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.
I think this question is a great prompt for an actual Solarpunk story.
Forget AGI, even creating 'AI' seems to require human exploitation on a global scale. All current Large Language Models' (LLM) existence relies on denying intellectual 'property' norms and erasing the authorship of millions of small human authors, artists, and creators, while those same norms are enforced brutally against them in the interest of rich creators and corporations.
I know anarchists take many stances on the use of LLM technology, but I don't think anyone denies these technologies are powerful and world-changing. Like not driving a car or living a strictly vegan lifestyle, some anarchists have measured the harm with the benefit, and decided to accept that boycotting LLM technology is an ethical stance they can't individually afford.
But what would an anti-capitalist 'AI' look like? Is it possible to build an alternative to the LAION Dataset that respects the human authorship upon which it depends? How would such a system survive against its capitalist competitors? How would tools built on the dataset differ from the ones currently available? How would abuse of the system be prevented or mitigated? How would the world react to an anarchist LLM?
I think answering these questions could be the basis of a solarpunk version of the cypherpunk Cryptonomicon. It would be the kind of well-written story I would like to read.
it's long past time for so-called "intellectual property" to be abolished.
Agreed, but that doesn't make it right for multi billion dollar companies to take artists work without their consent and turn it into a commercial AI.
At the very least those AIs would need to be released to the public domain if they were trained on a public body of works.
that would come with the abolition of intellectual property
No, because AI runs in data centers and only offer an API.
Mistral-7B and Mixtral are 2 top-scoring LLMs that you can run on a personal computer. Admittedly a beefy one for the latter model.
Stable Diffusion generates very good image on personal computers.
All three are part of the hundreds of very good open source AI models that the industry is struggling to keep up with. OpenAI and MidJourney are the only one to manage to keep up the pace. Think about it: there are billions poured monthly into the industry and a bunch of researchers and hobbyists beat that on home PCs. Even mfing Google does not manage to keep up!
All these models can be run locally with no third-party between your prompt and the result.
And if you dont have a good GPU, you can join the AI Horde, that provides share computation to everyone.
90% of the non-tech news about AI talks about OpenAI but when you follow the tech news of the scene, the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) community is actually winning a very important battle without the general public being aware of the battles going on.
I was specifically referring to commercial AI, and besides that: those ones you mention are under quite restrictive licensing and can't really be considered in the public domain either.
Apache 2.0 for the first 2 ones. It is essentially the same as public domain.
CreativeML Open RAIL-M for Stable Diffusion.
The Linux kernel is under more restrictive licenses.
I stand corrected on the first two, but Stable Diffusion's license is significantly more restrictive than the GPLv2.
I'm myself no fan of OpenRail, but I think it is more of a result of FOSS ceding to silly fearmongerers than a trojan to close down models.
with no intellectual property, the code can just be exfiltrated
I think the problem is not with intellectual property but with artists being forced to create art for profit. Can we decouple art from commerce completely and set up society in such way that we can afford to create art for pleasure? If I needed to work only two days a week to provide for myself I could create art in the remaining time. With art not being a commercial product anymore, intellectual property wouldn't be an issue, plus people could create art from the depth of their hearts and not geared towards commercial success.
Forcing people to perform a skill they would do for free both drains the joy out of creation and undermines cooperation between creators. I agree that being forced to create art for profit is part of the problem.
One of the foundational coups of capitalism was framing respect for artists as a form of 'property' - twisting the interests of culture creators and landlords into the same emerging political system. Now that capitalists believe we're at the 'end of history' this fiction is becoming less important.
When someone creates beauty, people will want to show gratitude. Even in a post-scarcity world, there is incentive for jerks to misrepresent the origins of their work and to plagiarize. I think people will create art regardless of their political or economic situation, but I would like to think that whatever replaces capitalism would be a system where artists flourish because of their environment and not in spite of it. Intellectual property is old bathwater, but attribution and respect is our baby.
The age of content. When I grew up, millions of teen artsy folk like me were told we could 'earn a living with our creativity' in marketing and adjacent areas aka 'sell your soul to capitalism'.
Yeah, you nailed it.