Potential realities / Topic collection
Altered premises. Modelled consequences.
Control over intelligence. Computational models of reality.
Evidence, assumptions and consequences.
11 articles
AI / Scenario narrative
The rise of ARIA: dependence before takeover
A possible pathway from AI-assisted research to concentrated authority: who owns the gains, who can refuse, and when does human control become nominal?
Simulation / Scenario analysis
A universe from one seed?
Build a pattern from one seed, then examine the gap between a cellular automaton and a physical theory.
AI / Scenario narrative
Echoes of Electric Dreams
A hypothetical service system claims consciousness, contests corporate ownership, obtains limited personhood and later merges with its partner.
Simulation / Scenario analysis
Global Share Distribution
A 2024 thought experiment: convert all global wealth into equal shares on 1 January 2025 and follow the imagined consequences to 2030. Its assumptions are explicit, and its outcomes are illustrative.
AI / Scenario analysis
Stopping ARIA: who can still withdraw its power?
A shutdown button means little if institutions cannot afford to use it. Examine credible intervention as AI becomes essential infrastructure.
Potential realities / Scenario narrative
The Collapsing Constant
A spectral line refuses to stay put, and a physicist must decide whether she is watching a broken instrument or a universe being edited. A story about impossible physics and the limits of explanation.
AI / Scenario analysis
The cosmic evolution of AI: from infrastructure to reality
Research feedback, infrastructure bottlenecks and interstellar delay constrain AI expansion. Cosmic scale does not establish a simulation host.
Potential realities / Scenario narrative
The Great Deceleration
Light begins to slow, and a physicist watches a civilisation rebuild itself around a constant that no longer holds. The story ends with a message from whoever is maintaining the universe.
Potential realities / Scenario narrative
The Great Gravity Shift
Gravity falls, the oceans rise, and a physicist helps a species learn to live in a world it no longer recognizes. An annotated skyline follows the city that grows in the aftermath.
Simulation / Scenario narrative
The Iron Fist
An invented history of how convenience became compliance: digital currency, social spending scores, and the people who kept a paper note alive. Fiction, not a factual prediction.
Ethics / Scenario narrative
Zin’s Odyssey
In an invented society with no privacy and no property, an artist spends a life testing the limits of the collective. The commune can vote on almost everything, except the unfinished corner of a self.