Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01

Sure, in theory there's nothing preventing one from building such a thing, but the economics just say no to the concept.

Hyperloop doesn't fail due to missing technology, but due to economics that just don't add up.

For an example in lesson's from reality, just look at Musk's Loop project in Las Vegas: slick autonomous 10+ people buses turned into Model 3s on autonomous sleds, which were replaced by autonomous Model 3s with extra wheels, and the project ended up with regular Model 3s that have drivers (you know, for safety, even though they drive autonomously).

The concept of a vactrain isn't new and whenever someone presents an old and failed idea as the next big thing, you just need to stop and ask one simple questions: what changed?

I wouldn't place too much confidence in announcements and plans - there are lots of projects in the middle east that were halted and never finished or quickly abandoned.

Announcements like that can safely be put in the same drawer as Virgin Galactic's sub orbital tourist flights. VG even had a working prototype back in 2004(!) and didn't manage to turn it into a regular service in 16 years.

Hyperloop on the other hand doesn't even have a working prototype that demonstrates its capabilities, yet some seriously believe they can enter commercial operation in just 3 years? So far all they've ("they" being Hyperloop TT) shown was an empty shell.

Nope. I'm calling it right now: three years from now, in January 2024, there won't be an operational Hyperloop (<100 Pa vacuum tubes, MAGLEV) with passengers anywhere in world.

The sceptics were reluctant to give any such prediction, but he managed to persuade one to try.

Their prediction was that no AI would achieve a score above 90% on the Winograd Schema Challenge before 2025 (or something similar). The AI expert writing about this pointed out that a couple of months after the sceptic had made their prediction, in 2019, this threshold was passed by the BERT language model.