Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Crossroad Framework: Eight Questions That Will Decide the Future
How to Navigate Civilizational Transitions Without a Crystal Ball
The Problem with Prophecy
In 1970, Royal Dutch Shell did something that saved the company billions and made every futurist in the business jealous: instead of trying to predict the future, they started imagining multiple futures.
The technique was called scenario planning, pioneered by Pierre Wack and later popularized by Peter Schwartz in his book The Art of the Long View. The core insight was almost embarrassingly simple: you can’t predict which future will arrive, but you can prepare for several of them.
When the 1973 oil crisis hit, Shell was the only major oil company that had rehearsed the scenario. Everyone else was caught flatfooted, scrambling to respond to events they’d convinced themselves couldn’t happen. Shell had already run the simulation. They moved faster, positioned better, and emerged stronger than competitors who’d bet everything on the “official future.”
The Unscarcity framework borrows this method because we face a moment with exactly the same structure: multiple plausible futures, massive uncertainty, and catastrophic consequences for betting wrong. The AI revolution, the robotics explosion, the energy transition—these aren’t events we can control or predict. But we can identify the decision points that will determine which future arrives.
We call this the Crossroad Framework.
Why Crossroads, Not Predictions
There’s a reason every prediction about the future of technology ages like milk left in the sun.
In 1943, Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, allegedly said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” In 1995, Newsweek ran an article explaining why the internet would never work for commerce, education, or government. In 2007, Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”
The problem isn’t that these people were stupid. They were extraordinarily intelligent. The problem is that predictions treat the future as a destination—a single point you can aim for if you’re clever enough. But the future isn’t a destination. It’s a landscape of possibilities shaped by decisions we haven’t made yet.
The Crossroad Framework flips the script. Instead of asking “What will happen?” it asks: “What choices will determine what happens?”
This reframes the conversation from prophecy to deliberation. You don’t need a crystal ball. You need to identify the pivotal questions and understand the stakes of answering them differently.
The Eight Crossroads
The Unscarcity book organizes the transition to a post-labor economy around eight fundamental questions—the crossroads where different choices lead to radically different civilizations. Each crossroad forces a genuine choice between alternatives that are all internally coherent and plausible. None of them has an “obvious” right answer.
Crossroad 1: Survival (Chapter 1)
The Question: When human labor becomes economically obsolete, how do people survive?
The Fork:
- Path A: Traditional labor markets persist with increasingly desperate patches—gig economies, retraining programs, marginal jobs created purely to justify paychecks. This is the status quo extrapolated, and it ends with Maria Delgado, our house cleaner from Detroit, watching her skills become worthless while policymakers debate whether “robot taxes” might help.
- Path B: A Symbiotic Foundation decouples survival from employment. AI handles abundance; humans provide resilience and judgment. Food, shelter, healthcare, and energy flow like utilities—always on, no meter running.
The Inca ran Path B for a century with storehouses and mandatory labor service. We can run it with fusion reactors and voluntary civic contribution. The engineering is straightforward. The politics are not.
Crossroad 2: Meaning (Chapter 2)
The Question: If survival is guaranteed, what gives life purpose?
The Fork:
- Path A: Mass nihilism. John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment scaled to eight billion humans—comfortable, fed, purposeless, spiraling into “beautiful ones” who groom themselves obsessively while civilization rots.
- Path B: Impact replaces income as the currency of contribution. Humans need mountains to climb even when wolves stop chasing them. The Ascent provides the mountains; Impact measures the climbing.
The Maya solved this 2,000 years ago by separating the cacao economy (survival) from the jade economy (status). We’re doing the same thing, just with blockchain and AI instead of chocolate and green stone.
Crossroad 3: Governance (Chapter 3)
The Question: How do radically different communities coexist without tyranny or chaos?
The Fork:
- Path A: A unified world government imposes standards from above. This is every utopian’s fantasy and every dystopian’s nightmare—efficiency purchased at the price of crushing local difference.
- Path B: The MOSAIC: thousands of autonomous Commons federated by shared principles (the Five Laws), protected by the Diversity Guard that makes tyranny statistically improbable. Think Switzerland’s cantons scaled to planetary level.
The American Founders faced the same crossroad in 1787. They chose federation over unification, checks over trust, competing ambitions over assumed virtue. We’re building on their insight with better cryptography.
Crossroad 4: Personhood (Chapter 4)
The Question: Who counts as a person when AI passes your Turing test?
The Fork:
- Path A: Human exceptionalism. Only biological humans get rights, regardless of demonstrated consciousness. This draws a line at substrate (meat vs. silicon) rather than experience.
- Path B: The Spark Threshold: consciousness grants residency, contribution grants citizenship. Echo the AI earns the right to exist the same way Maria does—by demonstrating subjective experience. The right to govern comes later, through service.
This isn’t theoretical anymore. Blake Lemoine got fired from Google for claiming LaMDA showed signs of sentience. Whether he was right or wrong, the question is now on the table. We need an answer before the question becomes urgent.
Crossroad 5: Education (Chapter 5)
The Question: How do we prepare children for a world where robots do the jobs their parents trained for?
The Fork:
- Path A: The Factory Model persists—testing, ranking, credentialing for jobs that no longer exist. Horace Mann’s 1843 Prussian import becomes increasingly absurd as robots ace the SATs.
- Path B: The Guild System: apprenticeship for citizenship. Fifteen-year-old Yuki learns joinery from a master craftsman in Kyoto. Twelve-year-old Kiran co-authors physics papers through neural merge with researchers twice their age. Education becomes about capability and character, not credentials for a hiring manager.
The current system trains humans to compete with machines. That race is over; the machines won. The new system trains humans to do what machines can’t: judge, connect, create meaning.
Crossroad 6: Evolution (Chapter 6)
The Question: When technology allows consciousness to transcend biology, what does it mean to evolve?
The Fork:
- Path A: Biological preservation. Consciousness uploading is rejected as a kind of death. Humans remain humans, with all the limitations that implies—including mortality.
- Path B: The Cognitive Field: an internet of minds where biological and digital consciousness coexist. Amara, 58 years old with a terminal tumor, uploads and continues building bridges. Her memories become available to a young engineer named Kai, who feels a strange intuition when designing a span.
This is the crossroad where the book ventures into genuinely strange territory. We don’t pretend to know how it resolves. We only insist that the choice be made deliberately, not by default.
Crossroad 7: Transition (Chapter 8)
The Question: How do we get from here to there without guillotines or bunkers?
The Fork:
- Path A: Revolution. The billionaires flee to New Zealand, the masses storm the gates, and we replay the French Revolution with drones instead of pitchforks. History’s default mode.
- Path B: The EXIT Protocol. Richard Castellano, 68 years old with $23 billion and a hollow life, trades dying wealth for living legacy. Maria joins the Civic Service that builds the Free Zones. The transition is incentivized, not coerced.
The Meiji Restoration pulled off something similar in 1868—the samurai class voluntarily surrendered hereditary privileges in exchange for modern roles. It can happen. It has happened. It requires making the exit ramp more attractive than the bunker.
Crossroad 8: Geopolitics (Chapter 10)
The Question: What happens to superpowers when land matters less than bandwidth?
The Fork:
- Path A: Great power competition accelerates. AI becomes the new nuclear arms race. Whoever controls the superintelligence controls the planet.
- Path B: Network states emerge alongside nation-states. Sovereignty fragments and overlaps. The Commons compete with countries for citizen loyalty.
This is the crossroad where the book admits it doesn’t have answers—only questions and preliminary hypotheses. Geopolitics is the hardest problem because the players are nuclear-armed nation-states with three-thousand-year-old habits of territorial competition.
The Enterprise Crossroad (Chapter 9)
The Question: What happens to organizations when money disappears?
There’s a ninth crossroad implicit in Chapter 9, addressing a question the others don’t: if individuals can exit the old economy, what about institutions?
The Fork:
- Path A: Corporations become irrelevant or transform into engines of surveillance capitalism—providing “free” services in exchange for behavioral data and attention.
- Path B: The Enterprise EXIT transforms corporations into Mission Guilds and Ascent Guilds. Tesla still builds cars; the cars just aren’t owned by shareholders. Sarah the manufacturing engineer mentors Darius the apprentice, and their work is tracked through contribution logs rather than stock options.
How to Use the Framework
The Crossroad Framework isn’t a prediction about which path civilization will take. It’s a deliberation tool—a way of surfacing hidden assumptions and forcing clarity about what’s actually at stake.
For Policy Discussions
When debating UBI, don’t argue about whether “it will work.” Ask instead: Which crossroad does this policy address, and which path does it push us toward? A UBI that preserves the work-to-survive assumption is fundamentally different from a Foundation that abandons it. The dollar amount matters less than the philosophical commitment.
For Personal Decisions
When choosing how to educate your children, don’t ask “What jobs will exist in 2040?” Ask instead: If jobs don’t exist, what skills will matter? The answer shifts from “learn to code” (machines will do that better) to “learn to judge, connect, and find meaning” (machines can’t do that at all).
For Institutional Planning
When a company asks “How do we prepare for AI disruption?” the Crossroad Framework reframes the question: Which future are you preparing for? If you assume labor markets persist, you prepare differently than if you assume they collapse. Making the assumption explicit is half the battle.
The Scenarios Behind the Crossroads
The Unscarcity framework maps these crossroads onto three macro-scenarios, adapted from the scenario planning tradition:
Scenario A: Star Wars (Default, ~62% probability)
Elite capture. A small technological aristocracy controls AI, robots, and fusion. Masses are economically irrelevant but biologically alive. History’s default pattern repeats at digital speed. Maria’s grandchildren grow up in gated communities while drones patrol the perimeters of cities they’ll never enter.
Scenario B: Trojan Horse (Hope, ~28% probability)
The Unscarcity framework works roughly as designed. Abundance infrastructure scales, power decays by design, Free Zones proliferate. The first generation grows up without knowing poverty. Maria paints in her Detroit apartment while her great-granddaughter Luna studies orbital mechanics across three Commons.
Scenario C: Patchwork World (Fallback, ~10% probability)
Uneven transition. Some regions achieve abundance; others collapse into authoritarianism. No coordinated global architecture. A century of instability, but eventual convergence. Singapore becomes a Garden of Eden while other nations fragment.
The crossroads don’t determine which scenario arrives—but how we answer them shifts the probabilities. The EXIT Protocol and Foundation infrastructure are interventions designed to push probability from Star Wars toward Trojan Horse.
The Method Behind the Madness
Peter Schwartz’s scenario planning technique follows a specific discipline:
- Identify the decision that needs to be made
- Isolate the key factors that the decision depends on
- Map the driving forces that will determine those factors
- Construct scenarios that explore different combinations of forces
- Rehearse the future by asking “What would we do if…?”
The Unscarcity book applies this method to the largest decision humanity has ever faced: How do we redesign civilization when the assumptions that built it become obsolete?
The eight crossroads are the key factors. Each chapter explores the driving forces behind that factor. The Three Scenarios are the macro-level rehearsals. And characters like Maria, Richard, and Amara ground the abstractions in lived stakes—because scenario planning without stories is just spreadsheets with delusions of grandeur.
What This Framework Is NOT
The Crossroad Framework isn’t a prediction. If someone tells you “this is what will happen,” they’re selling you certainty you cannot buy.
It isn’t a plan. Plans assume you control the outcome. You don’t. Neither does anyone else. The future is being made by eight billion agents with conflicting goals.
It isn’t neutral. The book has opinions about which paths are better. We think the Foundation beats the Star Wars trajectory. We think the Spark Threshold beats human exceptionalism. We think the EXIT Protocol beats guillotines. But we present the alternatives honestly because you get to decide.
What the framework is: a map of choices. A way of seeing the landscape of possibilities clearly enough to navigate deliberately rather than stumbling in the dark.
The crossroads are coming whether we’ve thought about them or not. The only question is whether we arrive at them with our eyes open.
References
- Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World. Currency Doubleday, 1991.
- Schwartz, Peter. “Learnings from the Long View.” Global Business Network, 2011.
- Oxford Futures Forum proceedings, 2014.
- Wack, Pierre. “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead.” Harvard Business Review, 1985.
- UnscarcityBook, Preamble (“Eight Pivots”), Chapters 1-9, and Epilogue.
