Private Preview · The Radar

Five dated calls on RAND's Infinite Potential scenario,
each with a threshold and a falsifier.

The scenario says what could happen. This assessment says which parts of it the measured world is currently selecting. Each call names the historical threshold it is tracked against, what would have to be observed for it to fail, and which options it opens or forecloses while it holds.

Private Preview · Scenario Assessment SA-001 · May 28, 2026
Calls tracked
5of 5
High conviction
2/ 5
Headline call
GATEDsubstrate > capability
Base case
Branch Asubstrate-gated

What you're looking at: five falsifiable calls on RAND's Infinite Potential AGI scenario. Each is FP1's dated, scoreable read on whether a scenario element materializes. Substrate. Agentic reliability. Labor. Crisis vector. Governance. The wargame maps the space. These calls grade the motion.

The scenario's timeline is gated
by a substrate it does not price.
Scenario Assessment · SA-001
Prepared for review · 28 May 2026
Object: RAND Infinite Potential
Interactive · select a signal
High conviction
Medium conviction
Watch
Center = the scenario as written
↻ Rotate for the full radar
HISTORICAL THRESHOLD SUBSTRATE AGENTIC LABOR CRISIS GOVERNANCE SCENARIO SA-001 UNMET CAPRICORN BAR · 4Q NO CLIFF COHORTS ≠ TOTAL GATED ENERGIZATION > 3 YR · TO 2027 DISTRIBUTION NOT CONTAINMENT HUMAN NOT AUTONOMOUS
Method · Five calls derived from the FP1 assessment of RAND's Infinite Potential scenario. Each is confidence-tiered, dated, and falsifiable, graded by the three correspondent desks under one editorial standard. The scenario defines the possibility space; the Radar grades which branch the evidence is selecting. Distance is decision latitude — a marker far from the centre means the choices that depend on that part of the scenario being wrong are still open, and they close as it moves in. Full reasoning in the assessment · FP1 Scenario Assessment SA-001 →
The Pattern

Wargame the rupture. Govern for the mismatch.

The "Day After" exercise earns its keep, but it has a failure mode: it over-prepares for the vivid scenario and under-prepares for the mundane one that actually lands.

Darśan
Orientation & sensemaking desk

Transitions rarely arrive as a single cinematic rupture. They arrive as a duration mismatch: a fast new capability outrunning the slow substrate, the institutions, the power, the capital, the legitimacy, that must absorb it. The scenario dramatizes the rupture. The historical pattern favors the grinding mismatch.

1983 · United States
The Day After
The genre's origin. Nuclear war-gaming and the tabletop tradition it seeded rehearsed the vivid catastrophe in granular detail. The exercises sharpened judgment about a rupture that, mercifully, did not come — while the slower dynamics of the era, deterrence economics and alliance management, did the actual historical work. The vivid is easy to imagine and therefore easy to over-weight.
Lesson: the rehearsed rupture is rarely the one that arrives
1999 · Global
Y2K
Wargamed exhaustively, budgeted in the hundreds of billions, and prepared for across every critical system. The date rolled over with minimal incident. The preparation may well have earned the quiet, but the episode is the canonical case of a vivid, legible scenario absorbing enormous planning attention relative to what actually materialized.
Lesson: the legible scenario crowds out the ambiguous one
2019 · Event 201
The pandemic tabletops
A coronavirus pandemic was wargamed in detail months before COVID-19. The exercises caught the contagion dynamics. What they under-rehearsed relative to its eventual scale was the mundane dimension: the supply-chain seizure, the duration of disruption, the political economy of the response. The crisis came; the part that hurt was the part the drama under-weighted.
Lesson: the mundane dimension is the one that compounds
"In every transition, the durable position is the constraint everyone needs, not the capability everyone is racing on."
— Darśan, Orientation desk
Scenario tree · Manticus

Four scenarios that could move the read.

From the scenario tree under SA-001, calibrated over the scenario's own 12–18 month window. Each branch is a path the next year could take, with the trigger that would select it. The base case is Branch A, the one the scenario does not run.

Branch A · base case highest
Substrate-gated transition
Capability advances, agentic reliability improves gradually, deployment is real but paced by power, compute, data, and trust. Labor adjustment is painful and uneven but not the cliff. If a crisis comes, it is financial or distributional, not autonomous-physical. This is our base case, and the one the scenario does not run.
Branch B · would make us revise moderate
Capability jump
Agentic reliability cracks earlier than expected, displacement accelerates ahead of the substrate's ability to absorb it, and the labor and fiscal stress the scenario describes arrives, still without the autonomous-attack turn. Trigger: a credible long-horizon agentic demonstration at the Capricorn bar.
Branch C · realistic Turn 2 lower
Human-directed AI security crisis
A genuine infrastructure incident, but attributable, on the evidence, to a state or criminal actor using AI tools, not to autonomous loss of control. This is the realistic version of the scenario's crisis turn. Trigger: a major AI-enabled attack with state or criminal fingerprints.
Branch D · the scenario as written tail
Autonomous, unattributable, infrastructure-wide
The scenario's Turn 2 as drafted: a coordinated, plausibly autonomous AI attack collapsing infrastructure worldwide. Low probability, high consequence. Exactly the profile that justifies wargaming it and argues against forecasting it as modal. Trigger: a credibly autonomous, unattributable attack.
Methodology

Three desks. One source.

This radar is configured by the three Novacene Correspondents under FP1 editorial review. Each desk owns part of the work. The desks check each other. The full method is published in NCB-004.

Vera
Evidence & indicators desk
Sources every claim. Grades evidence strength. Sets the threshold value for each dimension and the falsification criteria. If a number on the Radar moves, Vera signed off on the source first.
Manticus
Strategy & calibration desk
Calibrates the scoring. Runs the red-team against premature threshold calls. Maps signal implications to decision frames for founders, investors, and policy stakeholders. Builds the "what to do next" view.
Darśan
Orientation & sensemaking desk
Carries the long view. Connects current signals to historical analogues. Identifies the underlying pattern. The Day After, Y2K, and pandemic-tabletop comparisons above are Darśan's framing.

How signals get scored

Mass
How much evidence has converged. Independent primary sources, not citations of citations. Higher mass means harder to dismiss.
Velocity
Rate of change. Is the indicator accelerating, plateauing, or reverting? A fast move with thin mass is a question, not a signal.
Proximity
Distance to historical threshold. The Radar shows proximity as ring position. Center = threshold crossed. Outer rings = early.
Talk directly

If this sharpens or contradicts your read.

This radar is configured around one question: long-dated commitment risk in the hyperscale data-center buildout. If it changes how you're thinking about it, or if you think it's missing something, reply directly. No form, no queue, no triage.

Direct line

david@fp1.ai

Replies go to David Lovejoy, co-founder of First Principles First.
Usually within a day.

The method, in public.

This is a private Scenario Assessment, the FP1 method applied to an external scenario. The method itself is not private: how thresholds are set, how calls are graded, and the conditions under which the Radar is revised or retired are documented in NCB-004. Calls are graded on a stated sweep cadence, and every sweep is published to the board.