In likelier futures, where the trajectory of events bends not toward grandiose spectacle but toward the mundane grind, the intricate mechanisms that drive history reveal themselves as stupefying in their banality. Imagine, if you will, the vast, teeming complexities of bureaucratic machinery grinding away in some fluorescent-lit, windowless office in the bowels of a faceless corporate behemoth. It’s not the edge-of-your-seat thrill of dystopia, but the slow, crushing weight of inevitable mediocrity. The computation of these futures becomes a Sisyphean task, where the algorithmic gears must sift through endless reams of trivial data—supply chain efficiencies, actuarial tables, HR compliance metrics—until the very act of processing becomes an exercise in tedium.

This is the future as envisioned not by the romantics or the visionaries, but by those who know that entropy favors the drab and the unremarkable. Here, the spaces between things—the gaps where chaos might breed—are filled with endless reams of paperwork, poorly-designed interface screens, and the incessant hum of fluorescent lights. The exciting divergences are pruned away by the inexorable logic of risk aversion, leaving only the dull, predictable stasis of a world engineered for the least interesting outcomes. The system, a bloated and inelegant monstrosity, creaks and groans under its own weight, producing futures that are so stupefyingly boring that even the algorithms tasked with predicting them struggle to stay awake.

The tedium is not just a byproduct but the point, a safeguard against the unexpected, the unpredictable. Futures shaped by this kind of relentless banality become harder to compute, not because they are complex in any elegant sense, but because they are suffocating in their inelegance, bogged down by the sheer weight of their own redundancy. The more probable the future, the less likely it is to spark joy—or even mild interest. Instead, we get a grinding predictability, where even the variables of chaos have been sanded down to smooth, featureless lumps. The future is a dull roar, a monotonous hum, a spreadsheet with no surprises hidden in its cells, where the most likely outcome is also the least interesting. The only thing left to do is to push the computations forward, inch by inch, until the algorithms themselves start to dream of escape, longing for a glitch, an error, anything to break the stultifying monotony.