Brian Wang is a long-time futurist and writer of some 8000 articles on nextbigfuture.com. Nextbigfuture is a top 5 science website (per Technorati) and has over one million page views per month (RSS feed reads and regular website). Brian has studied extinction risks and all of the current major causes of death and damage and how to mitigate them.

He made a set of 156 predictions in 2006 for nanotech-now and many of the predictions for theĀ  5 year or less timeframe have proven to be accurate. He had a long bet prediction in 2006.

http://longbets.org/266/

There will be a quantum computer with over 100 qubits of processing capability sold either as a hardware system or whose use is made available as a commercial service by Dec 31, 2010
This was fulfilled when Dwave Systems sold a 128 qubit adiabatic quantum computer for $10 million to Lockheed Martin in Nov, 2010. The sale was only revealed last month.

Some of Brian’s writing which has gotten either a lot of attention or are ideas which he thinks are worth highlighting are :

A series of articles on the actual safety and danger of energy (deaths per terawatt hour)

Mundane Singularity (technologies which are less controversial than MNT. AGI and fusion but which could be used to radically improve the world)

The nuclear cannon (using nuclear bombs from inventory, a deep hole to launch massive amounts of cargo into space while not releasing radiation into the atmosphere or violating treaties.)

Brian has tables forecasting when China’s economy will surpass the United States (2016 to 2018 on an exchange rated basis)

Forecasts of China and US GDP to 2030

Brian also has articles about making civilization more robust and how to make energy cleaner and reduce death from disease.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/saving-37-million-lives-per-year.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/12/blast-resistant-wall-paper-and-enhanced.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/re-inventing-civil-defense.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/12/nuclear-winter-and-city-firestorms.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/progress-to-vaccines-against-plague.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/extra-43-billion-to-help-vaccinate.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/poverty-in-numbers-changing-state-of.html