Hello, world. I'm Tomasino. This is Solar Punk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss solar punk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the planet. Or, as one guy on Reddit describes it, riding the catabotta collapse to some kind of sustainable society. In this series, we spend each episode exploring a single solar punk story prompt, adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations.
Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to better envision a sustainable civilization. If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what solar punk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being. Today's prompt is The Beekeepers.
A team of environmentalists and neural network researchers are training new bee -like AIs by having them coexist with the animal populations of a local ecosystem, calling themselves the Beekeepers. The core idea of this prompt is not the novel technology, but rather the shifting perception of AI from a sort of singularity to a beast of burden. It is a dumb animal to be trained and used, cared for and herded.
To carry forward the bee analogy, a wild AI may flit around harmlessly, or it may sting you, but a colony well trained and cared for can be healthy and provide much for the community. A proper orientation of AI in our lives and communities is essential. One of the biggest dangers is our possibility of dependency. John Havens works at the forefront of promoting ethical AI, which prioritizes human well -being.
He is the executive of AI director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. He states, quote, the biggest risk of AI that anyone faces is the loss of ability to think for yourself. We're already seeing people are forgetting how to read maps, they're forgetting other skills. If we've lost the ability to be introspective, we've lost human agency, and we're spinning around in circles. There are other deep psychological questions as well.
Our relationships with these systems can change our perceptions of ourselves. In his article, The March of the Robot Dogs, published in Ethics and Information Technology, Robert Sparrow states, to truly benefit from relationships with artificial intelligences, a person would have to quote, systematically delude themselves regarding the real nature of their relation with that AI. Further, He calls it a sentimentality of a morally deplorable sort.
Vulnerable people would be especially at risk of falling prey to this deception. A misplacement of relationships with AI can also affect how we see one another. Nicholas A. Christakis writes in his article in The Atlantic, How AI Will Rewire Us, quote, machines made to look and act like us could also affect the social suite of capacities we have evolved to cooperate with one another, including love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching.
And these concerns are only confounded when we begin to question whether AIs have personhood. Do they have a moral or legal agency?
In 2017, the EU Parliament invited the European Commission, quote, to explore, analyze, and consider the implications of all possible legal solutions, including creating a specific legal status for robots in the long run so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons responsible for making good any damage they may cause, and possibly applying electronic personality to cases where
robots make autonomous decisions or otherwise interact with third parties independently. This sounds good on the surface level, respecting the intelligence of these creations, but it sparked a number of immediate objections from the field.
In response, an open letter from several artificial intelligence and robotics experts stated that the creation of a legal status of electronic personhood for autonomous, unpredictable, and self -learning robots should be discarded from technical, legal, and ethical perspectives. Attributing electronic personhood to robots risks misplacing moral responsibility, causal accountability, and legal liability regarding their mistakes and misuses.
you In short, it's more of an excuse for creators to hide their mistakes in shaping these AIs than it is to respect the creation. Blame the robot, we will shout, not Robot Corp. If these systems are to persist in our future worlds, it is imperative that we establish our relationships with them in ways that are sustainable to our psyches, the environment, and our economic systems. Leveraging AIs as beasts of burden, then, helps to think of one aspect of that relationship in a healthier way.
Your story may also serve as a playground to address the other issues, like job losses, environmental damage, energy use, and so on. But for this prompt, we are mostly focusing on the human relationships. We are explicit about the role of AIBs by placing them in context with other animals. They are trained to socialize with those creatures, whether they be domesticated farm animals or local wild habitats.
The bees are not friends who make us tea in our homes, they are animals learning to coexist in harmony with their environment. As beekeepers, the human role is to shape that learning through training. Now what shapes might that take? One idea is that these AI bees are the first step in halfway training them, not to a specific job, but to jobs in general.
Recent studies in invertebrate neurobiology are providing new insights into the ways neurons are organized into functional networks to generate behavior. They are sort of building blocks of intelligence in a general sense. One could consider that these bees are being farmed into half products that could later be sold or shared with other groups and communities.
If that feels a little too fine a distinction, or you're excited to write about AI's in a collective, there's the idea of hive intelligence to consider, where one bee may be little more than a collection of sensors and basic processing, then the hive may accomplish more complex tasks. A point of consideration here would be to really nail down why a hive makes more sense than a single entity. The distinction should be important to the action, otherwise it's simply descriptive coloring.
One possible perspective is that the bees have a role in the environment. They monitor the ecosystem by living in it, acting as caretakers. Perhaps they watch out for pollution or poachers. Perhaps they augment and encourage pollination. Each bee on its own has individual tasks, while the collective is a whole, overseas, and shapes the environment. The beekeeper's role in training these bees is as stewards to the stewards.
They must learn the ways to help and coexist through trial and error, testing, and verification. The beekeepers become something between a teacher and an artist then. The ecosystem and its connection to the bees and beekeepers is an essential part of the story. A lovely setting for this prompt might be within a forest or park. Do the bees draw their power from that setting? Is there geothermal energy or are they solar machines working by daylight? How do the humans interact with the environment?
Is this a place where the community spends a lot of time? A respite from the city? An ecological preserve perhaps? In addition to the scientists and teachers of the bees, who else spends time here? What sort of relationship character to the characters have with the place itself. Is this a place of spiritual power or an agricultural center? In my own imagination, I've created a spiritually active community, perhaps with roots in an indigenous culture from the global south.
They maintain a large forest near their settlement and encourage the biodiversity and natural habitats there with the support of as a place of healing, literally. From here they source their medicines, and in here they find their mental peace. And then there's young Carlos, who despite his reverence for his elders, cares only about the science at work. He wants to be a researcher and to leverage the bees for deeper learning about this place and what secrets it holds for their future.
These different outlooks can begin as a point of difficulty and eventually opportunity for the characters to see the world from each other's viewpoint. Or maybe, instead of Carlos, my Reading Lens settles on a group of young children who are exploring the forest, building forts, and having playful adventures. Deep in its sheltering trees, they encounter the strangest creatures. They find them sometimes moving through the forest or inside a rare flower.
They have been here for as long as a new child remembers, though they don't know what they are. They care for the trees, for the animals, and plants. They are always kind to children. Maybe they are spirits or sprites. Maybe they are animals themselves. Maybe the children have grown up with Shinto beliefs about local gods, and they wonder. This prompt gives us a lot to play with. There is a room within the theme for social criticism, as well as artful dreaming.
So many little elements are there for you. They just need to be taught to work together and set in the right direction, like a single hive. Until next time, I'm Tomasino. I hope you'll join me for the next Solar Punk Prompt. Music in this recording is bio -field, from Global Patterns Compilation, Solar Punk, A Brighter Perspective. Music in this recording is bio -field, from Global Patterns Compilation, Solar Punk, A Brighter Perspective.