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.
Because at this point, some people are suffering damage by the use of AI. I might not be hired as a translator in the future, my income is gone. Others have had their artworks, texts, creative output stolen (plus their work isn’t needed anymore). We have delegated creative work, which should be humans’ pride and joy, to a machine. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind do such thing?
So we as humans have to have a discussion about the responsible use of AI (I think nobody who screams ‘down with AI’ has any illusions that it will ever disappear again). As with any new tech product, the discussion should have been had before it was unleashed onto the public, then again you can’t talk about it if you don’t use it. It’s also time for the researchers to pick up on that sentiment and explore the ethical uses of the great power they have created.
If those now losing work as text and image workers were retrained as IT security people or AI prompt inventors before such tech was introduced, brilliant! If the numbers about ecological sustainability and advantages for society add up, I’m on board. But I want this to be a slow process and a public discussions (maybe with time some media learn to tone down the techbro/luddite extremes), before we drown in AI-generated shite nobody ever asked for.
It is not work we want, it is income. We need to break the mentality that we are not entitled a living unless we convince “higher ups” that we are doing a useful job. We are at 20-30% of workers declaring their jobs to be useless.
The useful production work is still being done, using less human labor. It should be accessible as easily as it is produced. As automation progresses, “tax the rich” becomes an increasingly obvious thing to push for.
I try to not be too bitter about the fact that every time in the past 20 years I have tried to start this discussion, I was met with denial that such a tech would one day exist. Especially in the “creative” fields of writing and drawing. It was impossible to have that debate before. And even today, it is hard. People are still in denial about what these existing system do today.
Or better yet, were allowed a premature retirement, or a part-time basic income, or a share of the company that replaced them.
We really need to imagine the post-labor world, otherwise we become the architect of our own prison.
Exactly!
I have been to rice harvest that were actually the village’s social event of the month. There is a way to partify work that could create a totally different society! Labor abolition could have happened before automation, but we opted out of it. Now it simply becomes much harder to avoid.
Don’t tax the rich, abolish them.
That can be attained by sufficient taxation :-)
Everything in automation has the same effect: human work becomes obsolete.
Most of the time is work that nobody likes, like elevator operator or copying books by hand. Sometimes is work that someone likes, like knitting or distributing newspaper by bike.
LLMs and stuff like that is nothing new in that regard. Although today LLMs are not an actual replacement of a professional translator.