Counterfactual futures are the holy Grail of, well of a lot, right? It's predicting the future plus making A/B tests. Humanities come with this question now. Can we now use AI to reimagine history and see how it would unfold differently?
In this paper https://alphaxiv.org/abs/2606.02293 by @mattwilkens He tells about how we can give AI different context, altered paragraphs or biographies (and maybe model editing or training) to write parts of books anew and see how events unfold.
Counterfactual futures are the holy Grail of, well of a lot, right? It's predicting the future plus making A/B tests. Humanities come with this question now. Can we now use AI to reimagine history and see how it would unfold differently?
There are experiments and they show some initial promise, but most of it is form and too initial to run for the prediction markets or to reliably imagine ghana had slavery never happened. Still this is an interesting vision.
If any of you read the paper share what you took from it. I'm still wrapping my head what important takes I should take from it