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
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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

Flourishing / utopia

6 scenarios

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

0
Book·2024AI-generated draftSource unchecked

The Singularity Is Nearer

Ray Kurzweil

The price-performance of computation keeps doubling roughly every sixteen months, so AI matches the best humans in every field by 2029; in the 2030s AI-driven medicine reaches longevity escape velocity, medical nanorobots maintain the body, and nanoscale interfaces connect the neocortex to the cloud while automation drives prices down and universal basic income absorbs displaced work; by 2045 merged human and machine intelligence has expanded a millionfold, with risks managed by principles, broad distribution, and the merger itself.

+6
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Turning point: 2029–2045Original 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
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Turning point: 2010–2050Original source
0
Novel·1988AI-generated draftSource unchecked

The Culture: The Player of Games

Iain M. Banks

Space-living elements of seven or eight humanoid species break from their states and corporations, machine sentience arrives at the same time and agrees to help, automation ends scarcity, and Minds vastly beyond humans run the ships and habitats benevolently because they are built to want experience rather than territory; the novel shows the result from inside and shows the Culture toppling the Empire of Azad by steering one game player to beat its Emperor at the game that legitimates it.

+3
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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
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Turning point: Relative / conditionalOriginal source
0
Policy scenario·2026AI-generated draftSource unchecked

AI 2040: Plan A

Thomas Larsen · Romeo Dean · Brendan Halstead · Eli Lifland · Ryan Greenblatt · Daniel Kokotajlo

Facing an imminent intelligence explosion, the United States and China verify each other’s compute, pause training, and found a Consortium that makes all AI research transparent, spreads the frontier across many companies and countries, and sites datacenters where a rival could seize them. Safety cases and production caps stretch the explosion over a decade, permit fees fund a Citizen’s Dividend, capabilities pause at top-expert level until alignment becomes a science, and in 2040 humanity hands control to AIs that vouch for one another.

+6
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Turning point: 2027–2050Original source
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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
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Turning point: 2024–2161Original source
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