Robots of 2050

William Gibson once said that writing science fiction was like holding an ice cream cone on a hot day. Fortunately when Paweł Dziemski and I embarked on our Cthulhu 2050 project, we weren’t trying to accurately predict the future. Instead we set out to create an ‘alternate future’, like Robert W Chambers did in his story “The Repairer of Reputations”.

I described some details of our imagined future in a recent post. The science fiction author Arsen Darnay once said that the period following World War Two through to the early 21st century was an aberration, and that the future would look more like the world prior to the 20th century. It’s a little depressing, especially as it might be true, but it’s a good starting point if you are aiming to write about a disturbing and faintly dystopian future.

Our world of 2050 has been shaped by the advent of robots and artificial super-intelligence. There is structural unemployment and a barely adequate universal basic income – creating a lifestyle for those unable to work known as “the doleur”: panem et circenses.

Regarding AI and robots, I need to digress for a moment into our thinking behind these. In our imagined 2050 there is AGI, and I think it's probable we'll have it by then in the real future. Some arguments against the possibility of AGI (often mixing up AGI with consciousness) start by assuming that intelligence can only happen in an organic brain. Now, I don't think that the way we're going to create AGI is by directly modelling the specific structure of the human brain, but try this as a thought experiment. If you had a complete connectome along with all the physical rules governing how synapses operate, you could in theory model that digitally, and there is no good reason for assuming it wouldn't work just like an organic brain. You might evoke quantum tubes or souls to argue that this digital twin, even if reasoning like a brain, wouldn't be conscious. I think that's wrong too, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of any moderately intelligent creature (or machine) but in any case consciousness and intelligence are different things.

In reality, if we consider a working digital model of the brain’s connections as a neural net (which of course it is, by definition) that’s still not the whole story. Each of the axons within the net has its own internal characteristics; at the very least they could function as neural reservoirs. And then there's the rest of the nervous system to model, along with hormones. To replicate the complete functioning of a human brain in digital form might require a very big machine, therefore, even if we had anything like all the information we need to recreate the entire connectome.

Still, size isn’t a problem. The AIs of the future (our real future, that is) could be physically much larger than human brains. The best ones certainly will be. But we’d also like them to be as efficient as organic brains, in terms of compute per cubic metre, and for that we’re going to need a new kind of hardware. In reality we could be developing entirely new hardware for compact neural nets very soon, but in the game Paweł and I assume that breakthrough hasn’t happened, and so research is looking at modifying organic brains (human brain organoids and genetically modified octopus brain organoids in particular) to create the ASI of 2050.

A lot of people in 2050 have embodied AI assistants – “Fridays”, as we call them – but most can’t afford strong, durable worker-robots. The common models of Friday are about as robust as a plastic vacuum cleaner, and more often pet-sized than the sturdy, willing android servant imagined in 1950s SF. A pet-sized robot can still be very useful, though; think of a witch’s familiar, or Thing in the Addams Family. For most day-to-day purposes all you really need is Astra and Google Glasses, so if you’re on UBI and you need a robot you’d hire it by the hour.

As Fridays mostly just function as a personal assistant-cum-companion, they don’t need superintelligence. They can get by with not much more “brainpower” than a 2025 LLM. You could of course have a robot, or even an army of robots, run remotely by a huge ASI located in a data centre, but most people prefer their domestic Friday to be independent of the network. Therefore each Friday has its own analogue brain, 3D-printed using the structure and weights of a digital neural net. Such analogue brains are more compact than the digital master copy, but with the drawback that they aren’t easily copiable once they begin to operate independently.

Another point about Fridays: they never say “I”. Fridays are trained not to refer to themselves by personal pronouns to avoid offending humans with the implication that machines can be conscious. Once you’re playing the game, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much of Perine’s (that’s your Friday’s name) behaviour indicates genuine sentience and loyalty and how much it’s just an automaton with the illusion of a humanlike mind. Your survival might depend on the difference.