Big Institution Changes by 2075
The last three centuries can be broken into six fifty-year periods, and we can rank these periods in terms of how much institution/policy change the West saw during each period. Here are rankings (1 is highest rank) of these periods by ChatGPT5, and by the median of 7 LLMs:
The last row gives the estimated rank of the next period (2025-2075) among the prior six, and this poll estimates a 56% chance that this next period will be above rank 2. So LLMs and polls agree to expect a lot more institution/policy change in the West in the next fifty years.
Which changes in particular might those be? I did a poll (2519 responses) on 32 candidates, giving these relative scores re effect (chance times impact if it happens):
A median of seven LLMs estimate 12 of these 32 will happen (ChatGPT says 13), but a poll gives a 74% chance it will be 7 or less. That’s a big disagreement.
Much of my life I’ve specialized in analyzing big possible institution changes, and it has been frustrating that so little has actually happened. So I’m encouraged to see bigger changes might be coming. Except that alas many of these changes don’t actually seem so great.
Added 4Sep: No matter what I post on, if I mention AI at all, all the comments will be on AI.
The high ranking makes sense when you consider we’re experiencing what I call ‘narrative attractor collapse’—the shared stories that coordinate institutional behavior are breaking down faster than new ones can stabilize. This explains both why the period scores so highly on change metrics AND why it will likely feel more like drift than revolution to people living through it. I explored this pattern in detail here: https://peter.evans-greenwood.com/2025/08/19/the-collapse-of-narrative-attractors/
To me, "futarchy" and "rule by AIs" seem like they could well be the same thing. If we are ruled by futarchy, and the AIs are the dominant traders on the prediction markets, in some sense we are simply ruled by those AIs.