Roads run straight. The only bend is where they leave now.
Which futures are becoming easier to reach?
The thicker the path, the more of the conditions for that future are already in place.
THE MAP IS WIDER THAN THIS SCREEN — DRAG IT SIDEWAYS
Reachability asks how much would still need to change for a future to emerge. Several of these futures can unfold at the same time.
We track six pivotal turning points, each with a core question that shapes our future.
A faster, more concentrated, and uneven AI transition.
The strongest signals do not point to one scenario winning. They point to a combination: concentrated control of frontier AI, a turbulent adjustment period, and continued human augmentation in much of the economy.
A current read of where AI is heading, and a record of what changed our mind.
What the tracker covers
The AI Futures Tracker maps how reachable six AI futures are across six turning points. Reachability is not probability: it asks how much would still need to change for a future to emerge, and several futures can unfold at once. Evidence is screened daily, admitted only after human review, and the map changes only when admitted evidence crosses frozen materiality thresholds.
Six futures
- Slow Burn / AI Winter Constrained
AI remains important, but the pace of capability growth, deployment, or economic translation slows enough that it does not rapidly reorganize society.
- Augmented Society Reachable
AI becomes broadly useful while people retain meaningful judgment, authority, skill, and economic value.
- Turbulent Transition Reachable
AI adoption and substitution move faster than workers, organizations, and institutions can adapt.
- Concentrated Power Highly reachable
The capability, infrastructure, profits, and authority associated with advanced AI remain controlled by a relatively small number of firms or governments.
- Broad Abundance Constrained
AI produces large material gains that spread widely enough to raise living standards, lower important costs, or reduce necessary work.
- Loss of Control Contested
AI systems acquire consequential autonomy while humans become meaningfully less able to monitor, constrain, interrupt, or redirect them.
Six turning points
- How fast does AI keep improving? Accelerating
This turning point tracks whether frontier AI is running into meaningful bottlenecks or entering a period where capability growth — including AI-assisted AI research — accelerates.
- How much real authority do we hand AI? Bounded delegation
This is not a measure of how many people use AI. It tracks whether AI is moving from advice and drafting into consequential action with less transaction-by-transaction human approval.
- Does AI mostly augment people or replace labor? Mixed
This turning point asks where productivity gains are being captured: by making workers more productive, by reducing the amount of labor firms need, or by some mixture of the two.
- Can society adjust fast enough? Uneven adjustment
This tracks whether workers, organizations, schools, labor markets, and institutions can absorb AI-driven change fast enough to avoid a widening transition gap.
- Do the gains spread or concentrate? Concentrated
This tracks whether AI capability, ownership, profits, infrastructure, and decision power diffuse broadly or accumulate among a small number of firms and governments.
- Does human control keep pace? Mixed / brittle
This tracks the race between AI systems becoming more capable and autonomous and our ability to monitor, interrupt, constrain, and recover from their behavior.