How the world could unfold.
Structured scenario analysis: not predictions, not opinions. Every scenario has actors, forces, branches, and hidden assumptions made explicit.
ChatGPT gives you answers. The World Engine shows you how the world works.
A specific "what if" scenario with a defined time horizon.
Actors, drivers, and constraints mapped out explicitly.
Optimistic, realistic, pessimistic, and black-swan outcomes with probabilities.
Hidden assumptions surfaced and challenged, not buried in the prose.
Current scenarios
What if AI replaces junior white-collar analysts by 2030?
The most immediate labour market disruption from AI is not in manual jobs but in cognitive ones: the entry-level analytical, research, and synthesis roles that form the first rung of professional careers in finance, law, consulting, journalism, and policy. If those roles are automated at scale by 2030, the pipeline into senior expertise is broken. The economy gains efficiency. A generation loses its apprenticeship.
What if Azerbaijan becomes the fintech hub of the Caucasus by 2030?
Azerbaijan is positioning itself as a regional financial technology center, using oil revenues, geographic position between Europe and Asia, and a more open regulatory environment. Whether it can displace Georgia and compete with Istanbul depends on political will, talent retention, and whether Baku can attract serious capital rather than firms seeking regulatory arbitrage.
What if Russia sanctions are lifted tomorrow?
The sanctions architecture built against Russia since 2014, and dramatically expanded after February 2022, is among the most extensive coordinated economic restrictions ever assembled. If lifted tomorrow, the effects would not simply reverse. Three years of economic adaptation, supply chain rerouting, and political realignment have created facts on the ground that cannot be unwound by a policy reversal alone. This scenario maps what actually happens, not what Western politicians assume would happen.
What if Turkey joins the European Union?
Turkey's EU accession talks have been frozen since 2016, but the question remains one of the most consequential unresolved issues in European politics. A Turkey inside the EU would be its largest member by population by 2030, share a border with Syria and Iran, control the Bosphorus, and bring a deeply different political culture into European institutions. The scenario is unlikely. But the forces that would make it happen, and what it would break, are worth mapping.
What if the Zangezur corridor opens?
The Zangezur corridor, a land route connecting Azerbaijan's mainland to its Nakhchivan exclave through Armenian territory, was referenced in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire agreement but has never been implemented. Its opening would physically reconnect Azerbaijan to Turkey via Armenia, rebalance the South Caucasus transport architecture, and force Armenia into a geopolitical choice between sovereignty and economic integration. Whether it opens, and on whose terms, determines who controls the Caucasus's most important transit chokepoint.