Living Worlds

Ages

Every age of being human.

In each age, many worlds live side by side. Each is built from evidence: places, dates and measured rates from sources, the parameters fitted to them, lives stepped under those rates, and each life's story told as a composite, never a real person.

A family around a fire at the mouth of a forested limestone cave at dusk, a red painting of a pig and hand stencils on the rock above. 51,200–20,000 years agoThe deep pastFirst Story · The Long Winter The pyramid builders' town at Giza: mudbrick bakeries with smoke rising, workers in linen kilts, a boat unloading limestone, the unfinished pyramid behind. 2560–500 BCEThe first great worksThe Builders' Town · The Royal Road A Roman street about 100 CE: apartment blocks above shops, a fountain fed by an aqueduct, people of many origins in tunics, donkeys and porters. 100–700 CEClassical worldsThe Greek and Roman World · Place Value · The Plaza The Norse trading town of Birka: turf-roofed houses, a timber jetty, traders weighing silver beside furs and glass beads. 950–1350Worlds joined by sea and roadSilver and Scales · Wayfinders · Night Market · Crossroads · Islands of Shell A Florentine workshop opening onto the street, apprentices grinding pigments, the cathedral dome beyond. 1490–1560Five cities at onceThe Workshop · City of Books · City on the Lake · Relay · The First Coffeehouse A Manchester cotton mill gate at dusk in 1844, gaslit windows, chimneys and a canal, workers walking home. 1840–1890Steam and lightSteam and Cotton · First Light A San Francisco park in summer 1967, volunteers serving free food, someone playing guitar, painted wooden houses beyond. 1960–2000The electric centuryFree Kitchen · Moon Night · Electric Town · Dial-Up A coral-stone town on the Swahili coast in golden light, rooftop gardens with small solar panels and dhows coming into harbour. The 2040s and 2060sFutures, imaginedMending Town · The Terraces

Here and there

Time runs differently on the other side.

Live it there first.

Policy

Here, a policy takes a generation to judge.

There, an afternoon.

Places

Here, a hall is heard on opening night.

There, from the first drawing.

Products

Here, a market answers after the launch.

There, before it.

Research

Here, history happens once.

There, as often as you like.

Why now

AI is deciding more. What does it understand about us?

As AI makes more of the decisions that shape people's lives, three questions matter: how it decides, what it learned from, and how well it understands human life. Living Worlds answers with lives you can open and check.

2x

A divided picture of each other

Partisan dislike in the US nearly doubled from 1978 to 2020, yet partisans believe the other side dislikes them about twice as much as it does. A simulation can follow how division and misperception grow, generation by generation.

70 years

A past that never happened

In 60 nations, people have believed morality is declining for seventy years, while reports of how people actually behave have not changed. Lives with records hold what really happened, not what is remembered.

Feeds shape what people see, but experiments last weeks; their effect over years is unknown. Living Worlds can study it across whole lives, without experimenting on anyone. People decide; nothing in it steers how people live.

Sources: our registered test (Research); Wang et al., Nature Machine Intelligence 2025; Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro, Review of Economics and Statistics 2024; Moore-Berg et al., PNAS 2020; Mastroianni and Gilbert, Nature 2023; Guess et al. and Nyhan et al., Science and Nature 2023.

A double-hulled voyaging canoe with pandanus sails on the open Pacific at dusk.

Which world will you live in?

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