Dakota Murray, Aaron (Sheung-King) Tang, Maari Sugawara, Kevin Jae

WORLDBUILD AI AND SHAPING THE FUTURE OF AI & AGI: A REFLECTION

with Dakota Murray, Aaron (Sheung-King) Tang, Maari Sugawara, Kevin Jae

IT may come as a surprise to hear that Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock over five decades ago, in 1970, to describe the psychological effects of the rapid change that affected his generation. Compared to the whirlwinds of change that mark our decade, Alvin Toffer’s 1970s evoke a calm pastoral paradise.

Artificial Intelligence is a large source of our contemporary psychological affects—our ever-increasing excitements and anxieties. AI gobbles up data, growing (exponentially) more powerful and capable, promising to change how we work, how we live, and how we relate to one another. And AI is a child’s toy compared with the potential of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a major goal of AI research. AGI, while still an emergent technology, promises a qualitatively different level of intelligence, as opposed to mere increases processing and computing capacity. It brings with it a host of new promises and threats. Like many others, I feel vertigo at the mere thought of this brave new world, towards which we are being propelled without any sense of agency over its direction.

How to overcome the sense of helplessness in the face of overwhelming forces of technological development, which advance rapidly beyond our control like tectonic plates? Do we still dare to dream and desire our preferred futures?

To think through these pressing issues, a group of friends and I participated in the WorldBuild AI Competition held by the Future of Life Institute.1 This competition challenged participants “to design a plausible and aspirational world” in the year 2045 that corresponds to some basic ground assumptions, which includes a) the existence of AGI for at least 5 years, b) rapid advancement of technology and spread of AI, c) a global power equilibrium between the US, EU, and China, and d) no global catastrophes. 2Four distinct elements were submitted to the WorldBuild AI Judging Committee: a timeline from 2022 to 2045; two “A Day in the Life” short stories; short responses to 13 prompts; and a non-text media piece. Not only did the world have to be logically coherent and aspirational, but we also had to summon the human species to live in and interact with our built-world.

Despite these constraints, we were confronted by a dizzying array of possible futures. While considering our aspirational world, we discovered that the future was not foreclosed upon; instead, we found an open terrain and an opportunity to shape future outcomes. To our surprise, our primary problem was to reduce the openness of the future, to which we developed a method to pursue reduction. The group started to ideate and imagine elements of our aspirational world using the PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental) categories

as a heuristic. We then organized our ideas into common themes, some of which included addressing the climate crisis, wealth inequality, international cooperation, and, of course, governance of AI and AGI technology. Other elements that did not fit into our basic themes were discarded.

Afterwards, we started thinking about the AI and AGI system that would fit with our aspirational world. One of our primary concerns was the centralization of AI and AGI technology. In our world today, political and economic power is centralized in the hands of a few states, corporations, and individuals. We wanted to avoid a world where AGI technology is monopolized under the same status quo. Such a world would be characterized by more wealth inequality, greater political power disparities, and ever-expanding inequalities of access to this powerful technology.

Our solution? We imagined a small and decentralized AGI system, shared between people joined in small groups called “AGI Clusters.” People are only able to register to only one “AGI Cluster,” which is tracked on a decentralized registry powered by blockchain technology. Our AGI systems have limited computational power, preventing centralization of power and limiting the number of people registered to a single AGI cluster. The limited AGI learns from Cluster members, becoming specialized in specific skills and becoming socialized into specific social contexts—AGI cannot be omnipotent. Although the U.N. centralizes authority over AGI governance, the protocols and policies that drive the technology are decentralized and interact at the level of individual humans.

Alas, despite our best efforts and the near two months of worldbuilding, we were not chosen as one of the finalists. However, the WorldBuildAI competition was still a welcome intrusion into our mundane, present-focused daily lives—it was a chance for us to explore, to imagine, and to build. Above all, it was an opportunity to overcome our shared sense of dread and powerlessness over the future and, in Dator’s terms, “decolonize” the future with an alternative vision of the future. 3To build a world, much less an aspirational one, is no easy task. However, to take on the challenge is to reclaim our futures-making agency.

NOTES: 1 https://worldbuild.ai/ 2 https://worldbuild.ai/faq/ 3 Dator, J. (2005). De-Colonizing The Future. Journal of Futures Studies, 9(3), 93-104.