When Dusk Turned into Dawn

There he was, tormented to despair. The night deepened with each hour, yet his mind’s light continued to flicker, denying him sleep. It was not a malady that kept him awake for he was in good health, he thought. Nor was it any external disturbance, for that part of Dar es Salaam was so pleasantly quiet that he could discern the faint roar of the ocean from the comfort of his bed. It was the dread of his recent actions – a little click of a button – that assailed him.

As he has always done since childhood, whether on a peaceful summer morn or on a freezing evening as a storm pelted the earth with bullets of ice, Vasquo resolved to take a walk to dampen the ferment of his mind. Many who have seen him sauntering through the streets, oblivious of the elements, have thought him mad. He would sway from path to path if he was lost in a dream from which he could not awake. But soon, touched by the miraculous tranquillity that solitude brings, his mind would clear, his spirits would settle, and eventually, his feet would lead him back home. And so, in search of his cure, he jumped out of his bed with patent distress, threw a coat hastily over his shoulders and without any thought about laying his course, plunged into the darkness of the night. Like clockwork, his retinal eyepiece roared to life, projecting the layout of the paths ahead of him with sharp clarity, illuminating any difficulties that may beset his path.

The sparse raindrops that were carried from the ocean fell like diamonds from the sky, coloured to a brilliant shimmer by Dar es Salaam’s scintillating lights. He steadied his step on the slippery pavements, exhaled, and allowed his mind to wander. He looked upward towards the majestic web of the Starlink network and then cast his eyes around. The low hum of autonomous vehicles was music to his ears, drawing his mind away from his distress. He saw their drunk occupants laughing and kissing their way towards some festal indulgence that befits the cold, Friday night, and suddenly he remembered his loss. The light rain, he smirked, was not as soothing as Adira’s warm kisses. Ah, Adira! Unwilling to accept the momentary distraction, his mind thrust Adira into the world around him, reminding him that it was a friendship he was unable to preserve that had denied him sleep.

With science, humanity had created the world in the image of its gods. Many maladies could now be dispelled with the rapidity of a miracle, hypersonic transport systems put the winged sandals of Hermes to shame, and the counsel of pedestrian AGIs was often far wiser than the musings of King Solomon. However, despite humanity’s earnest efforts, mortality remained unconquered. No matter how transhuman, no matter how long life was lengthened, death was inevitable. And with every remembrance of our dead, our hearts die anew, with distractions offering us merely a second of respite before remembrance forces us to die again. As he wandered throughout the night, he must have died a few thousand times. And with each step, his mind replayed Adira’s beautiful voice that was untainted by pain even on her deathbed, as she whispered “If it will make you happy, ReCreate me”.

ReCreate had emerged not long ago from Nairobi’s silicon savannah. It was a powerful multi-modal media generation tool that ran using an implementation of a generality measure 7 AGI agent. As soon as ReCreate had been announced, he had quickly acquired a beta subscription, training it to generate texts, images, videos and voices of his favourite historical thinkers for his amusement. When supplied with a sufficiently representative dataset, say Einstein’s complete audio-visual and text catalogue, ReCreate could generate new media that would mimic Einstein’s original’s cadence, physical form, voice, and wit with uncanny precision. Even his jolly and womanising nature and the swiss-Germanic affectations of his accent emerged from the ReCreation. Although ReCreate was largely an amusing indulgence, often referred to as the ‘deeper fake’ in the Metaverse, it was not lost on him that maybe, just maybe, ReCreate could do so much more…

And so, after Adira’s death, armed with both her permission and her passwords, he had compiled Adira’s total digital footprint: every picture and video that she had ever captured, every message and tweet that she had ever penned, from her childhood pictures posted by her parents to the remote comments that she had littered across every corner of the web and the metaverses. In total, just 1.5 terabytes of data, yet encompassing every single bit and qubit that her lovely soul had ever created.

With tears running down his eyes, he had logged into his ReCreate account and submitted the data, and now the seemingly endless wait had kept him awake for 4 days straight. All he wanted was to see her again, to hear her sweet, angelic voice in its full authenticity. He wanted to cheat death and bring her back to life, even if for a single moment. Moving on would be settling for too little, especially when science could let him chance at a miracle that could not have been offered to someone who needed it more woefully.

Suddenly, his eyepiece came to life with the notification “Training complete” in his visual field. Ignoring the cold chill that ran down his spine, he turned around and bolted at full speed back to his house, slammed the door shut behind him and initiated his Neuralink. “Nod to continue”, the eyepiece showed. Hesitating, he turned and looked outside. The sky was still dark. But soon, when dusk turned into dawn, he felt the heaviness lift from his heart with each ray of light that brightened the sky. Then he nodded. And alas, there she was, as vivid as the morning sun, standing in front of him as if she had never left.

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. International best practices in AGI research and development have been in place for at least 20 years. Most researchers and governments have settled on the “layered programming protocol”. There are 3 layers of architecture: the core, the plastic periphery, and the elastic interface. The elastic interface is an extremely adaptable layer of neural networks in which a client/agent is completely free to restructure and adapt according to contextual demands. The plastic periphery is more tasking to edit compared to the elastic layer. It involves the use of architectures with deliberately long convergence times, which consume significant amounts of energy. The core comprises the most critical components and is impossible to edit. It consists of risk-averse functional moral systems trained into the AGI system at development. For a client/agent to edit the core, they would have to solve the halting problem.

Regional bodies, corporations, nation-states, and even individuals can set up local infrastructure to access the elastic interphase, however, critical developments and amendments to the plastic interface are only allowed in exceptional circumstances. While the elastic interface is nodular and has a decentralized infrastructure, the core and plastic peripheries are maintained by a special branch of the Global Artificial Intelligence Alliance (GAIA), which is composed of representatives from all signatory member states of the AGI Non-Weaponization Treaty (ANT). GAIA, an international organization established by treaty, seeks to promote the peaceful use of AGI technologies and to inhibit their use for any military purposes.

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. Companies developed AGIs first, leading to a widespread emergence of intelligent systems classifiable by their abilities using a Generality Measure (GM). Primitive networks like CNNs and RNNs, have a GM=0 and perceivers have a GM=1. Combining these limited systems created agents have a GM=2-7, which quickly became ubiquitous from home service agents to large-scale industrial operators. Leveraging on better formal properties, better hardware and through strong collaborations with governments, super-companies became the first to run intelligent agents with a GM=8-10.

As the dangers of owning disparate AGIs and the benefits of collating global AGI capacities became clear, conferences and treaties led to a collectively owned GM=10 agent, secured by a robust multi-layered protocol as the standard global ‘immune system’. This agent quickly became much safer and more powerful than all others. The technical resources required for replicating such a safe and powerful multi-nodular AGI became too significant for ubiquitous emulation, and therefore most nations agreed to become national nodes in this global AGI network.
This resource merger was also precipitated by international political pressure towards collective ownership, transparency and non-weaponization, without which it would be almost impossible to guarantee collective control and non-militarization. 98% of countries signed the ANT by 2045, making GAIA’s multi-nodular AGI agent the only legally recognized ethical GM=10 agent in the world. All other GM= 8-10 systems are declared illegal to own, develop or maintain under ANT and international law.

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

A. The signing of the AGI Non-weaponization Treaty (ANT) by all permanent members of the UN Security Council and the increasing number of ANT signatories each year sought to emulate the long-lasting success of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As an arms control treaty, it categorized AGIs as weapons of mass destruction, distinguished the use of AGIs from conventional tools of cyberwarfare and banned Nations from secretly developing GM=8-10 systems.

The ANT, which formed the template for future treaties, was developed as a 3-pillar system:
i. collective ownership (all critical infrastructure must be owned collectively through GAIA and de-centralized in a multi-nodular network),
ii. transparency (GAIA Technical Committee members can view all developments in the systems network in an open-access fashion and within the legal restraints of the ANT framework for oversight), and
iii. non-weaponization (no ANT signatories may develop or deploy any AGI software or hardware for any military purposes)

By slowly evolving from a unipolar (one great superpower) to a multipolar world (multiple superpowers), nations have also grown more reluctant to engage in wars over-seas. This multi-polarity has been precipitated by the rise of the new eastern alliance between India, China and Russia during the Ukraine war, and the emergence of large economic blocks in the global south. The multipolarity has encouraged nations to deploy realist international policies and discard hegemonic, domineering and expansionist policies, thus withdrawing their vast military bases from foreign countries and reducing global tensions.

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. National politics has remained within the province of nations and their elected governments. However, increased productivity through AI and other technologies has encouraged regionalism as relatively smaller economies catch up with larger regional economies. India, for example, has fully caught up with China and the Indochina region has become the largest economic region in the world, with 45 trillion dollars GDP.
Enhanced trade and communication between neighboring nations has also inspired a gradual shift towards strengthening multi-national organizations for the strategic control of sectors of the global economy. China, India, Russia, and other Asian countries have restructured their national economic policies in favor of a international coordinated economic plan, forming a new economic institution to balance out the EU. With multiple institutions controlling roughly similar regions of the global economy, multiple reserve currencies have emerged, establishing a new financial status quo and promoting the formation of new allies across the globe.
As all members of the UN Security Council are signatories of the ANT, all these states have given away decision-making control of their AGI technologies to GAIA, which drafted the ANT. As a civilian-run organization, GAIA also harmonizes global activities in AGI development within its multimodal network. GAIA also helps smaller countries to access collated AGI resources and shapes the peaceful deployment trajectories of AGI by member states. No government has an AGI as head of state or head of government.

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. While the rapid deployment of AGI technologies in the global economy has led to the emergence of dollar trillionaires, gini coefficients within most countries has reduced, reducing slightly in high-income countries but falling drastically within low-income countries. In high-income countries, productivity has been almost completely decoupled from human labour and this decoupling is also accelerating in low-income countries. GM=2-7 systems are increasingly being deployed across industries to ensure universal access to food, shelter, clothing, education, electricity, and health with kind of rapidity seen in the mobilephone penetration of the African market in the early 21st century.

As many low-income countries start to maximize their revenue collection from large extractive corporations, there is rapid introduction of social contracts between such companies and respective local and national governments mandating that significant proportions of the profits are committed to community development. The rapid growth of an AI-assisted manufacturing industry has also allowed low-income countries to approach their economic potential, converting their import-heavy economies into net exporters of manufactured goods for the first time in their histories. A fraction of the government budgets is also being committed to the maintenance of UBI and UCE (Universal Capital Endowment) as the surplus generated by AGI-improved systems has lessened the economic reforms that would be needed to fund UBI & UCE. Millions of people are being extracted from abject poverty every year.

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

A. Energy efficiency
AI has been deployed across both regional, national, and private electric grids to maximize the efficiency of energy generation and consumption. Because of the complex dynamism of demand, environmental conditions, and the growth, development and incorporation of renewables, AIs have taken up the complex task of optimizing the decarbonization of electric grids, a task that standard programs were not smart enough to handle. On the national and regional scales, GM=4-7 AGIs have been deployed to predict the optimal renewable energy options and times to be integrated into the clean energy grid as carbon emitters are phased out. The ability of AI systems to learn from hundreds of thousands of new multimodal data points across the grids, predict how parameter variances blunt the resilience of the electric grids, and how these are intertwined with customer demand, market prices and more, has allowed an almost seamless transition from a centralized to a decentralized grid architecture and has also initiated the era of international electric grids in other regions.

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

A. Participatory socialism

Initially proposed by economists in the early 2010s and 2020s, it involves the entrenchment of communal and collective egalitarian development over national or individual development through a better sharing of wealth and power. While gathering popularity slowly across European countries, similar ideas started springing up in low-income countriesm that are seeking a more sustainable development path that avoids the pitfalls of untethered capitalism.

These ideas started being implemented in extractive super-companies companies, where new co-management systems enforced by new laws gave employees and local communities minority stakes in the capital, protecting local interests without stifling business growth. In multiple communities, there have also emerged community councils inspired by the Rwandan “ingando” whose main duties are to collate local development mandates. These are then communicated by the government and super-companies who have minority presence in these councils. Through these councils, companies are structurally sensitive to the development of the communities that they are embedded in while under indirect governmental oversight. The success of these policies in Songhai countries has started leading to novel tax and inheritance system reforms such as a minimum inheritance for all (a universal capital endowment (UCE)), which has been proposed in Kenya as an additional solution to resolve the extreme wealth disparity created by uber-rich political dynasties in the country.