This conversation and the reactions it caused made me think of a few tips to explicitly veer away from AI-aided dystopias in your fictional universe.
Avoid a monolithic centralized statist super-AI
I guess ChatGPT is the model people use, the idea that there is a supercomputer managing all aspects of a community. And people are understandably wary of a single point of control that could too easily lead to totalitarianism
Instead, have a multitude of transparent local agents managing different systems. Each with a different algorithm and “personality”.
Talk about open source
The most used AI models today are open source. We have a media that is biased towards thinking that things that do not generate commercial transactions are not important yet I am willing to bet that more tokens are generated by all the free models in the world than by OpenAI and its commercial competitors.
AIs are not to be produced by opaque companies from their ivory towers. They are the result of researchers and engineers who have a passion for designing smart system and --a fact that is too often obscured by the sad state of our society where you often have to join a company to make a living-- they do it with a genuine concern for humanity’s well being and a desire that this work is used for the greater good.
It is among AI engineers that you will find the most paranoids about AI safety and safeguards. In a solarpunk future, this is a public debate and a political subject that is an important part of the policy discussion: We make models together, with incentives that are collectively agreed upon.
AIs are personal
You don’t need a supercomputer to run an AI. LLMs today run on relatively modest gaming devices, even on raspberry pi! (though slowly at the moment). Energy-efficient chips are currently being designed to make the barrier of entry even lower.
It is a very safe bet to say that in the future, every person will have their own intelligent agent managing their local devices. Or even one agent per device and an orchestrator on their smartphone. And it is important that they are in complete control of these.
AIs should enhance humans control over their own devices, not make them surrender it.
AIs as enablers of democracy
You not only use your pocket AI to control your dishwasher, it is also your personal lawyer and representative. No human has the bandwidth to go through all the current policy debates happening in a typical country or even local community. But a well designed agent that spends time discussing with you will know your preferences and make sure to represent them.
It can engage in discussions with other agents to find compromises, to propose or oppose initiative.
As everyone’s opinion is now included in every decision about road planning, public transportation, construction schedules and urban development, the general landscape will organically grow friendlier for everybody.
First I want to say I appreciate the constructive tone. As a pragmatist, inclusive anarchist, I feel it is important we manage to make room for as many opinons and tastes as possible in a solarpunk utopia.
First, the technical advice:
You have several ways to do that but ne aware that this is a VERY fast moving target. Progress is made every week, sometimes by a factor of x2. You will find benchmarks online (mostly on reddit’s Locallama community) stating how many tokens per second a given model produces on a given GPU. (e.g. currently a RTX4090 produces ~100 toks/sec for the Mistral-7B model). A token is a unit of language in LLMs, count ~1.5 tokens per english word.
Even if I am a harsh critic of closed system, you could still test your application through the public openai models (ChatGPT) and see how much data you need to generate. To companies that use the ChatGPT model intensively, they charge $2 per million tokens. It is likely a higher bound of the cost of electricity it would cost an optimized system to run an equivalent system locally.
Now to the general criticism of AI: maybe it will surprise you, but I agree with your sentiment. Current capitalism + AI gives us unemployement and enshitification of Internet. As an AI researcher tweeted a while ago “We have workable solution for AI alignment, but we have yet to solve corporate alignment” (alignment is the field that studies the ethics safeguards of AI, or how to ‘align’ ethical assumptions of humans with those of a model).
This is why I am promoting uses of AI that are non-capitalist. They are also called open-source. Open source is actually the most successful example of a non-capitalist anarchist movement.
Researchers who have spent their lives dreaming of AGI did not do so in the hope of improving Amazon’s recommendation system or putting people out of work. We did so in the hope that humanity could be freed from labor.
If you remain under the paradigm of a regular capitalist work organization, AI is indeed a bad thing: it create unemployment and makes capital more profitable without the need to retribute workers. If you see further than this paradigm, however, it gives a possibility to not need mandatory work to receive manudfactured goods and earn a right to live.
I really wish humanity has the wisdom to go towards that utopia without needing a revolution but maybe it is unavoidable. It would be a waste though that instead of rebelling against our now obsolete masters, we rebel against the very tool that can bring us liberation from work.