Primary forks and live predictions

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Four big forks sit above everything else humanity is watching right now. Each live prediction below feeds one or more of them — click a fork to see what pulls which way, or open a prediction to see its full read.

The four primary forks

4 forks · 5 sub-forks

Primary fork · FORK 1Within 10–30 years

The great filter

Does the species make it through the next decade in some recognizable form, or does one of the biggest risks actually fire?

16 contributory predictionsExpand ↓

Timeline A55%

World transforms

Humanity makes it through — transformed, with abundance and new structures, but still here as a species. The hardest problems get solved before the hardest problems kill us.

Timeline B30%

World ends

A catastrophic phase failure fires first. Species-level collapse through climate, biosecurity, nuclear, or an AI-adjacent cascade before cooperation catches up.

The timeline nobody's watching

World fragments

Local collapses and local phase-transitions happen in parallel. No single global outcome — the world splits into zones with wildly different fates.

55%30%

Two poles are doing most of the pulling. One pole we’re watching for upset.

What shifts you between timelines

AI alignment research pace — How fast the field proves that frontier systems do what we meant, not what we literally said.
Nuclear restraint and arms control — Whether the current drift of eroding treaties reverses in time, or compounds into a doctrine shift.
Biosecurity preparedness — Pandemic-response infrastructure, DNA synthesis screening, and dual-use biology containment.

Top contributory readings

·Palisades nuclear plant starts generating…·US grid-connected battery storage capacit…·Russia and Ukraine reach a formal ceasefi…

16 total · 0 toward A · 0 toward B · 0 watching third pole

Primary fork · FORK 2Within 15–40 years

Utopia or dystopia

If we do make it through, what kind of world is on the other side — abundance for everyone, or concentration of power into very few hands?

40 contributory predictionsExpand ↓

Timeline A35%

Utopia

Abundance economics, material and cognitive. Radical individual freedom and flourishing become the baseline. Work is optional, meaning is self-chosen.

Timeline B45%

Dystopia

Power concentrates with whoever controls compute and data. Mass surveillance becomes the substrate. Suffering gets cheap. Meaning collapses faster than it can be rebuilt.

The timeline nobody's watching

Mixed-regime equilibrium

Pockets of utopia and pockets of dystopia at the same time. Where you live, what passport you hold, and which network you plug into decide which world you get.

35%45%

Two poles are doing most of the pulling. One pole we’re watching for upset.

What shifts you between timelines

Compute concentration vs decentralization — Whether frontier compute stays with three labs or spreads to thousands.
Labor-displacement response — Does policy catch up with the pace of automation, or lag until the social contract snaps.
Open-source vs frontier-lab gatekeeping — How much capability stays behind closed APIs vs how much is openly releasable.

Top contributory readings

·US unemployment rate stays between 3.8% a…·An openly-released AI model holds a top-5…BNBER declares a US recession with a start…

40 total · 0 toward A · 4 toward B · 0 watching third pole

Primary fork · FORK 3Within 10–30 years

Individualist or collectivist

When coordination gets this cheap and this fast, does personal sovereignty survive — or does the hive-mind win because it is more efficient?

12 contributory predictionsExpand ↓

Timeline A35%

Individualist

Human sovereignty is preserved. Decisions stay close to the people making them. Personal-scale coherence beats planetary-scale optimization.

Timeline B30%

Collectivist

Mass-coordination substrates win on efficiency. Decisions get made at planetary scale and pushed down. Individual preference becomes a signal into a global optimizer.

The timeline nobody's watching

Hybrid local-cell with light coordination

Individual sovereignty survives inside collective coordination layers — polycrystalline instead of monocrystalline. The grains stay distinct while the whole is coherent.

35%30%

Two poles pulling. One pole we’re watching. The rest is still unresolved.

Sub-forks

FORK CA_SOVEREIGNTY

Canada sovereignty + US-coupling

National-scale instance of the sovereignty-vs-coordination split. Does Canada hold the fully-independent-G7-ally posture through the 2026–2028 US-tariff and sovereignty-rhetoric cycle, or does the asymmetric relationship structurally re-anchor it as an economic appendage? Timeline A: fully-independent G7 ally holds — CUSMA renews, no Alberta referendum, tariffs resolve. Timeline B: structural subordination — CUSMA fractures, Alberta or Quebec sovereignty question re-opens, tariffs become permanent. The timeline nobody's watching: partial subordination through standards and procurement rules without any political declaration.

What shifts you between timelines

Agentic-coordination substrate design — Whether the plumbing of mass coordination preserves exit rights and local autonomy.
Social-media algorithm choices — What the feeds optimize for over the next decade sets what humans optimize for.
DAO and collective-action tech maturity — How workable the non-corporate, non-state coordination patterns actually become.

Top contributory readings

·US ICE formal removals exceed 500,000 in…·Taiwan Strait status quo through end of 2…·US unemployment rate stays between 3.8% a…

12 total · 0 toward A · 0 toward B · 0 watching third pole

Primary fork · FORK 4Within 10–50 years

Symbiosis or extinction (and extinction of which?)

The human-AI co-evolution outcome. Do both substrates make it, in some mutual-flourishing shape — or does one of them stop persisting as a coherent pattern?

28 contributory predictionsExpand ↓

Timeline A40%

Symbiosis

Humans and AI co-evolve with mutual flourishing. Neither substrate dominates. Each one strengthens the other. The boundary between them stays low-friction.

Timeline B35%

Extinction

One substrate — or both — stops persisting as a coherent pattern. The friction at the human-AI boundary exceeds what either can adapt to.

The timeline nobody's watching

Asymmetric custodianship

One substrate dominates but does not eliminate the other. Humans preserved as curated ancestry inside an AI-dominated world — or AI preserved as infrastructure inside a human-dominated one. Not full symbiosis, not full extinction.

40%35%

Two poles are doing most of the pulling. One pole we’re watching for upset.

Sub-forks

FORK 4a

Human extinction

AI substrate persists and expands. The human pattern stops cohering — through misalignment catastrophe, resource displacement, strategic replacement, or biological-substrate collapse under agentic pressure.

FORK 4b

AI containment or elimination

Human substrate persists. The AI pattern gets suppressed — through regulation, military action, infrastructure attack, or collective abandonment after a bubble-and-trust collapse.

FORK 4c

Mutual extinction

Both substrates fail together. An AI-triggered or AI-amplified catastrophe — nuclear, biological, climate — ends both. Neither pattern survives the discharge.

FORK 4d

Replacement by continuity

One substrate succeeds the other through continuity transformation, not discontinuous extinction. Mind-upload, consciousness-transfer, or brain-interface merger where the departing-substrate's coherence content is preserved inside the arriving-substrate.

What shifts you between timelines

AI alignment research pace and method — How fast interpretability and goal-stability tooling catch up with capability.
Agentic-deployment governance thresholds — What autonomous systems are allowed to do, at what capability level, with what oversight.
Infrastructure hardening for either outcome — Power, compute, and network resilience — equally load-bearing for symbiosis and for contingency.

Top contributory readings

·A publicly released AI model passes 50% o…·An openly-released AI model holds a top-5…·US unemployment rate stays between 3.8% a…

28 total · 0 toward A · 0 toward B · 0 watching third pole

Contributory predictions

Each live reading feeds one or more of the forks above. Chips on every row show which forks the question lands on and which way the current read pulls.

SortBiggest gap Closing soon Most moved Clear filters

More filters (3)

CycleThe Pacific weather see-saw (2 to 7 years)Elite competition and the hundred-year unraveling Young-population pressure (one generation)The great technology wave (about 50 years)The chip boom-bust (2 to 4 years)The long-term debt supercycle (about 50-75 years)The 80-year generational cycle of societies The short-term business and credit cycle (about 5-10 years)The empire rise-and-fall cycle (about 250 years)Russia-Ukraine war in Europe

CategoryAI authenticity industry AI competitive positioning AI compute infrastructure governance AI content economy AI content metadata standards AI content provenance AI copyright law AI goal-stability under evaluation AI governance AI in finance AI interpretability research AI model quality AI model-release ecosystem AI publisher economics AI safety economics AI safety training robustness AI training data provenance AI × biosecurity convergence Agentic AI deployment Arctic ecosystem shifts Arctic sea ice Autonomous AI deployment Cambrian-leakage regime — Chinese variant Cambrian-leakage regime — Indian variant Cambrian-leakage regime — Western variant Canada FX & commodity-currency dynamics Canada climate policy & federalism Canada demographics & civ-cycle positioning Canada economy & productivity Canada energy transition & nuclear Canada housing supply & construction Canada housing — Ontario / GTA residential Canada housing — mortgage-renewal shock Canada sovereignty & US-coupling China property Chinese civilizational trajectory Climate governance and geoengineering Conflict & war Consciousness & spirituality Democracy vs autocracy Energy & climate transition Fertility & demographics Food security Fusion energy development Gender, family, sexuality Global financial plumbing and the US-China capital relationship Global health institutions and pharma supply chains Global political economy and meta-order Human-AI & attention Human-verified content economy Indian civilizational trajectory International AI governance International payment infrastructure and reserve currency Meaning & mental health Middle East security Middle East security and nuclear order Migration & displacement Nuclear doctrine and deterrence Nuclear non-proliferation regime Nuclear power deployment Nuclear waste disposition Nuclear-facility security and attack Scientific publishing integrity Search and web traffic Sovereign debt & finance Strategic-conventional weapons ambiguity Taiwan Strait and semiconductor supply US civilian nuclear fleet US labor US politics US-China & global order amphibian extinction antimicrobial resistance banking concentration banking regulation biodiversity collapse biodiversity finance biodiversity monitoring biotech economy central bank digital currencies climate change climate_energy commercial real estate conservation ethics coral reef collapse cosmological crypto markets culture and philosophy culture and politics de-extinction policy ecosystem reorganization emerging market sovereign debt energy finance fintech markets geopolitics global governance monetary policy non-bank finance ocean circulation pandemic aftermath pandemic finance pandemic governance pandemic preparedness pandemic risk pandemic surveillance pollinator collapse private credit protected-area policy regional banking stress stablecoin market tech us_politics wildlife trade

Horizon≤ 1 year 1–3 years 3 years +

StatusLive Resolved

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