AI SCENARIO MODELING

COUNTERFACTUAL ANALYSIS // CUSTOM INTERVENTIONS // TIME MACHINE

Most AI policy debate happens in the abstract: would a binding international treaty help, would a six-month training pause help, would mandatory interpretability help? The AI Consciousness Tracker turns those abstractions into modellable interventions, each with explicit effect estimates, and lets you see what they project onto the Consciousness Index and the eight threat vectors.

The scenario tools are not predictions. They are a structured way to make your assumptions explicit, run them through a consistent causal matrix, and compare outcomes across alternatives.

OPEN THE COUNTERFACTUAL LAB →

WHAT THE COUNTERFACTUAL LAB DOES

Pick one of the preset interventions or design your own. The Tracker computes:

The new Consciousness Index after the intervention propagates through the factor weights.
The delta vs. the current state, displayed as a directional change with a colored arrow.
Per-factor effects (how much regulatory gap closes, how much corporate-race intensity changes, etc.).
Per-threat effects (how much each of the eight threat vectors moves).
A feasibility score reflecting how plausible the intervention is given current political and industry conditions.

PRESET INTERVENTIONS

The Tracker ships with ten carefully-calibrated preset interventions. Each was researched against published policy analysis and effect estimates were assigned to be realistic rather than aspirational.

Binding international AI treaty — analogous to nuclear non-proliferation. Largest effect on regulatory gap, modest effect on corporate race. Feasibility low.
Alignment research breakthrough — provably-safe training methods that scale with capability. Largest effect on alignment-failure threat. Feasibility moderate.
Coordinated 6-month training pause — major labs halt frontier training. Modest effects across the board; feasibility low (collective-action problem).
Open-source safety tools proliferate — freely available interpretability, monitoring, audit. Strong effect on alignment-failure and power-concentration. Feasibility relatively high.
US–China AI arms race escalation — the negative scenario, included for symmetry. All factors worsen.
Mass public AI literacy campaign — closes the awareness gap. Indirect effects on regulation and concentration.
Mandatory interpretability for frontier models — no black boxes above a capability threshold. Strong alignment-failure mitigation.
And three more, including compute-governance scaling, whistle-blower protections, and a frontier-model red-team mandate.

CUSTOM INTERVENTION DESIGNER

If none of the presets match what you want to model, the Custom Intervention Designer lets you define your own: name it, write a description, set per-factor effect sliders (−30 to +30), per-threat effect sliders, and a feasibility score. Custom interventions persist in your browser's localStorage alongside the presets and feed the same computation pipeline.

This matters because preset interventions encode an editorial view of what the relevant interventions are. The custom designer is the escape hatch: if you think the relevant intervention is something we have not anticipated, you can model it and compare.

DESIGN YOUR OWN INTERVENTION →

SCENARIO LAB (NAMED, SAVED, COMPARED)

The Scenario Lab is the longer-form sibling of the counterfactual tool. Save full snapshots of your CI factor settings under a name (“baseline”, “optimistic 2030”, “moratorium succeeds”), come back later, and compare them side-by-side. Snapshots persist locally and can be exported as JSON for sharing or version control.

TIME MACHINE

The Time Machine is the historical complement: scrub from 2020-06 through the present using fourteen recorded snapshots of the actual values to see how the Consciousness Index, factor levels, and threat vectors evolved. Press PLAY to scrub continuously and watch the curve accelerate. Useful for seeing how rapidly the present configuration assembled itself.

OPEN THE TIME MACHINE →

METHODOLOGY NOTES

Effect estimates for preset interventions are editorial judgments, calibrated against published policy literature where possible and labeled as estimates where not. Custom intervention effects are entirely user-defined and carry no calibration; treat their projections as thought experiments, not forecasts. The underlying causal influence matrix between threats is documented in the Tracker's methodology panel.