplicated? It looks like only you can add answers.

@Joshua ah I see. I had wanted to manage their addition to avoid overlaps or confusing answers.

@Ernie cool market, this one would probably be higher quality if the free-response already exists because you can filter for the best predictions. Gonna subsidize and boost it a bit

@Ernie Gotcha! Managing the addition is reasonable. I was going to try to add the other top answers from the original market:

So weight loss, trump indictments, and strikes. Do those all seem like reasonable candidates to you?

@Joshua yep, thanks!

OH wait i have made the classic mistake of misreading the year and thinking this was for 2023 😂