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.
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!
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.