Eduardo Ficaria
Troubadour
For too long I've been stuck trying to figure out a proper sociopolitical structure that, in a cyberpunk setting, would allow me to have both AIs and ultrarich or very privileged people hold some decent degree of power. Today, it dawned on me a possible setup that could solve me that issue and I want to share it with you here to get your opinion about it.
First, some references of my worldbuilding: the time is late XXII century and the environmental situation on our planet is quite dismal. It's so bad that even some nations have fallen (as in being no more) to draughts or other extreme-climate-related catastrophes. On the other hand, you can imagine all sorts of scarcity issues going on with water, food, and even materials like rare earth ones. The one good thing is that somehow there was no nuclear third world war, although all sort of conflicts for resources flare up here and there. So, given this pretty picture, the surviving political powers of the world realized that they needed to evolve and become much more effective and efficient. Enter the general AIs, which are already available and widely in use by the corporations of this time. The core idea was to use AIs as regents of delimited regions, but supervised by human-ruled councils. The plan started decades ago and has been going on at a steady pace, although they don't fully reach everywhere yet.
Next, let me roughly explain how this system works.
By the way, in the past year I started a couple of threads that deal with ideas also related to the cyberpunk fiction I'm working on, so maybe you'd like to check them out too.
First, some references of my worldbuilding: the time is late XXII century and the environmental situation on our planet is quite dismal. It's so bad that even some nations have fallen (as in being no more) to draughts or other extreme-climate-related catastrophes. On the other hand, you can imagine all sorts of scarcity issues going on with water, food, and even materials like rare earth ones. The one good thing is that somehow there was no nuclear third world war, although all sort of conflicts for resources flare up here and there. So, given this pretty picture, the surviving political powers of the world realized that they needed to evolve and become much more effective and efficient. Enter the general AIs, which are already available and widely in use by the corporations of this time. The core idea was to use AIs as regents of delimited regions, but supervised by human-ruled councils. The plan started decades ago and has been going on at a steady pace, although they don't fully reach everywhere yet.
Next, let me roughly explain how this system works.
- The basic regional unit is the dominion.
- A dominion can be the combination of two or more old-fashioned nations.
- Frontiers don't make much sense in a highly digitalized world, except for defense and inmigration purposes essentially.
- Internally, dominions are organized in different ways but all of them tend to be rather fluid so they can adapt better to any situation.
- Each dominion has one main AI acting as regent.
- Each regent AI is supported by other AIs that are specialized on different areas. These are known as the legates.
- All the AIs of a dominion are supported by a team of cherry-picked humans called syndics. They have two main functions:
- Supervise the administration of the computer systems running the AIs.
- Act as bridge or interpreter between humans and AIs, ensuring that both realms understand each other correctly.
- There's also a prestige or reputation scoring system in place.
- It's first function is to act as an advanced and, in theory, fairer rationing system.
- It's takes into account many metrics of each person, being able of distinguishing among the different scopes (private, public, job, etc) and circumstances each citizen deals with in their lives.
- Although it's expressed in a number, its colour coded in a semaphore style that gives the highest value (1000) a clear-sky blue and the lowest a dark red.
- It's possible to opt out of the system, to become grey, but those doing so have to move and live in the areas arranged in the dominion for people like them.
- Corporations, organizations, even cities have also this scoring applied.
- The lower your rating, the more expensive or restrictive things get for you in a dominion.
- Each dominion has a supervising council led by humans chosen in such a way that all the relevant human groups of a dominion are represented.
- There are representatives for corporations, social organizations and so on.
- Each group present a bunch of candidates and two of them are pick depending on their computed reputation.
- There's an exception though: if the candidates presented are grays, the group must vouch for them with their own reputation. So, if these people do something wrong, there's an extra penalty in that group's reputation.
- There are also supraregional, or supradominion, entities that integrate dominions into bigger conglomerates. These are roughly the big power blocks we have today: European Union, USA, China, plus any other kind of supranational entity that you may imagine could emerge (in Africa for instance).
- These also have their own regent AIs that act essentially as overseers, but they can also overrule decisions or actions made in the dominions when necessary.
- The evolution of Internet is not a metaverse, but a miriad of virtual worlds and services that are reached through the Nimbus system.
- This system is managed by its own regent AI known as Liminar, which has servers all around the globe.
- Nimbus and Liminar is supported by an international team of syndics that swear an oath of independece from any dominion, including their own, in the course of their job.
- There's also Nimbus council, as with any other dominion, integrated by representatives of all the major powers and groups of interest.
- In this world, there's money, it's all digital and is expressed in many virtual coins on different ledgers or their blockchain-equivalents in the early XXIII century.
By the way, in the past year I started a couple of threads that deal with ideas also related to the cyberpunk fiction I'm working on, so maybe you'd like to check them out too.
- Neofeudal society in a hard scifi cyberpunk setting. (this one turned out to be an interesting debate and is quite full of ideas).
- Premise for a cyberpunk worlbuilding, with a dash of fantasy vibe.