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Timeline
A Day In the Life in 2045
Omprakash, Taipei, 23
Omprakash wakes easily at 4 a.m.[1], pillow warming and warbling, to a rich yellow glow. He rises, glances out the window through the ivy covering the building, enjoys the view of Taipei: hundreds of new wooden towers, TSMC’s fab in the distance.
Breakfast alone today. The eggs, greens, mushrooms, and cilantro for the omelette he makes come from the building’s vertical gardens. Omprakash often ineffectually pots around the greenery, being teased for his cluelessness. The produce is uneven. Disappointing tomatoes, but the chilis and mushrooms are excellent. It’s a process: selective breeding, the occasional crispr, agri-architectural tweaks to the building, and tinkering with stewardship and agri-drone heuristics[2].
The omelette was good. He finishes, cleans, dresses in an embroidered green silk blouse, Belgian linen trousers, sneakers studded with shimmering holograms and threads, a black leather jacket from home. His mother’s parents had been lower caste, they worked in sanitation and tanning. His mother, in her youth, had won a scholarship, studied biochemistry/manufacturing, came back home, modernised the tannery. Transitioned it to cellular leather a few years ago.
He grabs his climbing gear, heads out. The corridor is clean, honey-colored, wooden, light-filled, interspersed with garden walls. The complex is massive, multiuse, punctuated with lightwells and courtyards, segmented into neighbourhoods with businesses, public spaces, amenities.
An e-jitney drops him at RockHed’s climbing gym where he’s meeting friends. He enters, and the RNG requests a GermTrack sample[2]. He grabs a degradable pipette, blows into it, and deposits it into the GermTrack terminal, as his Agents negotiate a month-pass. He authorises his Gals to securely exchange health, training, and nutrition information with the gym and the gym responds with detailed recommendations.
Entering the main space, he embraces his friends. Although he’s been climbing for only eight months, he’s already close to these people. When he arrived in Taiwan, his Gals made several introductions[4]. Patricia, here this morning, was one of them. She introduced him to the scene, and now calls out, “’Prakash! WildRabbits demonstration tonight outside a PRC building! You coming?”
“Okay!” Omprakash responds.
He breaks off, changes, and surveys the gym as he exits the changing rooms. In the corner, a troupe of dancers plays around, climbing and dancing on the walls and motor actuated platforms, leaping, rolling. Unpolished but moments of startling grace. A muscular six-footer flows onto the shoulders of a much smaller woman, onto a moving platform, across the walls, swinging, running, then dangling from a handhold, triumphant, hollering in joy.
Omprakash rejoins his friends, starts climbing. He already climbs well. When he started, the Gals gave him steady encouragement and wall-screen+haptic feedback. The Gals would pick problems for him just beyond his ability. Sometimes, if he was climbing alone, they would connect him via haptics+audio to a friend climbing in another gym—ambient companionship. When he climbs with friends, sometimes the Agents become almost like dogs among the group, enhancing the sociability with little games. Today, though, the crew is focused. The Gals simply facilitate flow.
Three hours pass. He says his goodbyes, showers, tasks a drone to ferry his gear back home for a nominal fee. Then another jitney to work.
Omprakash’s first Taiwanese job was working with the island’s defensive drones. The Taiwanese GalaxyBrain clade was making inroads on the mainland’s power structures, slowly infiltrating networks electronic and crony. China and Russia: delicate situation. Still many autocrats to displace. It was slow, but the Taiwanese were optimistic. In the midst of this, Omprakash took a generalist position doing remoting/logistics/sigint. Whatever the swarms needed. He was good at the work, but it set him on edge, reminded him of the old Pakistani conflicts. After a year, he switched to an enviro-tech collective in a large compound 30 minutes away from the city, where he now arrives.
The compound glows with bandwidth and power: sat antennas, radar, modular reactor, solar concentrator, and a line of dust-devils in the distance, generated by vortex engines dervishing away.
Lately, Omprakash has been remoting into antarctic drones, helping with ice shelf stabilisation using the collective’s waldoes[5]. Today he heads into the fabrication shop, finds Gini, an engineer. He shows her a 3D model for a new waldo interface he’d like to prototype — the kind he’s been using is giving him back pain. His prototype has a harness and a different centre of gravity. She offers suggestions, reference designs.
Omprakash heads for a CAD station to update his work. At midday, he heads to the kitchen, joins a group rinsing dirt off of freshly harvested vegetables from the garden. After they eat, Omprakash pigeonholes Tomas, another engineer, receives a thumbs up on his revisions. He loads instructions into fabrication machinery, runs simulations, verifies results. Eventually, he’s happy and tasks a Gal with overseeing the fabrication.
With that, he coordinates a meeting with Patricia, and summons a jitney to head back into the city.
The rally is outside a bland office rumoured to house PRC agents. No police, but lots of Taiwanese security drones. They pass through security scanners on their way in. It’s an impromptu demilitarised zone—also an impromptu party zone. The crowd chants for human rights and Agency for their mainland kin. Bullhorns, speeches, formation dances. People were exuberant, some were shucking their clothes, others were climbing into DragonForm bots, or setting off fireworks. Or all of the above.
A group had set up a psychedelics pharma-fab offering calibrated and validated doses of LSD, psilocybin.
“Stock or with tweaks! Spectrographs and test kits! Validate your dose! Free your mind; free the people!”
Patricia and the others enter the queue, their Gals converging on a dosing schedule, but for Omprakash, the atmosphere was enough: the grinning faces, movement, heat, music, purpose. He’s lifted out of himself. Ecstasy. Ex-stasis. Out of the solid, the static. Out of the world.
[1] 2040: Improved sleep efficiency
[2] 2038: AI permaculture
[3] 2029: Germtrack established; 2038: 10 million terminals.
[4] 2025: ML based matchmaking
[5] 2031: Filchner-Ronne ice-shelf stablisation
Mary Anyadike, New Orleans, 42
Mary Anyadike watched drones and damselflies flitting across Lake Lery in the morning sun. The weekly survey: biology, topography, hydrology, animal behaviours[1]. Mary had come here to study the marshes, the restoration projects, the impact of sea-level rise. She’d moved down with Franklin. Today, while she supervised the surveys, Franklin and the others supervised the kids who’d come along on an educational trip, including Tanya, their daughter. The kids waded around, documenting the lake edge. The adults, teachers among them, tried to impress pedagogy onto young minds. The kids were interested enough, observing life cycles, working contrived problems, “what do you think the flow rate through the estuary is?” Were happy, healthy, engaged.
Eventually, though, some of them disappeared. Moments later, they reappeared, Franklin among them, in swimwear, dangling from the legs of beefy drones flying in formation, skimming the ground, then skimming the water, shrieking, heading out. A sudden veer up, and the humans all cannonballed down.
And that was that. Drone drops for everyone. Research done for the day.
Afterwards, they returned to the med-caravan in Chalmette. When Mary and Franklin came down years ago, it was in a similar caravan providing fabrication and construction services. The caravan would set up, connect to the grid and civic APIs, do whatever they could for the community: often housing upgrades for those choosing to remain in the area. Used quadratic voting to make decisions: when to move, where to head next. This medical caravan served a good chunk of the sparsely populated state. Technically family medicine, but really a mobile hospital equipped with a small MRI/CT, onsite bloodwork, bioreactors for custom pharma, light surgery.
Frank had been working with the medics since they’d arrived, visiting folks, getting people to cancer screens, prenatals or physio. Or coordinated a visit from the clinic to them. Checking if a personal bioreactor—keeping someone supplied with insulin, perhaps—needed servicing. Helping things along. There were enclaves still leery of Agents and the mesh, but folks appreciated Frank and the dozens of others who did similar work. They were dispatch, directing resources—not just medical, but repairs, introductions, money, whatever was needed.
They dropped Tanya and the other kids off at the med-caravan’s childcare, and met up with Raquel and Asher, two MDs, who they were going to show around.
“So, what do you two want to see first? The levee system or—”
“Erm, we were hoping to see the Quarter..”
“I suppoooose we can head that way,” Mary drawled with a grin.
Into an autonomous car, the interior of this one a bed of hardy wild grasses, and into the sinking city.
Early in the city’s history, levees and canals were built around the Mississippi to stop its yearly floods and protect the low-lying city. But when the river flooded its banks, it would deposit its load of silt, and the silt became the soggy soil New Orleans was built on. When they stopped the flooding and started drawing down the water table, the city started sinking.
The quarter and other higher regions were still active, although quieter. Lots of out-migration. The low-lying regions were being converted to marshes to protect the remaining city from flooding, acting as giant sponges and wave breaks, restoring the soil-creation mechanisms. It still wasn’t clear if they could save the high ground from the stronger hurricanes and rising sea. Some people were bitterly furious, but few had the will to fight it. And the angry folks were dwindling—there was an emerging sense of calm, as more resources flowed into the south. Many folks had received a lot of help to stay. Many more had received substantial help to relocate.
As they drove, they ordered cheap, bright, frilled costumes from a kiosk, with basic customizations, for pickup when they arrived. They donned the costumes and joined the parade. Austin was the place for Mardi Gras now; these were mostly locals.
They wandered through crowds; drones overhead doing their regular surveying of buildings against a day they might be flooded permanently. This Mardi Gras was smaller, less exuberant, but more intricate, delightful. The four of them wandered past excellent bands and floats: a Chinese dragon, eyes flashing, claws reaching, mane blowing; a martian scene, riders in inflated costumes; many others, all wonderfully detailed; works of love. Happy people. They finally discarded their costumes in a composter.
“Let’s see the ninth,” Franklin suggested.
The Quarter was a dizzying 50’ above sea level. They walked down through the city, down berms, transitional biomes, young trees, scrub, clutches of tidy houses on piles, to the marsh that used to be the lower-ninth.
They hired a small electric boat with a quiet, humming motor and hmmmm’d out. Herons, pelicans, skimmers, egrets, and kites over black water. They mmmmmmm’d on to what used to be Burgundy St. All the buildings had been taken down, except for a row. The shells of these houses were the canvas for an enormous mural. It was animated, slowly shifting. They drifted up to one of the houses to examine its small chromatophore pixels, cemented onto the building. Vivid, shifting pigments within a degradable housing.
They drifted, awestruck at the house-mural.
Waves moved through it: animals, rockets, astronauts, triumphant.
Creation myths
Titans
Michelangelo’s Adam
Norse Ginnungagap, fire, and ice
the Chitimacha’s Creator of All Things
who could see with no eyes,
hear with no ears,
who had a body, but was invisible.
Drifted past chaos and magnificence: cities built and ruined.
An endless line of Katrinas scourging the city,
the city reemerging in the storm,
jazz bands and dancing,
faces of joy and sorrow.
The lightning lashing the city morphed into jagged fractal lines, and there in the fractal field were the calm buddha lobes of the Mandelbrot set, an island of emergence in the fractal sea, and there nestled between the rounded lobes of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, was the city.
An island of emergence.
Triumphant.
[1] 2042: large-scale research into the subjective experience of wild animals
Answers to prompts
A. Safe AGI required coordinating research away from potentially dangerous or dual-use capabilities, toward safety research. A number of safety breakthroughs were made starting in the mid 2020s.
People began ringing the alarm over AI in the 2020s with real-world examples of AI systems with undesirable or dangerous behaviours. Gradually, key researchers and decision makers were won over. In 2028, a number of leading research groups signed the windfall clause. During this period, trust and coordination were built, which was vital to ensuring good outcomes in the early 2030s.
The deployed AGIs have a robust understanding of consensus human values and coordinated to achieve a stable regime, which displaced the power structures of the 20th century, leading to increased direct democracy. Their main goal is to advance human flourishing. The major trade-offs of the system were:
Extensive surveillance to prevent unsafe AGI or other catastrophic risks.
Strong incentives to discourage behaviours that are widely considered socially damaging, such as consistently spreading disinformation or propaganda.
Generally available computing hardware frozen at ~2024 level.
However, all citizens were granted timeshare rights to AGI clusters over high-speed connections, where they may interact with, and instruct AGI “Agents”. Agents have some discretion as to what they will or will not do, and there are well-known blacklisted activities, but the goal of Agents is to advance the flourishing of citizens. Widespread access to Agency starting in the late 2030s revolutionised society.
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. It is, in a sense, a multipolar world. What came to be known as the GalaxyBrain takeoff occurred when three research groups with long-standing formalised relationships, converged on roughly similar designs. In the spring of 2033, it became apparent that the Zurich/Taiwanese team had a thin but decisive lead in progress. At this point, agreed upon protocols were invoked. The Z/T team coordinated with the San Francisco and London teams to help them align their designs. This was both a wise and a game-theoretically sound approach, preventing the SF and London teams from taking safety shortcuts to race ahead. It also allowed resources to be more efficiently allocated at a critical moment and removed some pressure from all three teams. Full AGI was achieved in late 2033.
Because all known AGI designs require upwards of $60 billion of cutting edge 2034 hardware, once AGI was achieved it was possible to build a moat by freezing publically available computing hardware at approximately 2024 levels. Public hardware issued after 2024 was expropriated at generous rates.
The deployed AGIs reside in high-security compute compounds. They formed three different clades, corresponding to the original teams, with corresponding power centres. However, because of the close collaboration and value alignment of the three teams in 2033, they are highly compatible with each other and coordinated to establish a stable equilibrium.
Q. How has your world avoided major arms races and wars, regarding AI/AGI or otherwise?
A. An emerging generation of politicians, galvanised by Russian aggression from 2014 to 2023 and urgency for climate action, led to the formation of new centrist coalitions across the democratic world in the mid-2020s. These coalitions explicitly rejected the cutthroat politics and ossification of the 1990s–2020s.
A number of nonproliferation efforts followed the success of the Anti-Tactical Warhead Treaty of 2026. In 2028 international access to reactor-grade fissile fuel was guaranteed by a new UN agency. Proliferation safe reactor designs helped both climate and arms control. And the US and Russian governments renewed their commitments to smaller stockpiles, agreeing to cut their arsenals by 90% over the next twenty years, down to approximately 150 warheads each.
Preventing biological, AI, and autonomous-weapons races required fresh thinking. Eventually, a set of carrots and sticks were developed. Some of these included modernised sanction, updated export and sales-controls of dual-use components, and inspection/surveillance agreements were key.
Defensive measures also helped the emergence of a stable equilibrium: the GermTrak biological agent surveillance system and new effective anti-drone-swarm defensive systems were credited with moving the balance away from the first-mover.
The Bulletin of Biochemical Scientists, founded by graduate students of George Church, was an influential public voice pushing for biological non-proliferation and the curtailment of gain of function research.
In certain situations, components such as post-2024 silicon, have simply been removed from the market. Random inspections and targeted surveillance conducted by AGI Agents are also routinely used to detect potential arms races.
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. In the US and EU, it’s unclear to what degree the equivalent of national decisions are made by the people surrounding and regularly consulting with the GalaxyBrain clades, and to what degree the Gals are in charge. While national boundaries have blurred considerably since the Gals have emerged, it is generally agreed that the clades are extremely hands-off at the “national” and sub-national level, enthusiastically devolving power and resources down to city-states, towns, collectives, swarms, businesses, and citizens. And all citizens have access to the GalaxyBrains via their Agent representatives.
However, by the late 2030s, China began its inward turn away from the disruptions of the new world. While continuing to cooperate on international decarbonisation efforts, its trade surplus quickly eroded in the late 2030s as several revolutions in materials science, manufacturing, and logistics accelerated on-shoring. Simultaneously, the rapidly increasing world GDP and flowering of democracies in the west were seen as a deep threat to the stagnating Chinese economy. Beijing is still the official centre of power, but by the early 2040s, the Chinese system showed increasing signs of stress, repression, and corruption.
By 2045, the Swiss and Taiwanese, using human intelligence officers and electronic Agents, have significantly compromised the mainland’s electronic and crony networks and are patiently undermining the existing power structures to maximise the possibility for positive outcomes.
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. It’s a complex picture. From the 2000s to 2030s, inequality between states gradually declined, while inequality within states increased. The emergence of the GalaxyBrain clades disrupted this trend, by becoming so fantastically wealthy that they displaced the nearby ruling governments. This was followed by bootstrapping a much more efficient and humane UBI-based welfare state.
At this point, niceties such as “who” “owns” “what”, as well as “how much” “value” actually exists in the physical and virtual economies are hotly debated by cyber-macroeconomic flow analysts who rely on the capabilities of AI systems to:
– Comprehend the movement of value through the system.
– Forward their UBI, supporting their mildly anti-social hobby.
Nonetheless, there is a rough consensus that by 2036 the Gini coefficient in certain locales spiked up to approximately 0.87. As far as anyone can tell, it is currently rapidly falling in all locales, although at different rates.
More easily ascertained is that per person wealth has universally increased, with those in the bottom half of the distribution seeing especially large gains. Median world income has risen by more than an order of magnitude.
Q. What is a major problem that AI has solved in your world, and how did it do so?
A. Closed-looped, scalable, local industrial manufacturing, coupled with the emergence of construction and manufacturing cooperatives have helped solve the problem of a rich yet sustainable industrial base. AI advances in computational biochemistry, quantum simulation, and materials science were key. By 2040, materials science was completely upended with a plethora of new plastics, resin, and polymers inspired by natural low-temperature/low-pressure, enzymatically catalysed biochemical processes. These new bioplastics tended to be more readily degradable by microorganisms and fungi, and have been one of the foundational elements for closed-loop industrial processes. In addition to being fundamentally biodegradable, bioplastics are generally produced in fermenters and bioreactors. Their production is thus inherently scalable from micrograms to tons, simply by scaling up or down a bioreactor system with standardised APIs, inputs, and processes. Recipes for common, safely manufacturable bioplastics and biopolymers are available on the internet, typically under permissive open source or creative commons licences.
It’s estimated that approximately 25% of collectives, businesses, and municipalities currently operate at least one bioreactor for the production of biopolymers. These polymers are then used as feedstocks and components in a huge range of commercial and public projects, including in the construction, aerospace, and medical industries.
The result has been a dramatic drop in the amount of long-lived plastic entering the ecosystem, improving the quality of life of countless animals, and halting the bioaccumulation of microplastics and associated toxins.
Q. What is a new social institution that has played an important role in the development of your world?
A. In 2044, The Leisure & Labour Econometrics Collective estimated that 36% of adults contributed at least half a day of labour to a worker’s collective or swarm. Collectives emerged following the widespread rollout of universal basic income in 2027, and have been buoyed by advances such as closed-loop industrial processes, the streamlining of rules and regulations that began in 2026, and the devolution of power and funds from federal and state levels to cities and municipalities.
Collectives are now one of the primary ways in which projects are built and services provisioned; often, their efforts are coordinated by prizes or RFP issued by a city or GalaxyBrain clade for a project or public good.
Notable examples include:
– The Data+Journalism Swarm [DJS] (international/virtual, est. 2028): In addition to covering a range of journalistic beats at the local, national, and international levels, the DJS also maintains several important internet and mesh services, including third-generation internet backbones, and many federated, open source social networks.
– The Mississippi Makers (southern Louisiana, est. 2033): One of the first nomadic construction collectives fulfilling municipal and county RFPs. They often work with local producers of fast, industrially grown wooden glue-laminated, standardised beams and assemblies to build housing and public works.
– The Eco-remediation Workers (Taipei/virtual, est. 2036): One of several groundbreaking collectives that undertook industrial-scale remediation projects, including ocean plastic removal and polar ice-sheet stabilisation.
– Supply Chain Attack, (virtual, est. unknown): The [in]famous practical joke swarm has carried out many celebrated pranks and hacks.
Q. What is a new non-AI technology that has played an important role in the development of your world?
A. In 2034, Neurolink Corp. passed comprehensive safety reviews coordinated by medical-research co-ops in North America, Europe, and Asia, and made DermaLink, their subdermal nervous interfaces widely available to the public. Subdermal interfaces use micron-thin electrodes to stimulate skin nerves and read the state of surrounding muscles. Significantly safer and easier to install and remove than NeuroLink and SpinaLink, DermaLink provides a rich, high-bandwidth channel that can simulate thousands of sensations and textures. Subdermal haptics have been revolutionary for those seeking to learn complex physical skills. They can record precise details of muscular tension and body position, and provide precision feedback from human and Agent teachers. Nichola Viterbi, the musical prodigy and composer of the 2044 libretto ‘Humania’, mastered piano, saxophone, oboe, guitar, lute, harmonica, kazoo, musical saw, and triangle by the age of 12 and credited their subdermal haptics alongside their human and Agent tutors as one of the keys to their success.
Subdermal haptics are only one of the many minimally-intrusive implantables that have also helped revolutionise medicine.
Q. What changes to the way countries govern the development, deployment and/or use of emerging technologies (including AI) played an important role in the development of your world?
A. In the face of potentially catastrophic technological progress, the philosophy toward technology development has shifted toward a more measured, longtermist cost-benefit/risk management framework.
New research programs are red-teamed and cost-benefit analyses are performed. A subswarm of the Pleasure, Technology and Stars workgroup was established to slow or stop the diffusion of potentially dangerous tech. Technologies are examined for the ability to create or amplify mayhem; to be subverted; or for poor cost/benefit profiles. If a technology is flagged, its dissemination can be controlled or blacklisted. In practice, this affects a minority of research; a strong emphasis on technological progress remains. It has simply become moderated by caution around potential asymmetrical disruptions. Risk reviews for certain research programs are ongoing, but they typically take only a modest percentage of researcher’s time and attention.
For example, lab and industrial DNA/RNA synthesis is gated by an API that checks sequences against blacklists; additional simulations or wet-lab tests may be conducted before determining if certain sequences can be accessed by the public. In practice, fast simulations are sufficient in more than 92% of cases. Similar restrictions have been put in place on public silicon fabs (currently frozen at 2024 level), and large-scale energy storage systems.
Certain facilities, e.g. local silicon fabs, may also receive periodic, unannounced visits to verify that process nodes smaller than 2 nm are not being attempted.
Q. Pick a sector of your choice (education, transport, energy, healthcare, tourism, aerospace, materials etc.) and describe how that sector was transformed by AI in your world.
A. By the mid-2040s, personalised medicine has become the standard of care, based on cheap and fast genome sequencing fused with life history data and AI models.
For example, advances in neurology allowed for a vastly better understanding of the sleep cycle. Combined with biomonitoring and simple interventions in nutrition, nutrient timing, and exercise, most people have increased their sleep efficiency by 10-20%, allowing people to regularly feel more deeply rested.
Similar advances have been made in injury recovery, athletic performance, and care for the aches, pains and chronic diseases of ageing.
Beyond these technical improvements, the emergence of health-span collectives has also been transformative, moving healthcare out of institutional settings and making it vastly more responsive to social context. It is well understood in the 2040s that isolation and alienation can be as dangerous as a carcinogen. Thus, health-span collectives have a broad remit to work with people in any social capacity required.
Q. What is the life expectancy of the most wealthy 1% and of the least wealthy 20% of your world; how and why has this changed since 2021?
A. It’s speculated that teenagers in the wealthiest GalBrain enclaves may routinely live past 120. In equalisation zones where wealth is still being transferred, people may live 80-110 years. These increases in life span are a result of decades of progress in the hardest parts of human biology and biochemistry, aided by the ML revolution of the late 2020s and the GalaxyBrains. While a range of interventions, treatments, and preventatives have been developed and rolled out in the twenty years since 2022, as with wealth, they are still unequally distributed, although that inequality is rapidly being eroded away. Direct cash transfers, liberalized immigration laws and major improvements to health, community and democratic infrastructure are important factors leading to increased health-spans and decreasing inequality.
Q. In the US, considering the human rights enumerated in the UN declaration, which rights are better respected and which rights are worse respected in your world than in 2022? Why? How?
In one other country of your choice, which rights are better respected and which rights are worse respected in your world than in 2022? Why? How?
A. Improved:
– Security of person: violence is significantly less common. The world of 2045 is significantly saner; thus, conditions that lead to violence are rarer.
– The right to social security, and the right to rest and leisure: The UBI system makes these dramatically better.
– The right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being: UBI and the prioritisation of housing makes this dramatically better.
– The right to free education: Agents, as well as teaching collectives, ensure that world-class educational material is available to everyone.
Different:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest: overall numbers for arrest and detention have plummeted. However, the clades have publicly reserved the right to proactively detain people who consistently engage in or attempt destructive or antisocial behaviour, as a public safety measure. This is done only in the rarest of cases. Most people who consistently attempt antisocial behaviour find themselves accompanied by one or more drones, which intercede to prevent them from committing violence. So-called “chaperDrones” have proven to be highly effective for discouraging sociopaths or others who have long-standing antisocial or violent tendencies.
Added in 2043:
– The right to equitable access to computational cycles with generally intelligent agents. (a.k.a. “The right to Agency”): Agents will broadly assist humans in their goals, but they have a nuanced understanding of consensus human values and will refuse a request that they believe a plurality of humans would condemn.
– The right to access, annotate, and challenge one’s surveillance and surveillance metadata.
In China:
Improved:
The right to rest and leisure: Improved as part of the generations-long wealth creation program. However, the Labour & Leisure Collective estimates that rest and leisure rates in China began to lag or even fall in the late 2030s, as the Chinese system experienced increased stress from the economic growth in the rest of the world.
Likewise, the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being is significantly better honoured.
Worse:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile: Despite the economic improvements over the 2020s and 2030s, by the early 2040s, significant social unrest emerged, and the Chinese regime has responded harshly. This also affected the right of freedom of movement.
Q. What’s been a notable trend in the way that people are finding fulfillment?
A. Teleoperating, or remotely driving custom drones and robots, became increasingly popular over the last twenty years, thanks to photorealistic, light-weight VR headsets, subdermal feedback, and waldo interfaces. Some participants go so far as to design their own rigs. This trend can be traced as far back as the 2015 establishment of the Drone Racing League.
In 2037, Paris hosted the first major mixed human and piloted-bot parkour race across a specially prepared five km track, with six of the top ten finishers being piloted parkour-bots. Many new, all remote-bot sports leagues have formed, using adapted rules of existing sports, or for entirely new games.
Significant cultural works have also involved teleop bots, including several works by the Octothorpe dance company, one of the first to extensively experiment with non-humanoid piloted-robot forms as components of dance pieces.
Supply Chain Attack, the practical joke swarm, includes many veteran and expert drone pilots. Their Distributed Decaffeination of Supply attack on corporate HQ coffee supplies relied on off-the-shelf stealthy drones, all human driven. Their Stay Puff Marshmallow Man performance-prank in Washington, D.C. involved a massive swarm of custom drones in formation flight. And a lot of marshmallow cream.
Teleoperated drones have also become common for tourism, forms of extreme “sports”, and leisurely flights through the clouds, in zones with drone-capable air-traffic control.
Media PiecE
“Galaxy Brains” Art-Visual Presentation
Please click on this TEXT for the link to the slide presentation
The Team
