Six lines make a hexagram, and here each line is a stage of an AI future, from the labs at the bottom to what it becomes at the top. Each line is drawn from a bowl of sixteen marbles, and before every draw you change what is in the bowl. The chance of a line is a property of the bowl, and the bowl is the path. At the end, the lines that are turning are drawn on to where they lead.
A teaching instrument, not a forecast and not a divination. Nothing staked, nothing sent. "I don't know" is always a legal move.
Before the first line
In each bowl, 8 of the 16 marbles draw a firm line and 8 draw a yielding one . A ringed marble draws a line that is turning: at the end it becomes its opposite.
The odds of the old yarrow-stalk count.
The odds of tossing three coins.
You draw a firm line. In which bowl is it more likely to be turning?
Pick the bowl you will walk with. You will change it six times.
Each name is a move in the AI story; the small print is all it does to the bowl. No move is judged good or bad here.
Same draws, no moves: the other world your path left behind.
The six lines are drawn
The same six lines, asked of three different paths. The first column is the chance of this pattern of firm and yielding lines; the second, of these lines turning exactly as they did.
With no choices, the two bowls give this hexagram the same chance: both are half firm. They part in the second column, where turning counts.
None of these is "the" probability of this hexagram. Each belongs to a path.
Change one move and walk it again. The marbles fall the same way at every line; only the bowl you changed is different.
Same bowl, same moves, a hundred fresh draws. The lit ones came out the same as yours; orange lines were turning. Each cell uses the same fall of the marbles in both grids, so where two cells differ, only the moves made the difference. One of these worlds is the one you drew. It is not a forecast of the others.
Your path
No choices, same bowl
Hexagram names and texts: James Legge (tr.), The Yî King, Sacred Books of the East vol. XVI, 1882 and 1899, public domain, read from the Recursive I Ching (zhouyi-core). The sixteen-marble bowl reproduces the yarrow-stalk odds; the coin bowl the three-coin odds. The reading of the six places as stages of an AI future is this page's own, and so are the moves. The idea of drawing turning lines one at a time to where they lead comes from the Recursive I Ching's path caster. PlayfulProcess, CC BY-SA 4.0. Other games · The Walk.