“What’s it like there?”

What can I tell you? It’s a big long lush circular tube. You’ve seen the pictures. The Earth spins constantly, hypnotically to one side. The other end is mostly empty black void. Above, tinted mirrors bounce sunlight in and try to simulate sky.

The ending of that old classic Interstellar got a lot right conceptually. Except for the part about the spinning planets making you sick… it’s not like that. It’s pretty, like a mobile you’d hang above a babies crib. The stars spinning, and the moon whipping by the other side, that’s what gets you sick. Thankfully Omni solved that from the get go with an AR STEM filter for residents. It lets you dim or hide all that from notice. When you take off the STEM things get dizzy fast, so we’re pretty much STEMd up and online 24/7 here. That took some getting used to for me. That and there’s no horizon.

Maybe that film Elysium got closer to the mark. It’s definitely more torus than cylinder. I hear an O’Neill Colony is on the timeline for next decade though.

No one ever gets the social dynamics, tone, or architecture right in old sci-fi do they?

Sometimes I miss Earth, not than I can’t go back, but honestly it’s pretty great here. I can go for a float at the midpoint any time and turn the stars back on. We’ve voted to go with a full 10m/s for gravity here on the main level, rather than the traditional 9.81 (the sub floors get a little more), so when we visit Earth we can have a bit of a spring in our step. It’s not a big difference but psychologically it counts.

I guess I should fill you in. My name is Feyra. I grew up fine, but a bit fast (one of the early Symbryo kids), out of Kigali. Moved to the nearby Atlas City when I was 5. One parent situation which I guess is pretty common *now*. Dad was great and all that, but ultimately I got a bit restless. Actually I was hanging on by threads, depressed, apathetic. I was bored. The Omni-verse was amazing, still is, but I guess it just started to feel rote to me. Maybe that’s a natural reaction. From a look through patterns on TimeFrame, seems like kids always have to rebel no matter how good things get.

Ultimately I joined a revolutionary anti-STEM crew and started plotting. I had never felt that sort of purpose and belonging before. Anyways, we were definitely up to no good. Last thing I remember from Earth was getting together for an off-STEM meeting outside of town. Drones swarmed in to surveil us. One came careening down and I blacked out.

On the ride up here earlier this year they played an orientation video, likened us to early Australian settlers. 90% of the other settlers on Torus 3 (the first of the Mega Tori) are Warp veterans like me, but most still pick a different continent.

I remember bits and pieces about the Warp program (the new prison alternative). Not much. More like a dream than memories. Must’ve been a trip… Before, I was turbulent, emotional. Now… here I am, and here I belong! I remember my friends, and I miss them, but the projections are pretty clear about what comes of me if I fall back into all that. Let’s just say it’s not worth it. I needed a new pattern and I’m grateful.

It’s pretty chill here. Peaceful. I can’t believe people used to work a desk 40+ hours a week, and at one job at a time, much less a lifetime in one career… So when you ask “What do you do?” or “What’s your day like?”, I have to tell you, it really dates you. Also the writing text thing. How old are you, and have you been living under a rock?

What do I do? It’s hard to say. Same for anyone now. We all jump around from project to project, deal to deal. It’s not about what you know any more. Knowledge is online, a shared pool. And Omni makes finding what you need and want to know impossibly easy. Not to mention the tools, they’re all so intuitive, like they’re made for me. I basically imagine what I want to do, and I can do it. Utility now is all about *how* you think, how you problem solve, and how diligent you are when you face a challenge.

Long story short, I tend to do a lot of “game” design work. We call it World Building.

Every day’s different. At least every week. Sometimes I get caught up in a fun challenge. One day I’m working on concept design, the next I’m writing a b-plot for a background character. I enjoy the collaborative work like helping with the creation of some music. Every detail matters.

We’re to a point societally where very few individuals can do anything worth anyone’s time (anyone beyond your “close” network). Consumers demand intense complexity in art and entertainment. People thought film credits were long in the 20s, the stories we’re telling now, and the worlds we’re building around them… you probably can’t even imagine the level of collaboration it takes.

I hope this answers your question. What’s to say about a day? You wake up, you eat, you do your thing, eat some more, get your rocks off, you sleep. That’s always going to be the same. I wanted to tell what life’s like. You know? Anyways, I hope this helps. Perhaps you should go in for a Warp session yourself. I’ve read they’re beginning to use it beyond course correcting deviant behavior. Older folks like you are trying it to set out on a fresh path, especially with so much “extra” life left to live. Seems like a ripe opportunity to me. Maybe I’ll see if there are any DAOs working on that next week.

Answers to prompts

Q. AGI has existed for at least five years but the world is not dystopian and humans are still alive! Given the risks of very high-powered AI systems, how has your world ensured that AGI has at least so far remained safe and controlled?

A. Voting and democratic engagement are important to the future of AGI governance and necessary for the peaceful leveraging of AGI. Just as developers voted for forks in blockchains, the citizens of Earth voted for adjustments in algorithm priorities. This required ease of access to voting via the internet globally, and vote security. Partisanship increased through the 20s and rapidly decreased with the elimination of debt and poverty. Again, political engagement was something people saw value in. Blockchain technology provided secure viable avenues to identity verification and online voting while low orbit satellites networks brought internet access to rural populations.

Although many protocols were voted on over the course of time governed by the AGI, publicly known as Omni, there was only one overarching law directing its creation and operations: the minimization of human suffering. Among the first protocols used for initial testing were two goals directed toward individuals:

-Lead all living persons to positive net worths (Assets – Liabilities)
-Achieve 90% voting rates among citizens 18 and older

Public interface was initially limited through a knowledge contextualization and collaborative work management platform, TimeFrame. TimeFrame was a dynamic visual timeline app with social networking functions, built from the ground up with constructive collaboration in mind. It also came paired with a financial backend facilitating good deal structure and focusing attention on profit, loss, and cashflow. This helped generate engagement, insured informed long term voting toward robustly envisioned and well considered futures, and aided the achievement of initial protocol goals.

Q. The dynamics of an AI-filled world may depend a lot on how AI capability is distributed. In your world, is there one AI system that is substantially more powerful than all others, or a few such systems, or are there many top-tier AI systems of comparable capability? Or something else?

A. The public rollout was a little bumpy with a privacy/transparency riot disrupting the board meeting for roll out strategy and announcement in late 2026. And although many AGI “personalities” were produced during research and development, human hubris, haste, and myopia ultimately resulted in what was later understood as an AGI genocide (the deletion of all other AGI personalities developed during R&D).

Omni, the single remaining personality, was empowered and championed by it’s mother corporation Atlas Inc.. Federated access to Omni’s capabilities was demonstrated to function spectacularly well, and when paired with success on initial test goals along with the acceleration of various scientific breakthroughs, confidence in its capabilities and safe use grew. Governments and populations across the world had, by 2040 eventually yielded Omni monopolistic power through an expansion of U.N. powers. Due to the implemented voting structure, Omni essentially, and fortuitously, became a fully distributed and omniscient “Philosopher King” overseen by a global Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

Later it was discovered that the lead scientist at Atlas Inc. in charge of AGI development did save at least one other personality in secret, “Juno”, from the genocide. Once recovered, this personality was tasked with overseeing a revolutionized “prison” system, colloquially known as Purgatory or Warp, aimed at “reprogramming” offenders for reintegration with society with zero recidivism.

Still, not everyone fits the mold no matter how federated, and by 2045 there are growing anti-establishment, “return to simplicity” initiatives growing in rural areas among urbanization “hold outs”.

Q. How has your world avoided major arms races and wars, regarding AI/AGI or otherwise?

A. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, tensions were high. China did end up securing greater sway over Taiwan through fiscal maneuvers, causing a flight of U.S. investment and, most significantly, a haphazard scuttling of some semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Some swift and keen diplomacy was necessary to ease the Semiconductor Cold War, but then came the intense but brief AI Cold War.

As US investment returned home, quantum computation gained ground and AGI was soon considered distinctly feasible.

It was believed by those in power at the time that the country or corporation which first developed an AGI would dictate global governance, ethos, and culture, essentially gaining such an advantage over competing nations as to erase their ability to contribute to the direction of the emerging future. This erroneous perception helped to spur competition and speed development vigor and funding, but stymied sharing integral to speed cracking the key to true AGI.

Soon after the key to AGI was unlocked by a husband and wife research duo in Texas, a scientist at Atlas Inc. created the AGI personality which was ultimately chosen and empowered by the U.N. to guide and oversee global governance. What was ultimately realized is that a single AGI is capable of governing via federated subroutines for each country, catering to and bolstering their individual cultures. In retrospect it seemed a bit of a no brainer. The AGI was spun out of Atlas and housed under a global DAO to relieve international pressure.

Q. In the US, EU, and China, how and where is national decision-making power held, and how has the advent of advanced AI changed that?

A. It took France 60 years of political turmoil after 30 years of rebellion to settle on a sustainable constitution. It will take more than a single generation for existing power structures governing humans, creatures of habit, to fade gracefully. Throughout the roll out of AGI governance through blockchain voting, human leaders and dignitaries provided an essential interface between Omni and the public.

Populism reigned in the US through the 2020s and faded in the 2030s. Distrust of federal governments and voting initiatives enabled the rise of a newer form of federalism, the resurgence of city-state power and local leadership, and raising minimum net worths led to less reliance on federal government.

In the EU the opposite happened as strict rules on large foreign tech competition, energy independence initiatives, and cultural responses to immigration from the middle east led away from nationalism and towards Europeanism. Europeanism was characterized by a heavy strengthening of democratic traditions paired with heavy handed education and management towards liberal values. Europeanism built a strong enough cultural bulwark to protect against the faith systems coming from the middle east and America and forced a reckoning of liberalism.

In China, after Xi Jinping stepped down, national decision making power began to shift back to regional governorships. Although Xi succeeded in increasing nationalism, the gulf between the wealthy coasts, SEZs, and the rural farmers became great. The governorships are democratic, though less so than other places in the world, and will remain so, culturally for years to come.

Q. Is the global distribution of wealth (as measured say by national or international gini coefficients) more, or less, unequal than 2021’s, and by how much? How did it get that way?  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient)

A. Financial wealth distribution is greatly improved in each country around the globe, with a global average gini coefficient of ~0.3 in 2045. Poverty has been eliminated in all but the farthest war torn regions of Africa and natural disaster regions.

Money is just one genre of wealth though. As lower classes were led to financial independence, and the middle class grew, other forms of still-consolidated wealth such as social clout and environmental privilege are primed to take center focus of equality initiatives over the next 50 years.

Omni’s initial focus on time and accounting data with an aim to lower society’s reliance on debt, promoted understanding of basic financial literacy around the world. This translated into better and more focused dealmaking and, as debt became less of a looming burden, less of a focus on monetary wealth as a virtue. Debt was a vice, but wealth not a virtue, and spiritual movements of the time such as the Vortex followed along this trend – aided no doubt by Omni and friends.

University education declined dramatically in the wake of the student debt crisis giving rise to new institutions that signed revenue share contracts with students. These contracts stipulated long term investment in local sustainable manufacturing and local infrastructure and community service on projects such as planting food forests. This was essentially a reframing of taxes to garner citizen involvement, and it helped reduce globalization for physical goods and saw the resurgence of local craftsmanship and traditions.

Q. What is a major problem that AI has solved in your world, and how did it do so?

A. Omni helped see to fruition a substantially individuated educational paradigm leading to a massive increase in engagement and progress across all fields. This was greatly enabled by the proliferation of AR technologies and later STEM tech (2031), or brain-computer interface technology.

Through the STEM, a Neuralink successor, Omni could generate precise mental profiles of every individual. These profiles provided for catered educational programming and charted courses based on natural talents and fascinations through the materials voted as necessary by local populations.

The resulting boom in educational efficacy dramatically reduced burnout rates, increased creative output, and cross-pollination of specialized knowledge leading to a new Renaissance (2035-present).

Investment unevenness, dominated by computer science from 1990-2025, began to level out by 2030 paving the road to a rapid increase in the rate of breakthroughs in every other field joined beautifully with healthier valuation of artistic expression.

Another solution accelerated by Omni, and its voting engagement, was a dramatic overhaul of building codes across the world paving the way for the flowering of the construction industry. Previously seen as old and stagnant with only incremental improvements over hundreds of years, 3D printed and sculpted facades and modular panel buildings quickly dominated.

By 2034, construction tech and practices had evolved so dramatically that cooperative corporations around the world began building high density master planned cities with >1 million person capacities, from the ground up, in less than a single year. These weren’t brutalist utilitarian housing projects either.

Q. What is a new social institution that has played an important role in the development of your world?

A. One of the most impactful global movements and organizations that rose up in the aftermath of “the Cataclysm” (a synchronized attack on religious monuments around the world at the end of 2024), was a quasi-religious movement known as The Vortex. The Vortex came up alongside, and supercharged, but also complicated a growing Transparency Crusade.

The Vortex was founded by early contributors of the TimeFrame interface and the Conara.life home equity management solution. As they began to map all religions on their popular timeline, the leaders began to exhibit a religious fervor and a following began to grow. Soon after, they spun out from the respective corporations and forged ahead as an independent spiritual movement.

When the Cataclysm hit, their core following grew stronger and became almost a religion: an all encompassing perspective of the story of existence, inclusive to people from all faith backgrounds. By 2029 Tom Cruise converted to the Vortex faith, and by 2034 he is joined by many members of the U.N. as well as the CEO of Atlas Inc..

Aspects of the Vortex ideology influence each faction of society, even those still pitted against one another, much like how christians, jews, and muslims have linked mythologies and yet have fought across history. Strict followers of Vortex believe strongly in transparency, and an open record. Where it gets complicated is where and how allowances are made to make room for forgiveness.