Fearless Predictions for 2013

Let’s do something different this year.  Instead of just looking at my predictions for2012 from a year ago, let’s see what else I said for previous years:

(2007) “The US's biggest entertainment splash and its biggest technology innovation will both come out of South Korea.”  In other words, I knew about Psy six years ago!

(2008) “College football will have a scandal that makes Mike Vick, Tim Donaghy, and steroids look forgettable by comparison, and it will involve sex, money, and race.”  PSU is far worse than the scandal I had in mind.

(2009) “We will not be talking about Sarah Palin by the end of the year.”  This took awhile, but it’s largely true now, isn’t it?  Please?

(2010) “We're going to see the first prototype of a laptop the size of a deck of cards, which projects its screen onto a wall and a virtual keyboard and mouse onto a table surface. No one will be ready for this.”  I’m pretty sure this exists now.  I’m not entirely sure why this isn’t a bigger deal.

(2011) “Plastic surgery ‘jumps the shark,’ and we coin a new phrase for it to account for its utter banality in Hollywood.”  So banal, in fact, that no one really talks about it anymore.

(2012) “We start to see the seeds of a breakup of China into several separate nations, a la USSR in the 20th century, as the Communist Party proves unable to hold together an increasingly dynamic, vocal, and restive populace. (And here we were worried that China's economy would overtake ours in a couple of decades!)”  I still think this is going to happen.  Check back in five years.

In other words, if you word things just the right way, and make enough inane predictions, you will eventually end up looking like Nostradamus.  On to 2013:

1. Having conquered sports and politics, analytics makes a big mainstream splash in farming and casting.

2. One of the big automakers announces a future date by which some of its models will have a driverless mode.

3. Bryce Harper makes the leap, both in his play and in his outspokenness about his faith.

4. Bullish on: Turkey, Israel, Chile, Iran.  Bearish on: England, China, South Africa, Russia.