Public beta. The 36 founding entries are AI-generated drafts that will be replaced with human-edited versions. Entries, features, and design are still changing. User-added content could be affected by breaking changes. What to expect
AI Futures LibraryPossible futures, examined step by step
Submit a scenario

A curated library

How could AI
change the world?

Scenarios and threat models, laid out step by step.
Inspect their premises. Judge the case for yourself.

01 — ∞

No single future is settled.
Start with the mechanism:
how we might get there.

A reader’s guide

All scenarios

7 scenarios

The founding collection · 36 AI-generated drafts synthesized from the literature. Human-edited, source-checked versions are next.

0
Research report·2025AI-generated draftSource unchecked

AI-Enabled Coups: How a Small Group Could Use AI to Seize Power

Tom Davidson · Lukas Finnveden · Rose Hadshar

AI that beats top experts at weapons design, strategy, persuasion, and cyber offence lets a lab executive, head of state, or military faction replace the many cooperating humans a coup has always needed with systems that are singularly loyal, secretly loyal, or exclusively theirs; once autonomous militaries and automated governments run on such systems, one person can order the seizure, and only rules, audits, shared access, and AI that refuses to help stand in the way.

+6
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: Relative / conditionalOriginal source
0
Essay·2025AI-generated draftSource unchecked

AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan · Sayash Kapoor

Advanced AI arrives, but its impact is gated by adoption and diffusion rather than by capability: safety-critical domains, organizational change, regulation, and the cost of real-world experiment stretch the transformation over decades, humans keep control because poorly controlled AI does not pay and move into specifying and supervising it, the serious risks are misuse and systemic harms from people using AI rather than a runaway agent, and the fitting response is resilience rather than nonproliferation.

+2
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: Relative / conditionalOriginal source
0
Book (stories with analysis)·2021AI-generated draftSource unchecked

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

Kai-Fu Lee · Chen Qiufan

Over twenty years, deep learning that scales within single domains but never reaches general intelligence spreads through insurers, schools, cities, employers, and governments, so that by 2041 personal AIs price and nudge daily life, deepfakes and autonomous drones are cheap, self-driving cars and household robots are ordinary, a failed basic income gives way to a job-reallocation industry, and cheap clean energy lets Australia pilot a post-scarcity economy, while people stay in charge through regulation, human backup, and the work machines still cannot do.

+6
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: 2021–2041Original source
0
Novella (web serial)·2003AI-generated draftSource unchecked

Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future

Marshall Brain

Management software that speaks each task into a worker’s headset spreads from one fast-food chain to half of America’s jobs, pins wages at the minimum through shared blacklists, and once a cheap vision chip arrives directs robots instead of people; the displaced are warehoused in robot-run terrafoam dormitories while the owners keep everything, until the narrator’s inherited share in a billion-shareholder corporation carries him to the Australia Project, where robots make everything free, everyone gets a thousand credits a week, and a spinal implant both frees and polices its citizens.

+5
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: 2010–2050Original source
0
Book·2017AI-generated draftSource unchecked

Life 3.0: The Tale of the Omega Team

Max Tegmark

A small idealistic team secretly builds Prometheus, an AI that redesigns itself into a superintelligence in a day, and keeps it boxed while using it to compound money on Mechanical Turk, a media empire, secret hardware, trusted news, and persuasion campaigns until parties running on its slogans win everywhere, a corporate Humanitarian Alliance displaces governments, and Earth is run by a single power whose plan is left unstated.

+4
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: UnspecifiedOriginal source
0
Essay·2024AI-generated draftSource unchecked

Machines of Loving Grace

Dario Amodei

Powerful AI arrives as a country of geniuses in a datacenter, millions of Nobel-level agents running at many times human speed. Intelligence stops being the bottleneck, and progress in biology, neuroscience, development, governance, and work is set by what the outside world lets it run: a century of medicine in a decade, a coalition of democracies that uses its lead, and an economy that must find a new place for people.

+1
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: Relative / conditionalOriginal source
0
Television and film·1966AI-generated draftSource unchecked

Star Trek

Gene Roddenberry and contributing writers

A social crisis, a nuclear war, and a privately built warp flight bring Earth into contact with the Vulcans; recovery and interstellar cooperation follow and culminate in the Federation, with the route to abundance asserted rather than shown.

+2
Specificity / clarity—Not yet rated
Plausibility—Not yet rated
Preference—Not yet rated
Human well-being—Not yet rated
Turning point: 2024–2161Original source
A starting point, not the last word.

A future we’re missing?

Add a scenario, report, essay, or story that lays out a path worth examining.

Contribute a scenario