None of this was a particularly hard prediction.
BO2 released in 2012, and now we’re here. If it’s not particularly hard for you to predict the future, what will be the major military and geopolitical trends of the next 13 years Nostrachadmus?
Drone warfare will be the primary form of warfare (ie automation will continue to become more prevalent), Haiti will still be in crisis, China and the US will still be competing for military dominance, China will still have a disproportionate amount of rare earth metals (that one isn’t even a trend really, just describing geography), and states will continue to call terrorists freedom fighters whenever their goals align.
So, basically, the same trends that have been ongoing since the cold war will continue to be trends, Nostrasmartass.
China will still have a disproportionate amount of rare earth metals (that one isn’t even a trend really, just describing geography)
Actually, it’s not about geography. Rare-earth elements aren’t that rare, it’s just that they’re difficult to separate from each other and produces a lot of pollution. China’s the main exporter because they don’t care much about pollution and they undercut everyone else in the market to gain a monopoly over the years
Nostradamus was famous for making predictions vague enough that they were guaranteed to come true, FYI.
As for the “predictions”: Haiti facing a crisis is basically the history of Haiti, drones were already the future of warfare in 2012, China was already on the way to being the biggest producer of rare earth metals (along with a lot of things given all the outsourcing to China, plus there’s the size, population, and geology), “AI” targetting systems (read: computer assisted targeting) was already in development, and I’m not sure what the terrorist thing is but terrorists being called freedom fighters happen all the time.
While Nostrachadmus was known for making no predictions and mocking everybody else making semi-accurate predictions as something he could have done better himself. Nostrasmartass just mocked them all without claiming he could make any long-term predicions at all.
Past and future history is crazy.
Right? Most of this stuff was already the case in 2012, so it barely even counts as a prediction.
China’s lead in rare earth production doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere, nor does Haiti having a crisis of some sort or terrorists being called freedom fighters. And having AI do the targeting work in place of humans has been floating around as an idea since what, when The Forbin Project came out? 1970 or so?
I feel bad for Haiti, they’ve been dealt a shit hand from the very beginning. But it’s been crisis after crisis since Spanish times.
And for the tech stuff, Vannevar Bush’s 1947 Atlantic article gets you 95% of the way there.
For sure. It’s kind of fascinating, in a grim way, to contrast Haiti’s revolutionary course with the US, where basically every major power was cool with them a few years after their revolution.
One wonders how history would be different if the nations of the world had spent centuries screwing the US with debt and propping up their worst leaders and left Haiti to do its own thing.
But it’s been crisis after crisis since Spanish times.
I’d like to clarify that Haiti was actually a French colony. And a major contributing factor to Haiti’s ongoing problems is the fact that France convinced the other world powers at the time to demand that Haiti pay France reparations for the revolution.
Yeah, and it feels like if anyone deserves an easy ride, the one successful slave revolt in history should be it.
Link to the mentioned article, assuming you actually meant 45: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
If you wanted to stretch it, WWII was supposed to start with mechanical computers that made missing with a bomb impossible (the way it is with electronic systems now).
Obviously that didn’t happen. Basically, they were really expensive, single-purpose machines and didn’t work so well actually in a moving, vibrating airplane.
Thank user vzq, yet I don’t believe drone warfare was the trend at the end of the cold war nor was the US and China direct competitors in the way we see today. Come to think of it, wasn’t the cold war about the US and a different country? I’m so historyless, lol.
>Nostrasmartass
Thanks! 😊
But we had a woman as President in Black Ops II so don’t worry guys we’re good
Can’t wait for 2035 when joint Chinese and Russian forces (they’ve combined into one country or something) terrorize a Greek island with an earthquake machine, as detailed by Arma 3.
If I remember correctly, During development of Black Ops 2, Treyarch consulted with the US military or something on what “near-future” tech would be like.
I think that’s one of the reasons why I loved that game so much. It wasn’t way out there and hypothetical like Infinite Warfare was. But still grounded with realism.
It’s crazy how accurate they were!
