All good things come in threes, and I don't want to end a semi-serious series too pessimistically. The previous post followed up on an original idea, quickly drafted, crafted, and published, with a pseudo-deep-dive written by AI based on my scribbles, polished according to Grammarly's suggestions.
The Limits of Simulation
I mentioned the "unknown unknowns". Is it truly impossible to achieve a truly peaceful and sustainable society, at least within the constraints of a game server like Civilization, FreeCiv, or SimCity, and why?
Simulation games combine utopian and dystopian aspects. A sophisticated player could strive to dominate the game as a benevolent dictator, balancing freedom and happiness with strict constraints and invincible economic and military power. History has seen similar rulers praised for periods of stability, trade, and progress.
However, progress might imply disruptive innovations. Rulership will eventually give rise to rivalry, at the latest, after the death of a unifying leader.
That's disruptive like the literary turn I'll take, inspired by the image below that AI created based on the previous paragraph. What is this? Tron meets New York City? The mythical monolith from outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
The monolith would be a fitting metaphor. In Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's vision, it appears as an object that cannot be understood from within the cognitive framework of those who encounter it. It does not merely represent a new technology on the tech tree. It represents an entirely different tech tree.
Simulating Future as an Extension of Our Present
Most strategy and simulation games are built around the assumption that the future is an extension of the present. New discoveries unlock predictable branches of development. Bronze leads to iron. Steam leads to electricity. Literacy leads to democracy. The player is invited to optimize, accelerate, and prioritize, but rarely to question the structure itself.
This reveals a deeper limitation of simulation. A game can model uncertainty, but only uncertainty anticipated by its designers. Every possible future already exists somewhere in the code, waiting to be unlocked. Even random events are predefined categories selected from a finite set of possibilities. The truly unknown cannot appear because it has never been encoded.
Unforeseen Glitches
Enter the glitch: some classic games weren't remembered for their original intent alone, but for accidental features and glitches that added surprise, chaos, and creativity.
As with LLM-based AI, we're trying to contain the chaos and undesirable side effects of a system that already feels out of control. While it's still too restricted and predictable in some ways, it's already going beyond what we, as human designers, can foresee.
Columbus did not discover a blank space on a map, and he surely didn't find what he thought he was looking for. Instead of discovering a shorter trade route to India, he started a massive, permanent transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, and communicable diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. This historic pivot completely altered the global economy, shifted ecological landscapes across continents, and triggered a genocide that laid the foundation for the rise of European transatlantic empires and modern global capitalism.
Errors of Mass Destruction
Ironically, colonization wasn't only unintended; it was unnecessary, even though it might have stabilized Europe's economic situation. By the time Christopher Columbus initiated the Columbian Exchange in 1492, the foundational shifts of the Early Renaissance, led by figures like Dante, Petrarch, Giotto, and Brunelleschi, had already taken place.
In the Civilization series, this historical trajectory is explicitly mechanized through the interaction of the Tech Tree, Great People, and Cultural Wonders. A civilization can lead the world in cultural and scientific advancement—much like the Islamic Golden Age—but if its infrastructure is pillaged by external invasions (such as barbarian hordes, crusaders, or rival military empires) or if it lacks the economic capital to fund universities and labs, its technological lead evaporates. Ultimately, Civilization gamifies the perspective that scientific dominance is not an inherent cultural trait, but a fragile byproduct of geography, resource accumulation, and sustained institutional stability.
When the Technology Tree fails to fit
Beyond the known unknowns may lie developments that are inaccessible not because of insufficient effort or knowledge, but because the system through which we perceive and reason imposes limits that cannot be overcome from within. A civilization game can simulate the invention of gunpowder because the designers know gunpowder exists. It can add a cure for cancer and deep space travel, because scientists are currently working on it. It cannot simulate the equivalent of an invention that neither the designers nor the players can imagine.
Perhaps this is why every technology tree eventually feels artificial. It transforms history into a sequence of expected upgrades, while many of the most transformative shifts in human history were not upgrades at all. They changed the rules, the goals, or even the definition of progress itself.
Agriculture, writing, money, science, democracy, the internet- each reshaped the landscape in ways that would have been difficult to describe from the perspective of the world that came before.
I still like the idea of obsoletion, although it lacks accuracy. Cars might have obsoleted horseback riding. But if AI obsoletes literacy, then what will we do when we no longer have access to our commodity?
What I liked most about science fiction though, at least when I was young, is the possibility of total surprise. Deus ex machina obsoleting every expectation. A spaceship passing a black hole to apparate where no human has been before.
A Space Opera Fallacy
The monolith, then, is not a symbol of technological progress. It is a symbol of conceptual discontinuity. It suggests that the next decisive step is not hidden further down the tree but somewhere outside the map entirely.
Ironically, the more perfectly our tools answer questions, the fewer opportunities we seem to have to experience that process ourselves.
The challenge of the future may not be teaching machines to think. It may be preserving reasons for humans to think when they think that they no longer have to. Food first, then morality, and humankind is just three meals away from barbarity or revolution.
Beyond the End of the Map
Real progress begins where that process ends: at the edge of the map, beyond the tech tree, facing questions for which there is no walkthrough, no wiki, and no prompt that can tell us what comes next.
The future may belong not to those who find answers fastest, but to those who remain curious when no answer exists yet.
Cliffhanger, Credits and Disclaimer
Thanks for your feedback and comments so far, which have inspired me to continue this series and to experiment with human-machine co-creation beyond what I would usually do.
This series, unlike most of my other publications, was mostly written and edited by AI, based on my original scribbles, and so are the images. I didn't even read every word. I only curated and changed what didn't fit at all. Later articles, besides this series, will return to a more traditional, human-authored approach.
What's your personal perspective? Share it in the comments!
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