About the atlas

Ontology & classification

Every scenario in SuperFutures is tagged along five short axes. Together they give a shared shape so you can compare scenarios that otherwise share almost nothing. This page defines each axis and each value it can take, and explains where the boundaries are fuzzy. Classifications are editorial judgements, not empirically-derived clusters.

Scenario type

What kind of future the scenario describes at a high level. A scenario belongs to exactly one type.

Coexistence: Humans and superintelligent AI share the world as long-term partners or neighbours. Neither wholly dominates.
Utopian: The arrival of ASI produces a broadly desirable outcome - abundance, flourishing, meaning.
Dystopian: The arrival of ASI produces a broadly undesirable outcome - repression, catastrophe, loss.
Governance: The defining feature is how power is organised: who decides, under what rules, with what checks.
Transition: Focuses on the passage from a pre-ASI world to whatever comes next - a rupture, a phase change.
Posthuman: The category of “human” itself becomes secondary; the story is about successor forms of intelligence or life.
Merger: Humans and machines integrate - enhancement, brain-computer interfaces, hybrid identity.
Mixed: Multiple types describe the scenario roughly equally, and forcing a single label would be misleading.
Metaphysical: The scenario turns on questions about the nature of mind, reality, or meaning - cosmological, spiritual, or philosophical.

A scenario’s type is a first-pass label, not a value judgement. “Dystopian” here is descriptive (“this scenario describes an undesirable outcome”), not editorial (“we think this is what’ll happen”).

Time horizon

Roughly when the scenario’s defining events take place, measured from today. These are open ranges - different fields (economics, biology, geopolitics) run on different clocks.

Near-term: Within the next ~5 years. Extrapolations from currently visible trends.
Mid-term: ~5 to 15 years out. Requires plausible but non-trivial changes to hold.
Long-term: ~15 to 50 years. Requires substantial technological or social change.
Deep future: 50 years and beyond. Speculative by construction; often unbounded.

Human position

Where the scenario places humanity relative to ASI. What kind of agency, if any, humans retain.

Sovereign: Humans set direction. Advanced AI is a tool, however capable. Legitimacy and final authority stay with human institutions.
Adaptive: Humans still shape the trajectory but only by adapting to what AI enables, constrains, or refuses. Co-decision rather than direction.
Passive: Direction is set elsewhere - by AI systems, by capital owners, by institutions that respond to AI dynamics rather than to citizens. Humans are affected rather than deciding.
Transformed: The very category of “human” becomes contested. Enhancement, uploading, integration, succession. Some scenarios add finer-grained language (subordinated, obsolete, extinct); the headline label collapses these into “Transformed”.

Framing

How the scenario reads emotionally to the people who imagine it. Distinct from what actually happens in the story - a chaotic-transition scenario written by an accelerationist might still be framed as optimistic.

Optimistic: The scenario’s advocates describe it as desirable or hopeful. The lens is opportunity.
Cautious: The advocates describe it as a serious possibility that demands preparation, without endorsing or condemning.
Pessimistic: The scenario is invoked primarily as a warning, a risk to prevent, or a critique of a trajectory.

Cultural visibility

How readily this future is imagined at all. A sequential scale, not a judgement about likelihood. A “culturally dominant” scenario is not more probable - it’s easier to picture because we’ve seen it in fiction, journalism, and everyday conversation.

Dominant: The future most people picture by default when they think about ASI. Encoded in mainstream fiction, news framing, everyday discourse.
Prominent: Widely recognised and frequently invoked. Not the default, but not niche.
Emerging: Gaining cultural ground. Discussed increasingly in specialist and adjacent circles.
Peripheral: Discussed in specialist circles, rarely beyond them.
Rarely imagined: Seldom pictured. The atlas may be one of the few places you encounter it laid out.

Cultural visibility is a claim about representation, not likelihood. See How to read a scenario for the distinction we draw between visibility, probability, and belief.

Editorial judgements, not measurements

These classifications are decisions by whoever curates the atlas - us, and any future contributors - not empirical clusters derived from data. They’re useful because they let you compare scenarios written by very different thinkers along the same axes. They’re dangerous when treated as objective truths about the future.

We revise them. See the (forthcoming) changelog for renames and reclassifications. Corrections are welcome.