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.
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!
Oh yeah absolutely, I’ll include it in such a way that people are beginiing to substitute the tougher jobs for it while still making sure people are trained and ready to take over at a moments notice.