Revisiting 10 predictions for 2023

I’m writing this on the summer solstice, staring down the barrel of a week that promises record breaking temperatures here in the UK. I love the heat so you won’t hear me complain about it but it does remind me of something I wrote at the turn of the decade…

I made 10 predictions – some off-the-wall, and some more down-to-earth. When I predicted that the UK would experience highs of 45ºC one summer, a lot of people chortled. The record high in 2019 was 38.7ºC. In 2022, we reached 40.3ºC. It’s a record I hope isn’t ever set but with feels-like temperatures estimated to reach 42ºC, we might get closer than ever before.

That same post had predictions like ‘By 2030, a non-human entity will have passed the Turing test’ (OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 did so in 2025) and ‘By 2030, one country will have shutdown its citizens access to the internet for a total of at least 366 days – 10% of the decade’ (Myanmar alone cleared this in 2024).

Predicting the rise of AI in 2019, when ChatGPT launched in November 2022, is quite nice. But I am also wrong (so far) on a few counts too.

I predicted that ‘By 2030, almost every high-street travel agent in operation today will go the way of Thomas Cook’ but Hay’s Travel now runs 530 branches and a Which? survey last year said 94% of people were satisfied with travel agents amid a re-rise of mass market retail.

I also predicted that ‘By 2030, per capita meat consumption in both the USA and UK will be lower than it is in 2019’. One industry analysis put overall UK meat consumption at over 61kg of animal protein per head, up from 56kg a decade earlier, as cheap poultry displaced beef and lamb.

That final prediction is pure 2019. It was the Beyond Meat IPO moment, Veganuary went mainstream, oat milk was colonising coffee shops, and there was a widespread sense that the diet transition was underway and irreversible. By 2026 that wave has visibly stalled: we’re abandoning the mid-2010s environmental movement optimism in favour of convenience and hyper-individuality.

My 45ºC bet was a doom call on what happens when we let the rest of the predictions take hold. And for the most part, authoritarianism and our increasing dis-integration from the way the world actually functions is winning.