# Scenarios - best, worst, and the worlds between ← [Part IV](README.md) · [Index](../README.md) --- The corpus commits to **one causal chain**, not a fan of equally weighted futures ([index design](../README.md)). This page does not replace that chain. It names the **joint worlds** that appear when the chain's joints resolve together - so a reader who wants "best / worst / what else" can find them without treating every branch as the base case. The **base case** is the modal path argued through [Parts I–IV](../00-overview/thesis.md): verification asymmetry holds, Taiwan continuity holds, institutional lag dominates after ~2028, robotics is the growth swing variable, and value accrues to inelastic complements until [Uncertainty 7](../06-uncertainties/complement-erosion.md) erodes the list. Every other scenario is a *named deviation* from that path, keyed to a joint in [Part VI](../06-uncertainties/) or a [Part V](../05-probabilities/) row cluster. Subjective weights below are **order-of-magnitude joint mass**, not new Part V rows. Marginals stay in [Part V](../05-probabilities/); joints stay verbal there; this page makes the joints legible as worlds. Directions of uncertainty: best-case mass is easier to overstate (accelerationist literature is loud); worst-case mass is easier to understate on Taiwan and correlated cyber, overstate on existential control loss. | Scenario | Rough joint mass through ~2040 | Primary joint that selects it | |---|---|---| | **Base / modal** | ~40–50% | Spine holds; [2032–40](2032-2040.md) middle (~45% of growth fork) | | **Best (abundance)** | ~15–25% | Robotics + power + RSI governors release together | | **Hard disappointment** | ~10–20% | Capex correction + slow absorption + robotics miss | | **Taiwan break** | ~5–12% | [Uncertainty 4](../06-uncertainties/taiwan.md) fails (hard or prolonged gray zone) | | **Incident-dominated** | ~10–20% | [Part V](../05-probabilities/) row 3 fires early; architecture freezes wrong | | **Control-loss tail** | ~3–8% by 2040 | [Part V](../05-probabilities/) row 7; mostly inside hard RSI | These bands overlap and are not a partition that sums to 100% - a Taiwan gray-zone year can sit inside base case with slipped dates, and "incident-dominated" can still land in the growth middle. Treat the table as a map of *named attractors*, not a probability simplex. --- ## Base case - what the document actually predicts Cheap cognition becomes abundant; verification, energy, land, licenses, trust, and physical presence stay scarce. Domains with scoreboards pull ahead; judgment-heavy work lags. Firms adopt under Red Queen pressure and mostly do not keep the surplus ([Game 3](../02-games/3-firms.md)). Aggregate job loss is bounded by [demography](../09-macro/demography.md); the [apprenticeship gap](../06-uncertainties/apprenticeship-gap.md) is not. A capital-markets air pocket is more likely than not before 2030 ([Part V](../05-probabilities/) row 6). Growth through the 2030s is **meaningful but unspectacular** unless robotics clears economic thresholds - the middle of the [40/45/15](2032-2040.md) fork. > **By 2030:** agentic systems handle most day-to-day tasks in verifiable knowledge work for a large share of competent workers in leading firms; measured US TFP still usually below a clean 2%/yr sustained print; no binding international agreement with real verification; junior hiring ratios in several professions permanently lower than 2022–23 baselines. > **By 2035–40:** two-economy price split is political common sense - cognition-intensive goods deflate, care/energy/land/trades inflate; humanoids at true general-purpose economic scale remain contested; consumer surplus large, wealth concentrated in complements. **How it fails:** any of Uncertainties [1](../06-uncertainties/recursive-self-improvement.md), [4](../06-uncertainties/taiwan.md), [5](../06-uncertainties/learned-verification.md), [7](../06-uncertainties/complement-erosion.md) resolving hard against the spine; or the middle growth fork resolving into either pole early. --- ## Best case - abundance without losing the plot Not utopia: still politics, still inequality, still incidents. The best *coherent* world inside the framework is the one where the high-growth branch and the benign joint of uncertainties co-occur. **What has to go right together:** 1. **Power and permitting** loosen faster than the base case ([Uncertainty 2](../06-uncertainties/power-permitting.md) upside) - behind-the-meter and transmission reform both move. 2. **Robotics cost curves** clear local wages in structured then semi-structured work; delivered $/hour, not demos ([robotics](../03-domains/physical/robotics/)). 3. **Automated science** compounds in instrumented fields ([science](../03-domains/cognitive/science.md)) without a biosecurity catastrophe dominating the decade. 4. **Apprenticeship** is deliberately rebuilt - ladders, not only tools ([Uncertainty 3](../06-uncertainties/apprenticeship-gap.md)) - so expert formation does not collapse. 5. **Taiwan continuity** holds; open-weight lag stays months not years of capability blackout. 6. **No early freeze** from a panic architecture after the first incident - rules that still allow verification markets and insurance to mature ([Uncertainty 6](../06-uncertainties/correlated-risk.md)). > **Best-case 2030s:** global real GDP growth sustained above ~4% for multi-year stretches; care and trades still expensive but *augmented* enough that real access rises; verification infrastructure (provenance, underwriting, high-stakes eval) is built early enough that information disorder plateaus rather than compounds; most consumers are materially richer in ways CPI understates. **What "best" does *not* mean here:** perfect equality, no correction, no geopolitics, or solved alignment. A mild sector drawdown can still happen inside this world; [Part V](../05-probabilities/) row 6 and row 2 can both print. **How it fails into base:** robotics data wall holds; permitting stays stuck; organizational redesign stays the J-curve. **How it fails into worse:** growth arrives *with* a large early catastrophe or Taiwan shock - high capability, bad path. --- ## Worst case - the bad joints firing together Three different "worsts" get conflated in public argument. Separate them. ### W1 - Economic and institutional failure (most probable "bad") Capex correction becomes a multi-year funding winter ([winters](../08-method/base-rates/winters.md)); agentic reliability disappoints commercial buyers; measured productivity stays quiet; junior pipelines are cut *and* never rebuilt; insurance retreats after correlated losses without a clean state backstop. > **W1 through ~2032:** AI remains a powerful tool layer without a growth-regime change; political fight is over broken ladders and regional energy prices, not abundance; open-weight and closed labs both slow; the apprenticeship gap hardens into a structural expert shortage by the mid-2030s. ### W2 - Taiwan / supply-chain break (invalidates the document's arithmetic) Leading-edge fab output is removed or gray-zoned for years ([Uncertainty 4](../06-uncertainties/taiwan.md)). This is not "the model was wrong about AI"; it is an external zeroing of compute-gated timelines. > **W2:** frontier training and accelerator supply become politically allocated; bipolar capacity bifurcation is the base case not a scenario; every Part IV date slips years; robotics and science automation reorder around who holds remaining fabs and the magnet/actuator stack. ### W3 - Incident or control tail (low probability, high shape) A major AI-attributed catastrophe ([Part V](../05-probabilities/) row 3) writes a harsh, poorly designed regime - or, further out, loss-of-control dynamics in the row 7 range. Mechanism order the corpus favors for row 3: finance and correlated cyber first; bio middle with fat tail; kinetic least recoverable. > **W3:** deployment freezes where underwriters and regulators cannot price residual risk; dual-use domains (bio, cyber, weapons) dominate politics; useful civilian diffusion slows for a decade even if models keep improving in labs. **Compound worst:** W2 + W3, or W1 + early W3. Those joints are positively correlated through financing stress and geopolitical tension - the corpus already warns that independent multiplication understates joint extremes ([Part V](../05-probabilities/) correlations). --- ## Other scenarios worth naming ### Acceleration (RSI compresses the calendar) [Uncertainty 1](../06-uncertainties/recursive-self-improvement.md) fires hard: internal research cycle time collapses while verification and physical governors still bind somewhat. Dates in Part IV move left; the *ordering* of constraints can survive even when the calendar does not. > Observable signature: lab experiment cycle time and automated paper→result loops compress year-over-year while energy and fab constraints still show up as queues, not magic. ### Learned verification wins (spine fails upward for capability) [Uncertainty 5](../06-uncertainties/learned-verification.md) retires the master asymmetry. Domain ordering in [Part III](../03-domains/) reshuffles; judgment-heavy work automates faster than the base case; complements story partially survives (atoms, licenses) but *gradients* change. > Observable signature: blinded eval gap between verifiable and unverifiable domains closes and stays closed ([B8](../07-indicators/diffusion/capability.md)). ### Complement erosion (spine fails on distribution) [Uncertainty 7](../06-uncertainties/complement-erosion.md): intelligence + capital manufacture substitutes for land-with-power, proprietary data, or liability capacity faster than [assets](../09-macro/assets.md) prices. Consumers win more; the document's distributional predictions miss. ### Soft Taiwan / gray zone (base case with a risk premium) Not full W2. Freight insurance, license denials, and delivery slippage reprice accelerators without zeroing output. Timelines slip quarters; the spine still "looks right" while every cost curve is worse. Quietly one of the more likely deviations from clean base case. ### Correction then maturity (financial winter without tech winter) Row 6 fires, revenue later catches up, survivors consolidate to 3–5 frontier labs ([Game 1](../02-games/1-labs.md)). Looks like W1 for 18–36 months, then rejoins base case with a different ownership map. Base rates for [capex cycles](../08-method/base-rates/cycles.md) make this common in the reference class. --- ## How to tell which world you are in | Signal | Points toward | |---|---| | AI revenue vs capex; financing mix cash→credit | Base vs W1 vs correction-then-maturity ([A2](../07-indicators/substrate.md)/[A3](../07-indicators/substrate.md)) | | Entry-level : senior postings; B1 persistence | Base labor transition vs rebuilt ladders (best) vs hardened gap (W1) | | Delivered robot $/hour; teleop→autonomy | Best / high growth vs base middle vs disappointment ([2032–40](2032-2040.md)) | | Grid queue, behind-the-meter share, metro power prices | Best-case power release vs energy-political drag | | Freight insurance / export licenses / ASP step-ups on leading-edge | Gray zone vs W2 ([Taiwan](../06-uncertainties/taiwan.md)) | | B8 verifiable vs unverifiable gap | Base asymmetry vs U5 spine break | | First salient incident → statute quality within 18 months | Base post-incident architecture vs W3 freeze | | Internal research cycle time at frontier labs | Base calendar vs RSI acceleration | Full dashboard: [Part VII](../07-indicators/). Scoring discipline: [scoring](../08-method/scoring.md) - mechanism over outcome; right-for-wrong-reason is a miss. --- ## What this page is not It is not a permission slip to treat the base case as "just one scenario among many." The base case remains the committed forecast; best and worst are **stress tests** with named selectors. If a future round finds the modal world is no longer the middle growth fork, rewrite [2032–2040](2032-2040.md) and this page together - do not patch adjectives here while leaving Part IV untouched. **Failure mode of the page itself:** scenario sprawl. If a new joint cannot change at least two Part IV claims or one Part V row cluster, it belongs as a paragraph on an uncertainty page, not a new named world here. --- **Related:** [2032–2040](2032-2040.md) · [Part V](../05-probabilities/) · [Uncertainties](../06-uncertainties/) · [Steelman](../08-method/steelman.md) · [Dependencies](../00-overview/dependencies.md) **Next:** [Subjective probabilities](../05-probabilities/)