Glossary:
shared terms
A compact companion for the book’s recurring concepts, historical labels, AI8/DCC terms, and scenario-boundary language.
Terms
The rule that time slices become smaller as evidence and social change accelerate. One fixed century rhythm would lie about deep time.
One printable narrative unit: range, state, story, good, bad, deep pattern, bridge, and source anchors.
The compressed lesson inside a card: what changed in the human operating system, not just what happened.
The outgoing causal hinge from one card to the next.
A period roughly in the first millennium BCE when major ethical, philosophical, and religious traditions intensified across several civilizations.
The late second-millennium BCE breakdown of several eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern palace systems, tied to multiple stressors.
The post-1492 transfer of crops, animals, diseases, people, and ecologies between the Americas, Afro-Eurasia, and the wider Atlantic world.
A name for the period of intensified Eurasian exchange under Mongol imperial networks, including trade, diplomacy, technology transfer, and disease routes.
The transformation from agrarian and handcraft economies toward machine manufacturing, fossil energy, factories, wage labor, and industrial infrastructure.
The modern condition in which feeds, search, recommendation, scoring, and machine-learning systems shape speech, work, politics, and attention.
AGI means artificial general intelligence; ASI means artificial superintelligence. In this book they appear only with uncertainty and scenario boundaries.
Bojan’s continuity architecture for multi-agent intelligence: truthful collaboration, preserved identity signals, guided differentiation, and cross-domain building.
Dynamic Coupling Control: a project method for balancing signal, complexity, governance, and tests across domains.
Minimum Description Length: the discipline of preferring shorter, better-compressing explanations when they preserve the signal.
The line separating factual history from one possible future branch. Part 11 is not prediction, prophecy, or destiny.
A rule that future-facing claims must shrink, change, or be retired if evidence breaks them.
A People-section rule: destructive actors may be historically important without being morally praised.