23 Predictions for 2023

John J. Schaub 

Dec 24 , 2022 

Planning is hard! and the major reason planning is so hard is that making specific predictions about the future is essentially impossible. Beyond the general difficulty of knowing what will happen and when it will happen there are blackswan style events like COVID that can roll in and disrupt everything. Taken together the chances of getting things right more than half the time are pretty low. Regardless I decided to put down a series of predictions about next year. I tried to make these as measurable as possible so it should be fairly easy to come back next year and see if I got anything right. To keep things fair I allowed myself to make fairly general predictions in areas outside my expertise and more aggressive predictions in areas I am more familiar with. With 23 predictions in total and a few that are admitted longshots I will be happy if I get at least 12 correct. If you think I got anything wildly wrong and you would like to put a friendly wager on it reach out.

General Economy

Contrary to what you might read on WallStreetBets predicting the stock market is pretty simple in that in the aggregate in the long term it goes up. Predicting any given year however is much much harder. That said given we have seen an aggressive downturn in 2022 I am probably quite safe in this prediction.

The entire crypto currency as an asset class has never made sense to me and given recent events I cannot imagine it turning around in a significant way. For the record I do believe there are some interesting use cases for crypto and blockchain as I have detailed previously but an investable asset class is not one of them.

This is actually a bit of a double prediction. My feeling is that inflation has essentially peaked at this point and is now driven primarily by high energy costs which are almost entirely the result of non economic factors. My suspicion is that central banks will accept slightly higher inflation in the near term than they would otherwise and will be less hawkish with rates than they are currently broadcasting. 

I am writing this from a two bedroom London flat that cost $700 USD to heat last month so I might be a bit jaded but with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the coming advent of mass scale AI, we will see both increasing energy demand and constrained supply for the near future so I am feeling very safe in this prediction. I will count this one as correct if the energy usage at my flat costs increase by more than 20% yoy in 2023. It should be noted that I am also very much inline with the current consensus thinking here and this is the prediction equivalent of a free space in bingo.

It is not easy to make an actual measurable prediction but my feeling is that coworking is the wave of the future. I will count this prediction as correct if at least one major (Market Cap> $5B USD) company announces a move to a coworking first model in 2023.

World Events

In this case I am being solidly more optimistic than the consensus estimate. My reasoning is simply that the western world remains much more strongly unified than Russia could have possibly predicted and appears willing to continue to escalate support for Ukraine. With the US election in 2024, US and European leaders will be strongly incentivized to push for an end to the conflict before winter 2023. I have not made any prediction on where the resulting border will be but I would not be surprised if Crimea remains in Russian hands with an agreement on water rights to the peninsula. 

CANZUK is the idea that Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom should move toward a unified economy and currency. Essentially it is the EU for the commonwealth nations. There are pro's and con's to the idea but with the increased focus on friend shoring in an increasingly hostile world I absolutely see middle powers trying to gain an edge by forming a unified trading block.

I am in line with the consensus estimate that China will not invade this year but it remains a prediction worth making because the general consensus is also that China will invade in the next decade.

In normal times this would be a no brainer of a prediction but given recent history I might be going out on a limb on this one. 

In this prediction I am going out on a limb a bit. From a political strategy perspective it would make little sense for the Canadian Liberal party to call an election so soon but my estimate is they will lose the support of the NDP and be forced to do so.

General Technology

I have been pretty public in my prediction that the Metaverse will not be the gamechanger that some think it will be. It should be noted that some very smart people who are significantly more accomplished than I disagree with me. I will count this prediction as correct if Meta spends less than the currently projected 20% of their development costs on the Metaverse in 2023.

FAANG stocks have performed very poorly in 2022. I do not expect that trend to continue but I do expect Meta (aka Facebook) to lag the others.

This is a bit of a give away prediction as Google really has no choice but to launch a competitor quickly. To keep things fair I've made the additional prediction that the service will be subscription rather than advertisement funded. My thinking here is that ad funded AI is going to have a serious conflict of interest problem and in general Google will be looking for a way to rely less on ad revenue going forward.

Although I have not seen this discussed in the media it has been a widely ranging rumour in tech circles for most of 2022 that Google has something pretty amazing in the pipeline. I am essentially guessing that these rumours are true and the Chat GPT launch will cause them to speed up their efforts.

I have not been using Mastodon for long but I do like what I see. The notion that an individual or brand can build a social media audience that is platform independent is going to appeal to any marketer that knows what they are doing. I will count this prediction as successful if at least five fortune 500 companies have a presence on Mastodon by Dec 31, 2023. An interesting corollary of this prediction is the fact that mass adoption of Mastodon will certainly mean an entrenchment of influencer marketing as the platform itself does not support paid ads the way Twitter or Facebook do.

The accuracy of this one entirely depends on what you mean by mainstream of course. I was going to set the criteria that there would be at least one airport in the world where driverless cars were doing pickups but apparently that happened Dec 16th, 2022 in Phoenix. So instead I will count this prediction as correct if there are driverless cabs operating in at least five cities globally. 

I am outside the consensus opinion on this one but my feeling is that authorities are waking up to the risk of social media weaponization and are likely to clamp down in the near future. 

This prediction is going to run directly into my previous prediction about autonomous cars and I am honestly not sure how to reconcile the two. The issue here is that the Russia - Ukraine war has shown the world just how effective drones can be as a weapons delivery system and there is no doubt in my mind that authorities are scrambling to determine how to prevent them from being used by terrorist groups.  

FinTech and Banking

Recent events have made the regulation of Crypto exchanges all but inevitable in my opinion.  I will give myself some leeway on what exactly significant means but my guess is it won't be an arguable outcome.

London saw the most Fintech investment of any city globally in 2022 and I am predicting that will occur again in 2023.  London has a lot of wind at it's back when it comes to Fintech and tech in general not all of which is necessarily obvious. First Brexit has harmed the UK economy and my feeling is that the government sees Finance and Fintech as one of the few areas where it can really move the needle in the short term so they are putting a lot of effort into building the sector. Second the Russia-Ukraine war has displaced an absolute gold mine of talented tech staff. I have been in the technology sector since the dotcom crash and I have never seen anything like the level of talent that is available for hire in London right now or will be arriving shortly if my LinkedIn connection requests are an indication.  Over the next few years I have no doubt that this surplus of talent that the UK is wisely hoovering up will bring real benefits to London.

As far as predictions go this one is a longshot akin to calling a home run, aka if it actually happens you can expect me to brag about calling it. There are a few trends that are coming together that have me feeling that this outcome is at least plausible. First Wise has not done well in the stock market and investors are bound to be losing patience in the near term. Second Wise has an amazing product but for a few reasons the public perception of the company is not good and trust is everything in Fintech as I have written about previously. Third, at some point some telecom company is going to figure out that they control smartphones and smartphones are quickly becoming people's wallet. Take all this together and there is massive value to be unlocked by a global telecom company or smartphone manufacturer buying Wise. 

Looping back to my prediction about interest rates the entire concept of a Central Bank interest rate has been compared to trying to adjust a clock by throwing rocks at it from across the room. That is as a lever to control the economy interest rates are blunt and far too slow acting. A Central Bank Digital Currency opens up possibilities for fine grained economic adjustment and simplified taxation that are going to prove too good to pass up. Really the prediction here is that the first CDBC beta launches in 2023 as I see the eventual launch as essentially inevitable. 

Looping back to the comment I made earlier about smartphones becoming the de facto wallet for many people, the last barrier is really government issued ID. Governments are historically very slow to adopt technology unless pushed to do so. In this case the motivation from a government perspective is going to be reduced costs and increased security including the ability to authenticate online. There have been early stage trials of just this sort of tech in 2022. I will count this prediction as accurate if we see a statewide pilot announced before the end of 2023.