People have always wanted to know what comes next. Some approach the question scientifically. Others focus on probability and decision-making. A few explore intuition and consciousness. We all dislike uncertainty a little more than we’d like to admit. If you would like to know more about the topic, we recommend the following reads.
There will, of course, be skeptics. People often tend to consider future predictions to be grand predictions. But that’s not the way we are looking at it.
We think predictions can be many things — a warning, an estimate, or simply one of possible outcomes. And it is not really right to associate them with facts, because facts belong to the past.
Even the weather forecast is a prophecy though we don’t naturally call it a prophecy, so even quite scientific predictions are not facts. So if we trust weather forecasts so readily, why not give a chance to predictions about other events?
#1 Associative Remote Viewing: The Art & Science of Predicting Outcomes for Sports, Politics, Finances and the Lottery — Debra Lynne Katz
If there is one book on this list that is directly about making real-world predictions, this is probably it.
Associative Remote Viewing, often shortened to ARV, is a structured prediction method developed from remote viewing research. People describe hidden targets that are associated with different possible outcomes of the future event.
The book covers how prediction sessions are designed in detail, why feedback matters so much, common mistakes beginners make, and how teams attempt to improve consistency over time.
The author treats prediction like a skill. The emphasis is on protocols, practice, record keeping, and reducing bias wherever possible.
If you’re curious, we found what is probably the best and simplest personal ARV-like prediction tool on Reddit — something that even complete beginners can use. The idea is quite simple. You receive a string of numbers and letters, working as a code, and try to perceive the object associated with it completely blind about it. This could be a playing card, an image, a thought, or something much simpler, like whether the object inside a box is hot or cold. There are responses to choose from.
Once you’ve made your choice, you receive feedback based on the event outcome linked to that target — for example, Norway wins France during FIFA World Cup Group 2026. Maybe your predictions are no better than chance. Or maybe they’re consistently better. That’s something you can actually measure with the tool.
#2 Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku
This book is engaging, optimistic, and makes complex topics easy to follow. Many people even say Kaku was the person who first got them interested in physics. Physicists, however, tend to be much more critical. They think the author often blurs the line between established science and speculation. So his futurist predictions are largely treated as thought experiments.
Nevertheless, we believe such books are also worth attention and a “fiction + analysis” approach to forecasting the future along with that. To support the idea, we want to provide an example from another book – AI 2041 (2021). The book combines fictional stories with technical analysis by Kai-Fu Lee. One Reddit user decided to look back and evaluate how well its AI predictions had actually held up. Overall, many of its predictions turned out to be surprisingly accurate for the pre-ChatGPT era.
Predictions that proved largely accurate:
- The rapid rise of deepfake technology.
- Widespread adoption of AI in education, particularly personalized learning.
- How easy voice cloning would become.
- The growing use of AI in insurance for pricing and risk assessment.
- Partial displacement of jobs across certain industries.
Predictions that were inaccurate or only partly correct:
- The timeline for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which remains highly debated.
- Autonomous vehicles, which have been adopted more slowly than expected.
- The pace of chatbot and large language model (LLM) development, which the book significantly underestimated. In reality, these technologies advanced much faster than anticipated.
So we shouldn’t dismiss literature just because it seems controversial. It may be far ahead of its time — or it may not.
#3 Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
Remember when we said that a prophecy isn’t necessarily a fact, but can also serve as a warning? The next book is a perfect example of that. Published in 2004, it turned out to be surprisingly prophetic.
Its central idea is that civilizations rarely collapse because of a single catastrophe. Instead, they gradually decline as five key pillars of society begin to erode: families and communities, higher education, science, government, and professional ethics.
Despite its rather gloomy subject, readers don’t describe the book as hopeless. Quite the opposite. Many say it doesn’t simply warn about where society could be heading, but also offers ideas for slowing that decline — or even avoiding it altogether.
#4 Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Sometimes the future can be predicted simply by doing good analysis.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction argues exactly that. The authors studied an elite group of people known as “superforecasters” and explored what makes their predictions consistently more accurate than average. He suggests gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking in probabilities rather than certainties, working in teams, keeping track of their results, and not being afraid to admit mistakes or change their minds when new information appears.
One of the book’s main ideas is that good forecasting doesn’t necessarily require powerful computers or mysterious methods. Sometimes, it simply comes down to disciplined thinking.
#5 The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t by Nate Silver
Once you start making predictions, another question naturally follows: why are so many of them wrong?
Nate Silver argues that the problem usually isn’t a lack of information. We live in a world full of data, opinions, and headlines, but very little of it actually helps us forecast the future. The real challenge is separating the signal from the noise.
The book uses examples from elections, financial markets, weather forecasting, poker, and sports to show how probability, statistics, and uncertainty work in practice. You don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy it. In fact, one of the book’s biggest strengths is explaining statistical thinking in plain English.
After reading it, you probably won’t become someone who can predict the future. But you may become much better at recognizing which predictions are actually worth trusting.