Mobile App Developer · Android & Flutter
Note: This article was completed by AI (Claude) from my initial notes and thoughts.
It hit me the other day — there have been so many big predictions over the years. End of the world, population collapse, when AGI shows up. Whoever said them sounded so sure. But what actually happened? Nobody ever goes back and checks.
So here's a timeline. Twenty-five of them, spanning religious doomsday claims, secular catastrophe forecasts, and tech/AI timelines. Each one names who said it, when, what year it pointed at, and what actually happened. Sources are linked wherever one exists — Wikipedia avoided unless nothing more primary could be found.
A few of the corrections are more interesting than the predictions themselves. No Maya text actually prophesies the world ending in 2012 — the stone in question talks about a god's "descent." Herbert Simon's line about machines doing "any work a man can do" within twenty years was actually written in 1960, not the 1965 date everyone repeats — that later book was just a reprint. The Limits to Growth gave conditional scenarios, not forecasts; the book names no date for resource exhaustion at all. Those gaps between the popular version and what the source actually says are worth more than the predictions themselves.
A few of my own judgment calls aren't settled either — flagged as contested. Jehovah's Witnesses don't consider 1914 a failed prediction; they read it their own way. Whether Moore's Law is "dead" is still argued in the industry. That kind of ambiguity shouldn't get flattened into a single checkmark, so it's marked separately.
Click a card to see the verbatim quote (where one exists), what actually happened, and any correction. Scroll left and right; the filters up top narrow it to one outcome.
Two quotes are deliberately left blank — no verifiable verbatim wording could be found, and leaving it empty beats writing something that merely sounds right.
If you've got a favorite "big prediction" and know what actually happened to it, drop it in the comments below.