Hi all, I’m working on a Solarpunk world building project and I want to know your thoughts on one of the main features of my world. To preface all this and provide some context, my world is an alternate-history with a divergence point sometime in the 2020s. The divergence was caused by a vocal and technically-skilled group of Green-Anarchists that labelled themselves as “Dawn”.
Dawn did a whole host of things to ween people off of Capitalism and into my Solarpunk world, I’ve gone into immense detail on this but I doubt it’s relevancy to my question so I’ll omit all those details, but there was a tipping-point in which Capitalism crumbled and gave into Dawn’s Anarcho-Solar world.
To make sure the world stayed Solarpunk and to give people stress-free lifestyles, they developed 1 AI and 1 AGI. The AGI manages all Dawn technology, such as Dawn power generation, carbon-capture, a global hyper-loop etc and the AI makes sure no one tampers with the AGI (For those unaware, AGI is Artificial General Intelligence, so for example Skynet is an AGI since it can think and do many things, but ChatGPT is an AI because it can only do text).
Most people in my world wont ever have to think about the AI and AGI, it is taught in my education system to make people aware in case of catastrophe but it mostly manages itself and is monitored by the longest-serving Dawn members.
I simply want to know if machines like this can exist in Solarpunk with it remaining Solarpunk, and if people like the idea or not. If you want to know more about my world building then feel free to ask! Thanks for your time in advance :)
P.S. I should mention that AI and AGI are mirrored across 8 different instances and for the most part work independently of each other, meeting only when strictly necessary. This is to give even more defense against tampering and error.
Edit 1: Changed title from Overlord to Background, Overlord implies oppression which the system doesn’t do.
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I simply want to know if machines like this can exist in Solarpunk with it remaining Solarpunk, and if people like the idea or not.
As someone who went into robotics and AI 20 years ago because I strongly believe they make a whole new range of utopias possible, I’ll of course answer YES! Of course! And there are not enough fictions like that. Most sci-fi is dystopian and 90% of solarpunk dreams of a low tech future where everyone is a farmer which, to me, is another dystopia.
People here already mentioned Banks’ Culture series, that’s the only example of such things. I wish we had more, and if you ever need technical help on the AI design side, I’ll be happy to answer questions.
Even though this is not my personal opinion, you are in good company by using the definitions you use for AI and AGI. Technically you are talking about language models and multimodal models. It remains to be seen if multimodality is required for general intelligence but that’s certainly a plausible hypothesis for a sci-fi setting.
We are in dire lack of high-tech solarpunk around here, more power to you!
We are in dire lack of high-tech solarpunk around here, more power to you!
It sounded a bit counter-intuitive at the beginning, but I thought a bit about your point of view and I finally agree with you. We still need to have a bit of high-tech in solarpunk and low-tech. Of course, we need to drastically think how to use it ; everybody having a last-generation smartphone with more than enough power to send people on the Moon just to stay entertained all day long is a nonsense. However, AI and data science can be really beneficial especially for scientific purposes.
It is not the tech that is problematic, it is the culture around it, the economic system and the incitations around it. Having enough power to run AIs locally would allow everyone to carry a personal doctor and lawyer and has tons of applications. The fact that it allows such an intense level of communication across people all over the world is something that we take for granted but that has actually been world changing.
We don’t want high tech for the only purpose of having high tech, but we want it for the things it brings: knowledge, communication, automation (in the pursuit of labor abolition). If we could find a low tech way to achieve these, I would be all for it, but for now, high-tech is the enabler of these things.
For a Solarpunk story it is a very weak plot element as it basically just handwavy says the AI is solving all the hard problems. This is both unrealistic and also more akin to transhumanist narratives that claim that some imaginary and not yet invented technology will solve all of humanities problems.
It doesn’t “solve problems” per say, but informs people of those issues before they become damaging. Since most technology has some kind of Dawn-imprint on it it can interface with almost everything. Humans still have to go out and perform maintenance etc.
All the AGI can do is optimize existing Dawn technology and adjust the allocation of power to each purpose.
That wasn’t my point.
You plot is basically: “underdog group out of nowhere invents incredibly advanced cybernetic AGI way beyond what is currently technically feasible and by doing that saves the day”.
This as a plot is neither very realistic nor shows a feasible way how we might solve today’s issues.
Global coordination issues are the hardest problems, and while some sort of AI might play a role in this in the future, I don’t think taking that as a central plot element in a solarpunk story is a good idea.
Maybe you could center the story around every day people trying to fill in the coordination gaps that an imperfect but hailed as a saviour AGI leaves wide open, but I guess that would come closer to a cyberpunk story then.
I hear you, the narrative I have planned takes place around 50 years after the shift to Green-Anarchism, so I’d imagine if I continued like that but made the AGI a new invention it’d be more believable, with Dawn having more time to develop Sci-Fi technology? However I am in two minds to shift the narrative back to the emergence of Dawn and the transition to their world. Doing that would make it much easier to include more action into the story and give me more limitations which helps me massively in worldbuilding, it was personal preference to set it in the future since I love Sci-Fi :D.
Don’t worry, a lot of us want to hear about the society post-AGI.
I’ve made the descision to keep it in but I’ve lowered it’s scope quite a bit and made it an experimental recent creation in the timeline. This way it wouldn’t make sense for my society to totally depend on it, like they originally did, but I can still explore a world where people rejoice in AGIs existence instead of man vs machine.
Aw! Don’t let the naysayers here sway you too much. The dependency is certainly a worthy consideration to have (as we discuss here over our totally dependable internet infrastructure) but don’t make it miss the fundamental society changes that it can cause!
Why do you assume it is handwavy? AI will solve many problems and create many others. That’s the staple of sci-fi to explore these.
Suddenly workers are not necessary anymore => How does that change our urban organisation?
Wealth inequalities can’t really be used as a tool of oppression anymore => What oppression device remain and how do we get rid of it?
more akin to transhumanist narratives that claim that some imaginary and not yet invented technology will solve all of humanities problems.
Not “all”, but what type of utopian sci-fi does not rely on technology to solve some of our current problems?
Its handwavy because it appears to be the central plot element. Current “AI” is far from AGI, and even assuming some one comes up with an AGI in the near future, this would not solve many of the world’s problems.
The utopian sci-fi that does not rely on magical tech is called Solarpunk 😅
AGI will solve many problems. I mean, if you are talking about a 50 years apart future, it is far more realistic to try and imagine one where AGIs exist and solve many of the things they were designed for than to imagine they won’t appear or won’t change anything.
And I don’t see what in OP’s post make you think they will make their AGI work on “magic” or if they make the assumptions it will solve “every” problem.
For heaven sake, Asimov describes such futures in the 50s! And they are neither transhumanist nor utopian. He explores the impact of intensive robotics on human interaction and social structures.
How can solarpunk call itself a sci-fi movement if it refuses to go beyond today’s tech? or sometimes even just refuses to acknowledge current tech?
There is no AGI and current LLMs are unlikely to become such. Maybe, my predictive powers will turn out to be wrong, but I think there will not be an AGI in 50 years either.
Good Sci-fi is mostly a social commentary on the present. Sure, sometimes some magical technology is a useful rethorical device and sometimes placing the story into the far future can be used to great effect to drive home a point…
Yes, there is hard-sf that sometimes builds an interesting story extrapolated from existing technology, but AGI is not something that can be used in hard-sf as we have no realistic clue how to make an AGI.
Edit: we have no shortage of human level intelligence on this planet, yet somehow this doesn’t seem to solve most problems 😅
You don’t need an AGI to automate 99% of the labor. No one in the field thinks we can remain 50 years without getting an AGI.
And saying that a sci-fi author should refrain on imagining the consequence of AGI is… an interesting opinion to say the least. The whole field is about imagining how future tech will impact us!
we have no realistic clue how to make an AGI.
We do. There are many possibilities, many leads. From multi-modality to just scaling up, experts in the field rule none.
I did not say so, but it wouldn’t be hard-sf but rather speculative fantasy about some hypothetical technology.
I think a lot of people “in the field” will be up for a lot of disappointment in the coming 50 years, and not because human intelligence is so amazing 😅
speculative fantasy about some hypothetical technology.
So every story that include worker robots, spaceships, time machines, fusion power, moon bases, submarine bases, are not sci-fi? Dune, Foundation, The Culture, the Three-Body Problem, Blindsight, hell, half of Jules Verne books, are not sci-fi then?
Sorry, we are not talking about the same thing then.
