Podcast: The Power of Predictions with Carissa Véliz
Predictions are everywhere these days. Philosopher Carissa Véliz says they're more about power than knowledge.
We're swimming in predictions. Polls treated as prophecy, prediction markets reported as news, tech executives announcing that their preferred future is “inevitable.” We tend to hear all of this as information about what's coming. Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz wants us to hear it differently: a prediction is rarely knowledge about the future — it is, far more often, a bid to control it.
Véliz, a professor at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and author of Privacy Is Power, joins Dave on the new episode of Dave Troy Presents to discuss her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.
Carissa Véliz
Her argument reaches from King Louis XI's court astrologer — who saved his own neck by predicting he would die three days before the king — to the algorithms deciding today who gets a loan, a job, or an insurance claim. Predictions about people, she argues, are not like predictions about the weather. They act like magnets, bending reality toward themselves. They are veiled commands dressed up as facts. (Fun fact: books like The Secret and The Power of Positive Thinking borrow from the same techniques.)
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, sold as engines of truth, turn out to be engines of influence: anonymous wallets funded hours before an attack on Iran walked away with $1.2 million, and news outlets now report betting odds as if they were signal. AI hiring systems select for the middle of the curve, filtering out exactly the quirky outliers a free society runs on. And the loudest warnings about killer robots, Véliz argues, distract from AI's real danger: becoming the enabling technology of authoritarianism.
Heading into the 2026 midterms, her remedy echoes Timothy Snyder's first rule: do not obey in advance. Self-fulfilling prophecies only work if we believe them. “Democracy is never won,” she says. “It's something we fight for and build every single day.”
Listen to “The Power of Predictions” with Carissa Véliz on Dave Troy Presents.
Find Carissa Véliz's book Prophecy at your favorite bookseller, watch her TED 2026 talk, and follow her on X.
Dave Troy Presents is published by America 2.0. ◼
