The World Machines Project is a collaborative project to develop a future forecasting engine inspired by Asimov's psychohistory. Our guiding conceit is that the grand arc of world history can be understood in terms of the functioning of what we call World Machines that rise and fall over the course of centuries. Think of it as a nonfiction extended universe.
We aim to combine qualitative and narrative historiographic analysis, quantitative analysis, and AI modeling to generate long-term (100+ year) oracular forecasts and speculations. See the Theory page for our methodology and our Contributors page to learn about who we are. This project grew out of the Contraptions Book Club, which remains the main entry point. To join the project, join the book club, and read the current book and a few from past months/years, and try writing an essay based on your reading that fits our theoretical scaffolding. If we like it, we will invite you to join the contributors group.
If you're just interested in the output of the project, currently this comprises the essays indexed below. We are currently working on our first forecasting project and exploring AI architectures to digest our initial writings.