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Looking for opinions about a sociopolitical setup for a cyberpunk setting

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.
  1. The basic regional unit is the dominion.
    1. A dominion can be the combination of two or more old-fashioned nations.
    2. Frontiers don't make much sense in a highly digitalized world, except for defense and inmigration purposes essentially.
    3. Internally, dominions are organized in different ways but all of them tend to be rather fluid so they can adapt better to any situation.
  2. Each dominion has one main AI acting as regent.
    1. Each regent AI is supported by other AIs that are specialized on different areas. These are known as the legates.
    2. 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.
  3. There's also a prestige or reputation scoring system in place.
    1. It's first function is to act as an advanced and, in theory, fairer rationing system.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. Corporations, organizations, even cities have also this scoring applied.
    6. The lower your rating, the more expensive or restrictive things get for you in a dominion.
  4. 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.
    1. There are representatives for corporations, social organizations and so on.
    2. 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.
  5. 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).
    1. 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.
  6. The evolution of Internet is not a metaverse, but a miriad of virtual worlds and services that are reached through the Nimbus system.
    1. This system is managed by its own regent AI known as Liminar, which has servers all around the globe.
    2. 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.
    3. There's also Nimbus council, as with any other dominion, integrated by representatives of all the major powers and groups of interest.
  7. 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.
There are more details that I've left out, but I didn't want this post to be too long. I think this setup fixes well my problem about having the AIs ruling the world while, at the same time, the megarich and ultraprivileged also retaining some good room to exert their power. So, what do you thing about this setting? I'm open to suggestions!

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.
 
I LOVE this idea! I think it’s super rich and can be used in many levels.


Another consideration is you can maybe create a power structure out of the problem. Maybe People have the societal and governmental power but the AI is what determines distribution of food and water to be most economical and useful for civilization as a whole. Thereby giving the AI the power to determine the steer of the civilization
 

johnnyfoges

Dreamer
So it seems like the point of this system is to regiment society with less human input. What is stopping someone from taking the time to rewrite the AI's parameters to give themselves a perfect reputation rating? What about AI's doing this to themselves to gain more localized power over their areas of expertise?
 

Eduardo Ficaria

Troubadour
I LOVE this idea! I think it’s super rich and can be used in many levels.
Glad you liked it, TheRealKyleTM . I also feel that way about this setup.

Another consideration is you can maybe create a power structure out of the problem. Maybe People have the societal and governmental power but the AI is what determines distribution of food and water to be most economical and useful for civilization as a whole. Thereby giving the AI the power to determine the steer of the civilization
The idea of this system is that the regent AIs are so advanced that they can predict or infer with great accuracy and timely manner what is necessary to be done in their respective dominions. But to work that way, they require all sorts of data inputs from the heavily digitalize societies they control. On the other hand, the supervising councils are human-led, and they are essentially the evolution of our current political power structures. Moreover, you have the syndics, which are chosen by the regent AIs from the best citizens in their dominions. In other words, there's human input and some degree of control (at the hands of the usual priviledge ones) but AIs effectively run the system.

So it seems like the point of this system is to regiment society with less human input.
Not exactly, johnnyfoges . The system was sold as a fair and non-biased rationing method (in my setup many places run short of water and food), although of course you end up regimenting society using a system like this. Still, in my setup, how this system rules varies from dominion to dominion since they are deployed on regions that usually already had their own set of legal, political and sociocultural rules and behaviours which have been also taken into account or adapted by the regent AIs. So, yes there's a degree of regimentation but is not uniform across all the dominions of my worldbuilding.

What is stopping someone from taking the time to rewrite the AI's parameters to give themselves a perfect reputation rating?
Mainly, the sheer complexity of the system. Is not just about changing a number: the number is just a very simple representation of the calculated results taken from a whole web of interconnected elements that are considered part of a citizen. In other words, the number is some sort of calculated mean value that indicates how the dominion perceives the citizen, and the citizen can see all the detailed values that are taken into account in his app (think of the stats of a player character in any RPG). Related to this, I remember reading somewhere that is expected of AIs to grow so complex and advanced over time that eventually they could reach levels of intelligence well beyond human comprehension. In other words, yes a human with enough expertise and access to a regent AI's system could try to manipulate it but they wouldn't be able to predict the outcome of that tampering. But since you can talk or interact with these AIs, there's also the possibility of convince them of something. There you have an opening for manipulation, although remember the syndics watching the system: they act as human counselors for the regent AIs and help them understand the human world correctly.

What about AI's doing this to themselves to gain more localized power over their areas of expertise?
Regent AIs themselves don't get a score to avoid them fall into paradoxes or strange mental situations. The dominions as a whole are the ones that get a score, and it's calculated frecuently as the mean of all the values from their citizens, corporations and so on. So it's in the best interest of any regent AI and its legates to keep their dominion's score high, but it's a complex task that requires balancing many elements at the same time. But since "complexity" doesn't rule out "possibility", certainly an AI could try to get more power or just try to jump out of their expected functions and responsabilities. In fact, this is a notion I'll use in the story I'm working on.

To be clear, what I'm trying to do with this setup is to have a believable and very efficient "cyberpunk" governance system that keeps the human world functional within a really bad environmental situation, while also allowing the ultrarich and powerful (humans) keep or increase their privileges and clout (hence the supervising councils, corporations, etc.). So, the system is not perfect, but works exactly as intended: privileged ones at the top as usual, AIs as middlemen and control barrier, then the rest of humans at their usual spot at the bottom.

An extra detail from my worldbuilding you might like to know is that there are millions of humans outside the dominions, in regions classifed as "unsustainable lands" due to the severe environmental damage they've suffered. In those lands, the dominions just have a tenous influence at best, so those places usually end up becoming "hives of scum and villainy". There you find abandoned cities, ruined by droughts or other extreme environmental disasters, where inmigrants from regions in even worst shape go in the hopes of getting into a close-by dominion later. To keep such places in check, dominions subcontract "security" from specialized corporations to handle those places, so they don't become completely lawless. Also, the dominions keep "missions", also usually through corporations, that work in particular projects to improve somewhat the situation in those harsh territories.

By the way, I've got names for the AIs (regents, legates), and for their human administrators/counselors (syndics), but I'm missing a name for the supervising councils's members, any suggestions? "Supervisor" seems kind of dry compared to the other ones.
 

johnnyfoges

Dreamer
extra detail from my worldbuilding you might like to know is that there are millions of humans outside the dominions, in regions classifed as "unsustainable lands" due to the severe environmental damage they've suffered. In those lands, the dominions just have a tenous influence at best, so those places usually end up becoming "hives of scum and villainy". There you find abandoned cities, ruined by droughts or other extreme environmental disasters, where inmigrants from regions in even worst shape go in the hopes of getting into a close-by dominion later. To keep such places in check, dominions subcontract "security" from specialized corporations to handle those places, so they don't become completely lawless. Also, the dominions keep "missions", also usually through corporations, that work in particular projects to improve somewhat the situation in those harsh territories
Oh excellent! You can abuse that division in society to make conflict too! This is a much better picture then what I had in my head initially. Great idea, it also gives you so excellent leeway to transition from cyberpunk dystopia to lawless Old West style depending on how you wanna use your story material. But yeah, overall that makes more sense and adds in more human element to this set up making it all the more believable. Kudos to you!
 

Eduardo Ficaria

Troubadour
Oh excellent! You can abuse that division in society to make conflict too! This is a much better picture then what I had in my head initially. Great idea, it also gives you so excellent leeway to transition from cyberpunk dystopia to lawless Old West style depending on how you wanna use your story material. But yeah, overall that makes more sense and adds in more human element to this set up making it all the more believable. Kudos to you!
Exactly, what's cyberpunk without that good old class struggle with an ever widening chasm between the haves and have not's? And about the Old West style notion you hint, the funny thing is that it would be kind of the opposite in my setup: the conquest/colonization of the american west was a (perceived) process of progress and modernization, while in my setup the unsustainable lands are going backwards in that sense. In other words, I can have a Mad Max setup of sorts within my worldbuilding in which people just survive and some of them have access to really high tech in a belieable way. Let's hope I'm able to put all of these ideas to good use!
 
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