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.
I think the problem is not with intellectual property but with artists being forced to create art for profit. Can we decouple art from commerce completely and set up society in such way that we can afford to create art for pleasure? If I needed to work only two days a week to provide for myself I could create art in the remaining time. With art not being a commercial product anymore, intellectual property wouldn’t be an issue, plus people could create art from the depth of their hearts and not geared towards commercial success.
Forcing people to perform a skill they would do for free both drains the joy out of creation and undermines cooperation between creators. I agree that being forced to create art for profit is part of the problem.
One of the foundational coups of capitalism was framing respect for artists as a form of ‘property’ - twisting the interests of culture creators and landlords into the same emerging political system. Now that capitalists believe we’re at the ‘end of history’ this fiction is becoming less important.
When someone creates beauty, people will want to show gratitude. Even in a post-scarcity world, there is incentive for jerks to misrepresent the origins of their work and to plagiarize. I think people will create art regardless of their political or economic situation, but I would like to think that whatever replaces capitalism would be a system where artists flourish because of their environment and not in spite of it. Intellectual property is old bathwater, but attribution and respect is our baby.
The age of content. When I grew up, millions of teen artsy folk like me were told we could ‘earn a living with our creativity’ in marketing and adjacent areas aka ‘sell your soul to capitalism’.
Yeah, you nailed it.