A History of Possible Futures: Multipath Forecasting of Social Breakdown, Recovery, and Resilience

Peter Turchin and his colleagues explain their design of a computational method to predict social collapse: multipath forecasting. By incorporating quantitative data (i.e. demography) as well as qualitative data (i.e. cultural value), a system trained on historical data predicts “a history of possible futures, in which the near- and medium-term paths of societies are probabilistically forecast.” This sort of forecasting could help to predict the outcomes of future crises.