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.
Check out Ian M. Banks The Culture series. AI and humans do-exist, AI are also super nice and provide stuff for us because we’re basically the equivalent of puppies compared to their level of superiority.
Oh and each of the AI that are ships have names like “Funny, It Worked Last Time…”, “A Series Of Unlikely Explanations”, or “Very Little Gravitas Indeed”.
But in my opinion yes, but we have to co-exist making democratic decisions together. SolarPunk is anarchy, so you can’t just have a machine overlord lording over people.
This is what I intend, the AGI will do some monotonous tasks autonomously but will be in contact with Humans almost constantly and will give them final say. It mostly monitors and alerts if any fundamental Dawn technology is acting up and also adjusts the allocation of power globally, determining how much goes to each settlement, and giving the excess to itself or to “climate reclamation” technology.