This conversation and the reactions it caused made me think of a few tips to explicitly veer away from AI-aided dystopias in your fictional universe.
Avoid a monolithic centralized statist super-AI
I guess ChatGPT is the model people use, the idea that there is a supercomputer managing all aspects of a community. And people are understandably wary of a single point of control that could too easily lead to totalitarianism
Instead, have a multitude of transparent local agents managing different systems. Each with a different algorithm and “personality”.
Talk about open source
The most used AI models today are open source. We have a media that is biased towards thinking that things that do not generate commercial transactions are not important yet I am willing to bet that more tokens are generated by all the free models in the world than by OpenAI and its commercial competitors.
AIs are not to be produced by opaque companies from their ivory towers. They are the result of researchers and engineers who have a passion for designing smart system and --a fact that is too often obscured by the sad state of our society where you often have to join a company to make a living-- they do it with a genuine concern for humanity’s well being and a desire that this work is used for the greater good.
It is among AI engineers that you will find the most paranoids about AI safety and safeguards. In a solarpunk future, this is a public debate and a political subject that is an important part of the policy discussion: We make models together, with incentives that are collectively agreed upon.
AIs are personal
You don’t need a supercomputer to run an AI. LLMs today run on relatively modest gaming devices, even on raspberry pi! (though slowly at the moment). Energy-efficient chips are currently being designed to make the barrier of entry even lower.
It is a very safe bet to say that in the future, every person will have their own intelligent agent managing their local devices. Or even one agent per device and an orchestrator on their smartphone. And it is important that they are in complete control of these.
AIs should enhance humans control over their own devices, not make them surrender it.
AIs as enablers of democracy
You not only use your pocket AI to control your dishwasher, it is also your personal lawyer and representative. No human has the bandwidth to go through all the current policy debates happening in a typical country or even local community. But a well designed agent that spends time discussing with you will know your preferences and make sure to represent them.
It can engage in discussions with other agents to find compromises, to propose or oppose initiative.
As everyone’s opinion is now included in every decision about road planning, public transportation, construction schedules and urban development, the general landscape will organically grow friendlier for everybody.
An environmentalist activist at our local fablab once told me “forget about your fancy electronics, insulate your motherfucking water heater!” :-)
When you look at the hard numbers if your AI machine is your main energy use and source of CO2 emission, you are doing extremely well from an environmental point of view. Even running a LLM locally requires probably less than 300W (at peak) which is very easy to get through solar power.
One issue here is that that’s 300W more than would have otherwise been consumed with the addition of solar panels what would not have needed to be produced. The net is quite carbon intensive.
I give 300W because that’s what my own computer uses. It is not optimal for merely running a well designed system, I designed my machine to be able to do training experiments too. With a mature system, you can probably get away with 30W peak and much lower when unused. If that gives you a home AI able to optimize the heating patterns of your house or shutting down unused circuits, avoiding one or two car trips in a month, that’s much more environmentally friendly than it costs.
yea