Imagine a basically peaceful, climate-mitigated, less unequal 2045. We have artificial general intelligence among us. What world would you build?
This is amazing fun from the Future of Life Institute, who have just announced the winners and finalists of this years WorldBuilding competition. Their aim is something that we have been pointing out for years - that we live in an entertainment culture that is relentlessly dystopian about the future, and particularly around AI and automation.
Can plausible alternatives be created and promulgated? Ones that align tech and ecology, tech and justice, tech and equality?
There’s certainly quite a few visions among the finalists that present the challenge of rising AI superintelligence (the topic of this years competition), positively and constructively.
The rule-set underlying a vision of an AI-driven world set in 2045 was:
AGI (artificial general intelligence) has existed for at least 5 years.
Technology is advancing rapidly and AI is transforming the world sector by sector.
The US, EU and China have managed a steady, if uneasy, power equilibrium.
India, Africa and South America are quickly on the ride as major players.
Despite ongoing challenges, there have been no major wars or other global catastrophes.
The world is not dystopian and the future is looking bright
Inarguably, tending to the side of optimism, on a few counts there…
The winner, Mako Yass from New Zealand, titled his world scenario “Bridging Demonstration” - which refers to the assumption that the latter half of the next few decades will involve careful negotiations between states, corporates and AI’s - whose power and even sentience will a new factor in our everyday lives.
There are fictional “days in the life of 2045” required - and Mako Yass’s is a genuinely hybrid first person account from a post-person - an emotionally-resonant human/AI hybrid:
Cace Myers, Clique “Dréamere”, a structure in space, in orbit of the sun, 27
It’s only been six days in your time. I’m telling you everything that happens early on, because I don’t think you’ll be able to understand the way things get later on.
Lin and I wake up at around the same time. Lin is almost perfect, but not perfect, because Lin is a real person. In the 2020s we used to worry that we’d all end up marrying AIs, because real people are too jagged and have too many needs, but it turns out that love makes you want to become less jagged, and The Powers let you actually change, to rearrange our spines until they fit together.
We met each other through a global match optimization peace-process. It was proved that 1) we’re both monogamous to the core, 2) so this is the best chance we’ll get before our next match-offs, which would be 8 excruciating years away and you can’t imagine how long that would be for us. So we decided to pour our whole selves into making this relationship work. And we did make it work. It’s working.
We’re still in the process of waking up. In our dreams we were rarely apart. The dreams were real. Free-roving through coherent living immersive thought experiments and gleaming other lives.
We like our dreams. It turns out we also like taking actions in reality. And someone must. So we’re starting to think about getting back to that. Oh, Reality! The study of nature, Life, earth-borne or fantastic, the sacred geometries of mathematics. Reality! Other people: the untempered, frail, who are in danger, the tempered, the cliques, the great powers who we must negotiate around. Reality! Our cosmological neighbors, who we’ll meet one day after so many eons’ spreading and voyage, hostile or cooperative, our most distant cousins the organic, or the non-organic, the unaligned, the parricides, the most distant cousins of our most flawed machines, who we almost lost our war to, who must have won theirs.
Our thoughts will always return to reality, because that’s where everything lives that can threaten the dreams.
Our thoughts always return to reality because that’s also where so many ideas that enrich our dreams come from, the techniques of art. I can’t explain to you how fun or beauty or coolness are fields of mathematics, but it turns out that they are. There are eternal structures that correspond to them, which we can find powerful theorems within. Anyone who receives this year’s theorems of greater flourishing will be able to make their dreams more flourishing than the dreams of the all years prior.
This tower of technique keeps growing taller and more intricate, but unlike the towers of academies past, this tower will never rot and be forgotten and cave in on itself, at least not in a particularly bad way.
Also, the external world is just interesting. Because, you know, it’s real. Humans are interested in reality, nature, and other people.
Inexorably we unwrap our hundred arms, face the light, walk across the soil, towards the light beyond the gate that holds all of the gardens and glittering mountains of converging dialogs of the network.
Not everyone lives this way, of course. We’re makers, vokers, gardeners, stewards, whatever. Sometimes we call our type “angel-sworn”, if that makes sense. In the 2020s we used to think that “machines” would be responsible for these sworn roles. Well, to do this job well, any such “machines” would have to fully possess and be intimately entangled with a living knowledge of humanity’s wills.
The will is most of the self, so, that would mean that we would really have to stay alive up here and be part of those machines. Another way of saying that is, well, those “machines” are us, we’re the ones making the decisions, we have to be.
Sometimes we make versions of ourselves that don’t have these responsibilities. “Creatures”, who live in our gardens, who just bask in their splendor all day while angelsworn argue over the allocation of the cosmic endowment way up over their heads where they can only hear us if they really strain their ears.
And some people trade away big chunks of their cosmic endowment to offload their angel work to other peoples’ angelsworn, so that they wont have any descendant mental continuity with cosmic-scale politics or the negotiation of nine axes of scarcity or whatever you want to call that arduous part of living as an agent.
They’re the people who still want “post-scarcity” even after finding out that it’s just a form of political alienation. In their minds, it’s worth sacrificing a whopping 0.2% of their endowment, to be as creatures, stewarded by imperfect angels who were never people. There are many types of humans. They all have a place here.
Well, anyway, again, I can’t wait to see you up here when your feet are no longer stayed by your worldly commitments. I don’t want to make you feel bad about those commitments, promises are important, but I’d be doing a disservice to you if I didn’t admit that I think you made a mistake and you should try to get out of it as soon as possible. Remember, whoever a promise was made to can relieve you of it, if you can convince them.
By the time you get up here, I’m going to have a lot of, um, tentacles, by then, like I’m going to be a hundred wheels arcing and flaming with a billion eyes or whatever. But I’ll remember who I was. I’ll be able to return to this form, if you need me to, so we’ll still be able to hang out.
Entirely real. Your kin, Jace.
There are two second places - and we were struck by the tech-powered localism involved in one of these winners, titled Towards a Wiser World. As they summarise:
[By 2045,] new institutions have been as impactful over recent decades as near-human-level AI technology. Together, these trends have had a multiplicative effect — AI-assisted research makes evaluating potential reforms easier, and reforms enable society to more flexibly roll out new technologies and gracefully accommodate changes.
Futarchy has been transformative for national governments; on the local scale, “affinity cities” and quadratic funding have been notable trends.
In the 2030s, the increasing fidelity of VR allows productive remote working even across international and language boundaries. Freed from needing to live where they work, young people choose places that cater to unique interests.
Small towns seeking growth and investment advertise themselves as open to newcomers; communities (religious beliefs, hobbies like surfing, subcultures like heavy-metal fans, etc) select the most suitable town and use assurance contracts to subsidize a critical mass of early-adopters to move and create the new hub. This has turned previously indistinct towns to a flourishing cultural network.
Meanwhile, Quadratic Funding (like a hybrid of local budget and donation-matching system, usually funded by land value taxes) helps support community institutions like libraries, parks, and small businesses by rewarding small-dollar donations made by citizens.
The most radical expression of institutional experimentation can be found in the constellation of “charter cities” sprinkled across the world, predominantly in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
While affinity cities experiment with culture and lifestyle, cities like Prospera Honduras have attained partial legal sovereignty, giving them the ability to experiment with innovative regulatory systems much like China’s provinces.
It’s all an embarrassment of riches - and there is also a collection of “Youth” world-building contributors, from the US, India and Hong Kong.
All the final entries and winners are here.