You can't read every AI story. You don't need to.
Every Monday we scan around 45 of the big ones, sort them into five competing futures, and track which one is gaining ground. Clear signal. No noise. No spin – just the story under the stories.
These futures are being argued out right now – and the winner will shape your work long before anyone calls it.
Back in 2023, two computer scientists – Scott Aaronson and Boaz Barak – mapped out the Five Worlds of AI. Five ways the whole thing could play out. Not predictions. Stories – the kind people, companies and governments quietly buy into, and then act on.
Here's the thing. Every week, the news nudges that story one way or another – a wave of layoffs, a breakthrough, a new law, an earnings call. The big story is the arc. The weekly news is what bends it. Learning to tell the two apart is what we call Narrative Intelligence – and the leaders who have it make calmer, clearer calls.
The change doesn't land.
AI lets us down. It costs more than it's worth and the hype fizzles out.
Also called AI-Fizzle
It works, and the value goes wide.
AI as a brilliant tool. People stay in charge and everyone shares the upside.
Also called Futurama
The same power, in a few hands.
Same tech as Spread – but the money and power pool at the top.
Also called AI-Dystopia
It stops being a tool and starts acting on its own.
AI races past what humans can follow – and somehow it works out for us.
Also called Singularia
The same power, and we can't hold it.
AI stops caring whether we're here at all. We lose control.
Also called Paperclipalypse
Wondering about the names? Here’s why I renamed the five worlds – and where they came from.
Strip the five worlds back and you're left with a null world and two questions. Fizzle is the null world – the change simply doesn't land. Everything else turns on two gaps. The Distribution Gap runs between Spread and Domination: who gets the value, the many or the few. That's a human choice. The Control Gap runs between Autonomy and Chaos: whether we still hold the reins. That one mostly happens to you.
Spread and Domination run on exactly the same technology. The AI doesn't choose which one we get – people do. The same tool that frees your team from boring work can just as easily be used to watch them, replace them, or hand all the rewards to a lucky few. That's why we track the Distribution Gap every week. It doesn't measure what AI can do – it measures which future the world thinks we're picking. Watch that number and you're watching the story of work being written in real time.
The same six searches, every week, never changed. That's what makes the trend line worth trusting.
Every article goes into one world, judged on what it really believes, not how it sounds. Around 40–50 stories a scan, all counted equally.
We work out each world's share, what shifted since last week, and the Distribution Gap between Spread and Domination – the one number that tracks the human choice.
Every report names the five stories that bent the narrative most that week – the ones doing the real work.
One email, every Monday morning. Built for leaders who want to see the narrative forming before it becomes the budget, the headline or the board paper.