Predictions for 2026

(or how to embarrass myself in public)

I thought I’d get a head start on predictions for 2026..

Politics:

First and foremost: the state of the world for the next two decades will be determined largely by the 2026 U.S. midterms. The people who control the democratic party certainly know their futures depend on this; Canada’s Mark Carney and leaders across western Europe have bet their countries on Trump losing; and the GOP national leadership is only just starting to understand that the issues extend beyond their immediate personal agendas.

So how will it turn out? I believe the outcome depends on electoral reform: given honest elections and decent GOP candidates, this should be a conservative landslide in both the house and senate. Unfortunately the democrats have far more cash; mass media and cultural support; control of the judiciary; few, if any, moral constraints on action; and, highly motivated supporters.

Nevertheless I am making the positive assumption: the GOP wins the midterms - because, if they don’t, all bets are off: the U.S. will be paralyzed; the Soros people will get their fourth reich in Europe; and, the U.S. will suffer a lawfare plague alongside both inflation and scarcity with everyone’s standard of living falling rapidly.

So, assuming that the GOP maintains or extends its control of the house and senate, Trump and his successors will largely realize the MAGA agenda, China will not invade Taiwan, Japan will become a significantly more important cultural and military power, and India will totter along as Pakistan’s leadership gets further distracted by conflict with their former colleagues in Afghanistan - while most of what happens in Africa, Australia, Indonesia, and Latin America will stay just about as relevant to the rest of the world as it has been since the 18th century.

Russia will settle the war in the Ukraine militarily in the short term with the long run outcome very much along the lines I suggested a year ago - except that it will take longer, and kill or wound more people, than it should have and the problems in western Europe may delay its transition to America-like widespread prosperity by however long it takes for the Europeans to take back their countries and re-establish cultural stability.

Islam is well overdue for a revolution inside the faith, but when that happens depends on utterly opaque social trends among a billion oppressed women, whether or not the Mullahs in Iran and Afghanistan lose control, how long it takes before the peasantry in Europe starts slitting throats, and American support for the political consequences of significant change within Islam.

Beyond that? Canada will muddle along with everyone’s standard of living going down and no effective opposition to the lunacy in Ottawa emerging this year; while the inevitable bloodbath in Europe when the locals finally revolt against the left/muslim alliance feeding off them may, or may not, happen in 2026 and may, or may not, make the French revolution seem mostly peaceful by comparison - because people like Merz and Starmer are making the eventual explosion much worse by using government power to silence, isolate, and disarm their peasants.

Social change:

By the end of the year it will be obvious to most people that the programmable, general purpose, humanoid robot celebrated in science fiction for over a hundred years (viz: The Steam Man of the Prairies, 1868) will quickly become the chauffeur of choice for everything from personal vehicles and city buses to highway trucks and passenger jets. As a result millions of jobs in transportation, logistics, and retail (cashiers) will be lost over the next few years with no obvious replacements in sight.

Tesla will sell its car making business to somebody like GM or a private equity fund by late 2026 or early 2027; to supply, instead, robots with plug-in software tailored to vehicles made by others. Starting in 2027/8, those vehicles will use a new generation of far more efficient IC engines while manufacturers reduce both capital and operating costs (particularly insurance costs) further by moving much of the vehicle’s more vulnerable electronics out of the vehicle and into the robot.

Energy costs will continue to rise outside the United States and Russia but, by the end of 2026, almost everyone will have abandoned the idea that wind and solar can power the grid while dozens of nuclear power projects, particularly in the United States, will be far enough along in the regulatory system to be essentially unstoppable -despite the, by then obvious, evanescence of the power demand they were predicated on. The two main things driving the latter will be a greater than order of magnitude decrease in AI power consumption while the demand increases associated with robots will not compensate for the plateauing of demand for electric vehicle charging. As a result, first in the U.S. and eventually world-wide, pre-tax power costs will drop considerably - while natural gas and oil prices drop comparably.

Major changes in health care can be expected to show clearly in 2026 as the MAHA movement takes hold and campaign pressures finally force the GOP to kill off Obamacare and pass tort reform legislation. As a result both the costs of healthcare, and the demand for healthcare services, will fall rapidly. Similarly re-migration will continue to drive down costs for social services, housing, and food across the United States even as “blue” jurisdictions both in the United States and around the world continue to raise taxes, increase regulatory burdens, and try to suppress the social upheavals their policies lead to.

Finally, the move to elective education in which teaching is done through parent or teacher supported courseware but assimilation is done in social settings, will continue to accelerate to become the dominant American model by 2030 - eventually merging home, private, and public schooling to produce far better qualified graduates at every level.

Military Technology:

It will take a few more years for the Pentagon to notice, but the handwriting is on the wall for the toys based military. Today’s drones preview the smart artillery everyone has dreamt of for many years - and that means the important new developments will be in things that put eyes in space and boots on the ground: better personal armor, better exoskeletons, better air defense, and better logistics support along with faster and more self contained air, sea, and land transport - but fewer tanks, bombers, fighter jets, mid range missiles, and submarines.

In 1966 almost nobody not writing science fiction saw where research into single board (IC) controllers for the F-14 program would lead - the 2040 version is going to be current research into very high speed propulsion technology in the twin contexts of railguns and drones.

Science:

Assuming that the GOP holds there will be Americans on the moon in the first quarter of 2027, with robots on the way to Mars soon after. Equally importantly the replication crisis will work itself out as fewer colleges and universities graduate fewer people into the publish or perish cycle and better AI based search engines make all forms of fraud riskier and more difficult. That, coupled with change in education, means that both trust in the scientific method and enthusiasm for basic research, both of which have been in decline, will once again start to grow.

Further, an on-going major change in the way research and development monies are spent will become more obvious as larger shares of total spending go to both theoretical work and product making, with proportionally less going to support the engineering and regulatory processes between those two stages.

And, finally 2026 will be a year of major breakthroughs in both Physics and Math - with the former getting simplified as new theoretical constructs eliminate the kludges currently holding both quantum theory and the standard model together, while the latter becomes increasingly unified as more and more specialists discover they’ve found many different ways to work out similar issues.

Personal:

Every prediction I’ve sketched here, including this one, will prove wrong. (Hey, I have to get something right..)