Metaculus Launches the ‘Forecasting Our World In Data’ Project to Probe the Long-Term Future

With support from the FTX Future Fund, the project features a public forecasting tournament and a Pro Forecaster initiative delivering 1, 3, 10, 30, and 100-year predictions

Today, Metaculus is launching Forecasting Our World In Data, a tournament that will deliver predictions on technological advancement, global development, and social progress on time horizons ranging from one to 100 years, with close collaboration from the Our World In Data (OWID) team.

OWID is one of the world’s largest open online repositories of data and is a valuable source of information about both humanity’s progress and challenges. Metaculus will collect forecasts and analyses on 30 OWID metrics — including CO2 emissions, supercomputer performance, nuclear stockpiles, and more — to generate likelihoods of specific outcomes in humanity’s future. Aggregating crowd forecasts and weighting them by forecasters’ past performance leads to greater accuracy than relying on a single model or subject matter expert alone.

The Forecasting Our World In Data tournament will award a prize pool of $20,000 to incentivize accurate forecasting and insightful written comments by forecasters. For each OWID metric, participants are invited to predict outcomes at 1, 3, 10, 30, and 100 years. Prizes will be awarded for accurate performance on 1 and 3-year outcomes and cogent analysis on 10, 30, and 100-year outcomes. Questions are staggered, with 10 questions opening today and 10 additional questions opening October 19th and 26th. A team of Metaculus Pro Forecasters will also predict each metric.

A grant from the Future Fund makes this project possible, and is greatly appreciated. Our thanks also to the forecasting community for contributing to a greater understanding of humanity’s near- and long-term future. The first set of questions is now open for public forecasting here.

Metaculus is an online forecasting platform and aggregation engine working to improve human reasoning and coordination on topics of global importance.

Our World In Data publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.

FTX Future Fund is a philanthropic fund that supports ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects.