An artificial intelligence predicts the future

This publication draws on a wide range of expertise to illuminate the year ahead. Even so, all our contributors have one thing in common: they are human. But advances in technology mean it is now possible to ask an artificial intelligence (AI) for its views on the coming year. We asked an AI called GPT-2, created by Openai, a research outfit. GPT-2 is an "unsupervised language model" trained using 40 gigabytes of text from the internet.