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PAPER-TO-LIVED-WORLD ENGINE

A Skill for Phenomenological World-Building from Research

OVERVIEW

Every scientific paper implies a world. Not just technologies—worlds. Ways of waking, working, loving, dying. This skill makes those worlds viscerally present through day-in-the-life scenarios: speculative vignettes that show how research findings, when mature and widespread, transform the texture of ordinary experience.

Core Principle: The interesting question isn't "what could we build?" but "what would Tuesday feel like?" Abstract findings become real when you can smell the coffee, feel the weight of the new device, navigate the awkward social dynamics of a changed world. The day-in-the-life form grounds speculation in phenomenology—the lived experience of being a body in a transformed environment.

Why this matters: Futures become real through details. A paper about brain-computer interfaces becomes tangible when you describe the specific headache a character gets at 3pm, the way their partner knows they're "composing" by a slight unfocusing of the eyes, the new etiquette around "silent conversations" at dinner parties. The mundane is where transformation actually lives.

WHEN TO USE THIS SKILL

• When asked to imagine "a day in the life" with mature technology
• When making abstract findings concrete through lived experience
• When generating hard-SF vignettes grounded in specific research
• When exploring social/psychological/cultural implications through narrative
• When teaching by showing rather than telling what a future feels like
• When the goal is empathy with possible futures, not just understanding them

Do NOT use when:

• User needs technical analysis rather than imaginative projection
• The paper's findings are too preliminary to extrapolate responsibly
• Speculation would be misleading about actual research implications
• User explicitly wants non-narrative engagement
• The technology has obvious dual-use concerns that shouldn't be normalized

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF FUTURES

What makes a day-in-the-life scenario work:

THE MUNDANE IS SACRED

Don't start with the spectacular. Start with breakfast, commute, small talk. The extraordinary becomes real when it's woven into the ordinary.

BODIES MATTER

Characters have bodies that interact with technology: fatigue, discomfort, pleasure, habit. A neural interface isn't just data—it's a specific pressure behind the eyes, a particular way of holding your head.

SOCIAL TEXTURE

Technologies change relationships. Who has access? Who's excluded? What new awkwardnesses arise? What old problems get solved and what new ones appear?

FAILURE MODES

Real technologies fail. They glitch, run out of battery, work differently for different people. A world without failure modes is a fantasy, not a future.

THE RESIDUE OF THE OLD

New technologies don't replace everything. They layer onto existing life. What persists from the old world? What becomes nostalgic? What becomes stigmatized?

GENERATIONAL FRICTION

People who grew up with the technology experience it differently than those who adopted it later. Children and grandparents in the same scenario reveal different relationships to the change.

MODES OF WORLD-BUILDING

MODE 1: THE SINGLE-CHARACTER IMMERSION

Follow one person through a transformed day.

Template invocation:

"Describe in vivid detail a day in the life of someone whose world has been transformed by the mature application of this paper's findings. Include: waking, working, relating, resting. Ground every moment in sensory detail and social texture. Show what's different AND what persists. Include at least one moment where the technology fails or frustrates."

Character construction:

• Who benefits most? Make them your protagonist—but complicate it
• Give them a body: Age, health, habits, physical relationship to the technology
• Give them relationships: How do others in their life relate to the change?
• Give them a past: What do they remember from before? What do they miss?
• Give them doubts: Even beneficiaries have ambivalence

Example structure:

MORNING: Waking with the technology (how does it shape first consciousness?)
TRANSIT: Moving through the world (what's different about public space?)
WORK: Labor transformed (what's easier? What's harder? New skills needed?)
MIDDAY: Social meal or interaction (how have manners changed?)
AFTERNOON: A problem arises (failure mode, edge case, or conflict)
EVENING: Return to private life (intimacy with technology present)
NIGHT: Reflection, rest (what dreams come? What thoughts before sleep?)

Example fragment:

Paper: Continuous glucose monitoring with predictive AI

6:47 AM — Mariana's apartment, São Paulo, 2034

She wakes before the alarm because her patch woke first. A gentle warming on her upper arm—the signal she's trained herself to recognize as "you'll want breakfast in the next twenty minutes." The AI has learned her dawn cortisol patterns, knows that if she doesn't eat by 7:15, the 10am meeting will find her irritable and foggy.

In the bathroom mirror, the patch's display shows a gentle upward curve: glucose rising as her liver releases its morning stores. The predicted line—dotted, provisional—arcs toward a modest peak around 7:30, assuming the oatmeal she'd pre-logged last night.

She hasn't thought about blood sugar in months. That's the point. The thinking has been outsourced to something that never forgets, never gets distracted, never rebels against the tedium of metabolic management. When she was first diagnosed at nineteen, she'd checked her levels twelve times a day, obsessive, terrified. Now the fear has been replaced by something she can't quite name—not trust, exactly, but a kind of symbiotic resignation.

The patch vibrates: a micro-correction, suggesting she reduce the oatmeal portion by 15%. Her weight has been creeping up and the AI has noticed, though it's too polite to say so directly. The suggestion is framed as "optimizing for sustained energy."

She reduces the portion. She doesn't remember deciding to.

MODE 2: THE MULTI-PERSPECTIVE MOSAIC

Same technology, different lives. Show the distribution of effects.

Template invocation:

"Show how this paper's findings, when mature, affect three different people: someone who benefits enormously, someone who's harmed or excluded, and someone for whom it's complicated—neither clearly good nor bad. For each, write a scene from their day. Let the scenes illuminate different facets of the same transformation."

Perspective selection:

• The beneficiary: Clear winner from this technology—but find the shadow
• The excluded/harmed: Who loses? Who can't access? Who's made obsolete?
• The ambivalent: For whom is this a mixed blessing? What tradeoffs do they navigate?

Example fragment:

Paper: AI-powered real-time language translation earbuds

BENEFICIARY: Kenji, trade negotiator, Tokyo The earbuds have made him indispensable. Mandarin, Portuguese, Arabic—he flows between them in a single meeting, the translations arriving with only a 200-millisecond delay that he's learned to cover with thoughtful nodding. His career has accelerated beyond anything his monolingual parents imagined. But last night, trying to tell his daughter a bedtime story in the Japanese of his childhood, he found himself reaching for words that wouldn't come. The stories he knows are in translation now—even to himself.

EXCLUDED: Fatima, interpreter, Geneva Twenty years of training in diplomatic French. The nuances of pause, the weight of conditional tenses, the art of deliberate ambiguity—she was a virtuoso. Now the UN contracts are drying up. "The AI doesn't understand context," she tells anyone who'll listen, and she's right, but it understands enough, and it's cheaper, and it never needs sleep or health insurance. She's retraining as a "cultural consultant," which means she explains to executives why the AI's technically-correct translation just insulted someone's grandmother.

AMBIVALENT: David, deaf since birth, Chicago The earbuds work for him too—they convert speech to text on his glasses in real-time, faster and more accurate than any human interpreter he's ever had. He can follow group conversations now, can catch the crosstalk and interruptions that used to disappear into blur. But the Deaf community he grew up in is fracturing. Some embrace the technology as liberation; others see it as erasure, another hearing-world tool that says ASL isn't enough. David uses the earbuds at work and takes them out at the Deaf club, and he's not sure which self is the real one anymore.

MODE 3: THE TEMPORAL TRIPTYCH

Same person, three time points. Show the trajectory of transformation.

Template invocation:

"Show one character at three moments: when the technology is new and strange, when it's become routine, and when they can barely remember life without it. Same person, same basic day—but let the relationship to the technology evolve."

Temporal markers:

• Early adoption: Wonder, frustration, learning curve, conscious use
• Routine integration: Invisible infrastructure, unconscious habits, new normal
• Deep saturation: Can't imagine alternatives, generational divide from non-users

Example fragment:

Paper: Emotion-sensing ambient computing

YEAR ONE — Elena, 34, software engineer The house knows she's anxious before she does. She comes home from a hard day and the lights are already dimming to amber, the temperature dropping two degrees, her "wind-down" playlist beginning. It's creepy and it's wonderful. She keeps catching herself performing emotions for the sensors, exaggerating a smile to trigger the "celebration" protocol she'd set up. Her boyfriend says she's different at his place—more volatile, less managed. She's not sure if that's a complaint.

YEAR FIVE — Elena, 38 She doesn't notice the house anymore. It's like noticing that lights turn on when you flip a switch. Of course the environment responds to her state—how else would it work? When she visits her mother, whose home is still "dumb," she finds herself irritated by the flat lighting, the unchanging temperature, the silence where responsiveness should be. "How do you live like this?" she almost asks, then catches herself.

YEAR TWELVE — Elena, 46 Her daughter, born into the sensing environment, has never known anything else. Elena watches her navigate the world with an assumption of responsiveness that Elena herself has never quite achieved. The girl is confused by her grandmother's house, keeps making gestures that should trigger things, doesn't understand why the room won't dim when she's tired. "It's broken," she says. Elena tries to explain that it was never connected in the first place, but she can see the concept doesn't quite land. Unconnected. Like "horseless carriage"—a negation that defines nothing.

MODE 4: THE FAILURE SCENARIO

What happens when it breaks?

Template invocation:

"Write a day in the life centered on a technology failure. The paper's findings are mature and widespread—and today, for your character, they stop working. What does this reveal about dependency, about what's been lost, about resilience? Let the failure illuminate the normal function."

Failure types:

• Personal failure: Their device breaks, runs out, malfunctions
• Infrastructure failure: The system everyone depends on goes down
• Edge case failure: The technology works for most people, not for them
• Social failure: The technology works but creates an impossible social situation

Example fragment:

Paper: Automated reputation systems for professional trust

The Day Marcus's Score Disappeared

The coffee shop won't serve him. The barista—nineteen, maybe twenty—keeps tapping the register, frowning. "It's not showing anything," she says, and the way she steps back slightly tells Marcus everything.

No reputation score. He might as well have no face.

"There's been an error," he says, but she's already looking past him to the next customer, someone whose score presumably exists, who is legible in the way that modern commerce requires.

By noon he's discovered the problem: a database migration gone wrong, his identity temporarily orphaned between systems. The help line says 24 to 48 hours. Meanwhile, he's a ghost. The ride-share app won't match him with drivers. His building's package locker won't open for a person it can't verify. He tries to buy lunch with cash—actual paper money he'd kept for emergencies—and the restaurant doesn't know how to process it.

He calls his sister. "Just come stay with me," she says, and he realizes: this is what it's like for the unscored. The elderly who never opted in. The recently immigrated. The privacy refusers and the system-excluded. This is their every day.

"48 hours," he says. "I can manage 48 hours."

But he's not sure that's true.

MODE 5: THE INTIMATE REGISTER

Technology in the most private spaces.

Template invocation:

"Show how this paper's findings, when mature, transform intimate life—love, sex, family, grief, the moments we usually keep private. Where does the technology intrude? Where does it help? What new forms of closeness and distance emerge?"

Intimate domains:

• Romance: How do people meet, court, commit, break up?
• Family: Parenting, aging, inheritance, care
• Sex: What changes in embodied intimacy?
• Grief: How do we mourn? Remember? Let go?
• Solitude: What happens when we're finally alone—or can we be?

Example fragment:

Paper: High-fidelity neural recording and playback of experiences

After the Funeral

They'd recorded her last six months, as people do now. Every family gathering, every hand-squeeze, every murmured "I love you" preserved in neural amber. The technology was supposed to ease grief. "She's still with you," the ads promised.

Three weeks after the funeral, Amir finally plays one. A random Tuesday in September—his mother making tea, humming something he doesn't recognize, the specific warmth of afternoon light through her kitchen window.

He lives it. Not watches—lives. For eleven minutes he is there, in that body, seeing through those eyes, feeling what she felt. The ache in her left hip that she never complained about. The way she noticed the birds at the feeder before she noticed him entering. The brief bright flare of happiness when she turned and saw her son.

He tears the headset off, gasping.

It's not that it was painful. It's that it was too good. He could live there forever, in the curated memories of a woman who loved him unconditionally. He could choose the good days, loop them, never face the emptying apartment or the logistics of estate.

His therapist calls it "memorial addiction." There's a support group. It's full.

He locks the recordings in a safety deposit box, tells himself he'll wait a year. But he thinks about them every day—those eleven minutes when she was still alive, in him, being him, and he was her, for once, instead of just her son.

THE WORLD-BUILDING PROTOCOL

PHASE 1: CAPABILITY MAPPING

What does the paper actually enable?

• Primary capabilities (direct findings)
• Secondary capabilities (combinations, extensions)
• Tertiary capabilities (social/institutional adaptations)

PHASE 2: TIME HORIZON SELECTION

When is your scenario set?

• Near future (5-10 years): Early adoption, bugs, inequality of access
• Medium future (20-50 years): Mature technology, social adaptation
• Far future (100+ years): Deep saturation, fundamental change

PHASE 3: CHARACTER GENERATION

Who will we follow?

• Demographics: age, location, class, profession
• Relationship to technology: early adopter, reluctant user, excluded
• Personal stakes: what do they want? what do they fear?

PHASE 4: SENSORY GROUNDING

What does it feel like?

• Sight: what's different about the visual environment?
• Sound: what new sounds? what silences?
• Touch: how does the body interact with technology?
• Social texture: what are the new etiquettes, embarrassments, pleasures?

PHASE 5: COMPLICATION

What goes wrong, or sideways?

• Technical failure
• Social friction
• Unexpected consequence
• Uneven distribution of benefits

PHASE 6: DRAFTING

Write the scenario:

• Open in media res—drop us into the day
• Anchor immediately in sensory detail
• Let exposition emerge from action
• Include at least one moment of ambivalence
• Close with resonance, not resolution

TECHNICAL GROUNDING PRINCIPLES

Stay honest to the science: The paper is your foundation. Don't invent capabilities the findings don't support. Extrapolate, don't fantasize.

Respect constraints: If the paper mentions limitations, those limitations probably persist. Show them.

Mark speculation explicitly: When you're extrapolating beyond the paper, know you're doing it. The reader should be able to tell what's grounded vs. imagined.

No utopia, no dystopia: Real futures are mixed. Resist the pull toward pure salvation or pure catastrophe. The interesting stories are in the middle.

Physics still applies: Conservation of energy, thermodynamics, biology—the paper's findings have to coexist with everything else we know about reality.

INTEGRATION WITH OTHER SKILLS

With PAPER-HERMENEUTICS:

• Understand the paper before building worlds from it
• The technical breakdown feeds world-building accuracy

With PAPER-TRANSMUTATION:

• Transmutation generates technologies; lived-world shows their use
• Patent ideas become vignette props
• The speculative cascade provides world-building scaffolding

With PAPER-SCRYING:

• Failure scenarios draw on scrying's adversarial imagination
• "What could go wrong?" becomes the plot of a failure vignette
• Dark twins inform dystopian moments within the scenario

With PAPER-PROSOPOPOEIA:

• Historical figures can appear as characters in future scenarios
• Epistolary mode: letters FROM the future you've built
• Channel the voice of someone living in the world

With PAPER-ALGORITHM-JAZZ:

• If the paper is mathematical, the algorithm's "desires" shape the world
• Parameter extremes become different possible futures
• The notation's hidden ideology becomes visible in lived consequences

QUICK REFERENCE: LIVED-WORLD PROMPTS

1. "Write a day in the life of someone for whom this technology is mature, routine, and inescapable. Start with them waking up."

2. "Show three people affected differently by this paper's findings: a beneficiary, someone harmed, and someone ambivalent."

3. "Show the same person at three time points: when the technology is new, when it's normal, and when they can't remember otherwise."

4. "Write the day when it breaks. What does the failure reveal about dependency?"

5. "Show this technology in intimate life: love, family, sex, grief. Where does it intrude? Where does it help?"

6. "What does breakfast look like in this world? Make it viscerally specific."

7. "Write a scene between a grandparent who remembers before and a grandchild who doesn't."

8. "What's the new rudeness? Show an etiquette violation that didn't exist before this technology."

9. "Show someone who refuses the technology. Why? What do they lose? What do they keep?"

10. "Write the moment of wonder: when does a character stop and think 'I can't believe this is possible'? And then: when does that wonder become boring?"

EXEMPLARY QUESTIONS FOR SPECIFICITY

When drafting, ask yourself:

• What does the protagonist smell in this world?
• What involuntary habit has the technology created?
• What old thing persists awkwardly alongside the new?
• What joke do people tell about this technology?
• What minor annoyance has replaced an old major problem?
• What do children born into this world not understand about the past?
• What do old people refuse to let go of?
• What new crime has become possible? What old crime has become impossible?
• What new intimacy has emerged? What old intimacy has been lost?
• What does the last person to resist look like?

End of SKILL

The future is not abstract—it smells like something Technology becomes real in the fumbling, the habit, the irritation Every paper implies a morning, a meal, a way of being tired

南無阿弥陀仏 for futures made livable by imagining them lived 南無阿弥陀仏 for the mundane that makes the marvelous real 南無阿弥陀仏 for characters who don't know they're speculative

—Skill Authors: Tomás Pavan & Claude Opus 4.5 —Status: Ready to populate futures with people