What will happen in 2023? Predictions and events for the year

This time last year we were looking ahead to a 2022 that we hoped might not be so dominated by the death and devastation of Covid-19.

And while the success of vaccines and our growing immunity did lead to the lifting of restrictions and reopening of international borders, 2022 was still dominated by death and destruction. The Russian invasion of Ukraine sparked the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War, while thousands were killed in Ethiopia amid the country’s brutal civil war.

Elsewhere, 2022 was the year of many prominent deaths, including world leaders Shinzo Abe, Mikhail Gorbachev, Queen Elizabeth II and Jiang Zemin.

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The Week’s own predictions for 2022 were something of a mixed bag. We were correct in our assertion that the French elections would see Emmanuel Macron returned as president and that hybrid working would become the norm after the pandemic. On the other hand, we’ve not quite seen space tourism lift off in the way we predicted 12 months ago.

As the famous saying goes, “it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”... but that’s not going to stop us having another go. Here’s what could grab world headlines in 2023.

Peace in Ukraine?

In February 2022 Vladimir Putin made his shocking decision to mount an invasion of Ukraine that many people didn’t believe was possible, even as Russian troops massed on the border. Yet after nearly a year of fighting, Putin’s objectives remain unmet and his troops have faced devastating defeats on the battlefield.

The two nations remain locked in conflict but some believe 2023 may prove a significant year, even offering the first glimmers of peace. When the winter begins to recede, several “paths” can be traced to determine how the war will eventually end, said The Economist’s deputy editor Edward Carr. For peace to arrive, the main change that must occur is in Moscow itself, said Carr. “[Russia’s] nuclear weapons mean that a surrender cannot be imposed on the Kremlin by force of arms. Instead Russians will have to grasp the truth that Putin is squandering their lives in a futile, unwinnable war.”

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, told reporters in early December that Russia was “open to contacts and negotiations”. He claimed that Moscow would prefer a diplomatic resolution but made it clear that “talks were unlikely to progress without Washington accepting Russia’s annexation of parts of southern and eastern Ukraine”, said The Times.

Amid all the chaos, Ukraine’s chief negotiator with Russia, David Arakhamia, has said that negotiations between the two warring sides could start again as soon as “the second half of 2023”.

Rolling recessions

One of the safest bets for 2023 is that the cost-of-living crisis won’t be going away any time soon as countries around the globe face severe economic headwinds. “As we survey the prospects for the global economy, we see many reasons for concern,” said Citigroup chief economist Nathan Sheets, who listed continued challenges from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and high inflation as such reasons.

“Reflecting these factors, the global economy is likely to endure ‘rolling’ country-level recessions during the coming year,” he added, writing in a client note on 30 November.

It’s not just economists who are expecting a dire 12 months. The wider public believes inflation, interest rates, unemployment and taxes will all rise in 2023, according to a monthly Ipsos Global Inflation Monitor report in November.

Researchers interviewed almost 25,000 adults in 36 countries on their predictions for the global economy and nearly seven in ten of them thought inflation would continue to rise, while more than six in ten thought interest rates and unemployment would climb. As a result, nearly a third predicted their own standard of living would fall, with 37% expecting their disposable income to take a hit next year.

On a global level, economists believe the relative winner in 2023 could be China, which has seen a very poor 2022 economically thanks to the country’s hardline Covid-19 restrictions, which only began to be eased in early December.

“We see growth [in China] accelerating as the authorities soften the zero-Covid policy,” Sheets said. “Still, excluding China, global growth next year will be running close to some definitions of global recession. More positively, many of the recessions in our forecast are relatively mild and should help pave the way for improved performance by early 2024.”

India’s billions

Next year it is widely expected that India will surpass China as the most populous country in the world. While the honour in itself is not that remarkable, what it signifies for international relations could be significant.

“Although China’s economy is nearly six times larger, India’s growing population will help it catch up,” said The Economist, with India “expected to provide more than a sixth of the increase of the world’s population of working age (15-64) between now and 2050”.

By contrast, China’s population is in a steep – and surprising – decline. “The presumption was that [China was] going to max out in population in 2028, but now it looks like they already have, and that’s a very big change,” Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm, told The Guardian’s Julian Borger.

“China is in a race, trying to get rich before it gets old,” said Borger. “India will face similar dilemmas as its population grows. There will be more Indians of working age in relation to the elderly parents they will have to fund, but the leadership will have to be agile to reap the demographic dividend,” he added.

The rise of the East African Federation

This coming year could see the foundation of the East African Federation (EAF) – a proposed political union between several nations in East Africa. Although the concept has been discussed since the 1960s, recent years have seen greater co-ordination and willingness between Uganda, Burundi, the DRC, South Sudan, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania to form a political federation, potentially uniting a large swathe of central and eastern Africa.

This action “will form a superstate stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean” and if the project is successful, the EAF “will rank as one of the most populous and largest countries in the world”, according to Grey Dynamics, a private intelligence firm. There are “major obstacles to the eventual goal of integration for the East African Federation, but the expected benefits are encouraging”, the firm added.

Among those openly pushing for the establishment of the supra-state is the new Kenyan president William Ruto, who recently told supporters: “The community is becoming even more tightly connected with infrastructure systems criss-crossing the member countries. The possibility of an East African Federation is no longer a wild imagination or an idle dream. It is no longer a matter of if, it is a matter of when.”

Eurovision in Liverpool

A bit closer to home, May 2023 will see Eurovision return to the UK’s shores for the first time in 25 years. Following Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra’s win last May, show organisers the European Broadcasting Union opened talks with the BBC after assessing the situation in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.

It was subsequently decided that the contest would move to the UK and, after a bidding process, Liverpool was chosen as the host city. Staging Eurovision “could be a saviour for Liverpool’s struggling hospitality sector”, said the BBC, with thousands of visitors set to descend on the city, which has a rich musical history in its own right.

The UK will be hoping to go one better than Sam Ryder’s lauded second-place performance in 2022 and win Eurovision for the first time since 1997.

The Eurovision semi-finals will take place at Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena on 9 and 11 May 2023, with the final following on 13 May.

AI for an eye

Many think that 2023 will be the year that AI and in particular generative AI become a fixture in our daily lives. Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that can generate novel content, rather than simply analysing or acting on existing data, and it has seen a huge increase in usage following the release of DALL-E and ChatGPT by the AI research and deployment company OpenAI in recent months.

While image generation is fun and often humorous, “AI-powered text generation will create many orders of magnitude more value than will AI-powered image generation in the years ahead”, said Forbes. The ability of machines to generate language, specifically to write and speak, “will prove to be far more transformative than their ability to generate visual content”, added the magazine.

And could we see something like ChatGPT eventually replacing a search engine like Google? TechCrunch seems to think so. OpenAI’s new technology is “the closest approximation yet” to how such AI could work as a search engine and “it should have Google scared”, said the site.