What’s a World Machine? It “is a large-scale civilizational system — an interlocking set of institutions, technologies, practices, and assumptions — that organizes human life across centuries. Not a nation, not an empire, not an ideology, but something longer-lived and more fundamental than any of those: the deep infrastructure of a historical era.”

At any one time, there’s three World Machines in play, each spanning approx. 400 years and overlapping to cover a 1,000 year span: these are the emerging (Dawn), the dominant (Day) and the declining (Dusk) machines. The contributors have identified the current set:

• The Modernity Machine (c. 1200–1600 Dawn, 1600–2000 Day, now Dusk) — the organizing system of the modern era, characterized by Progress as its animating drive. A “pull” system: it pulled humanity toward an imagined future of universal development, scientific mastery, and liberal order.
• The Divergence Machine (c. 1600–2000 Dawn, 2000– Day) — currently the dominant emerging framework. Where Modernity pulled toward convergence, Divergence is a “push” system: it produces radically different outcomes depending on local conditions, values, and trajectories. There is no single destination.
• The Liveness Machine (Dawn, future study) — the next machine, whose outlines are only beginning to be visible.

This is all good and fun and useful, but I have been wondering: what sort of person does a particular Dawn / Day / Dusk machine favour?

Given that World Machines theory’s premise is informed by the notion of psychohistory, I’m loathe to start proposing that particular individuals will “win” or “lose” at particular games in particular World Machines. There’s a need to be apersonal. What I’m more comfortable proposing, however, is that certain populations will “do better” at particular games in particular World Machines than others.

There’s two lenses for this. The first is a lock and key. Within each World Machines there exists a minority population that is especially adapted to the conditions; they are the ones most suited to unlock the latent value inherent in the World Machine.

The other is more evolutionary; it’s about replication over time as a proxy for harvesting unlocked value, and it is not the same as optimality. As an absurd example: imagine a minority celibate population is responsible for all technological progress in the world. Their rate of replication is naturally capped and likely to be dwarfed by all the other non-celibate populations that can “go forth and multiply” off the back of “progress” without having to worry about generating more of it.

Certain demographics of humanity will be uniquely suited to particular World Machines and shall thrive because of certain predispositions and traits; others will be less suited and will not. Given that the long term goal of World Machine theory is “to combine qualitative historiographic analysis with quantitative methods and AI modeling to generate long-term forecasts and speculations,”, there’ll need to be a way to answer the question: “As an individual, how does one align to those forecasts and speculations?”

Dawns imply there are things to be learned; Days imply there are problems to be solved; Dusks imply there are things to unlearn. How does a person actually do that?