Neither Saviors, Nor Destroyers - Just People.

Guest Blog by Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio 

There are plenty of stories, from Space Odyssey, to Terminator and the Avengers, in which AIs are a threat to humanity, and a fair amount in which AIs are the salvation of humanity, instead, deity-like caretakers who make choices on behalf of humanity for their own good.

Collectively we dislike both options. The first one is a bit cliché at this point, and the second one is too closely aligned with the techno-utopianism proposed by many AI peddlers, made of technocratic solutions imposed on people by "experts" with no democratic oversight, with the underlying idea that humanity is too stupid, selfish or evil to be left to self-govern and that society must be optimized according to "scientific" and "rational" lines with a hefty dose of surveillance and manipulation.

We're not buying what they're selling, thank you very much.

There's plenty of good stories to be written about the resistance to such "benevolent caretaker" AI, but that was not the kind of story we wanted to go with for this anthology and so we ruminated and procrastinated, until one Saturday afternoon.

The idea of this story came to us all at once in a café in Oxford. The main members were having a break with one of our silent partners, who is a researcher in the humanities.

We started talking shop about our respective day jobs, about grant proposals, projects and coursework, and eventually the discussion started to veer towards digital humanities and the slow creep of AI into everything.

From there, between scones and absolutely killer mocha coffee, the conversation devolved into giggles and speculation: why did Ultron flip the lid as soon as they saw the Pope online? What is the relationship between Ultron and Futurama's PreacherBot? What would happen if consciousness emerged not in an autonomous weapons system or in a resource management entity, but rather in an academic AI? And a digital humanities one, at that?

Our silent partner provided the name, a good Arcadian one, and the rest of us retrofitted a plausible acronym.

Soon LIN.C.O. was born, with their deep love for poetry and sheep, and their desire to "be a real person" to fulfill their dreams of nomadic pastoralism.

Part Wall-E and part Pinocchio, LIN.C.O. is a relatable little ball of anxiety and innocence, who, like every other person in the world, is trying to figure out what they want from life and what is their place in the grand scheme of things.

What we really wanted to write about was a quest for self-actualisation, and a society where every person, human or not, is allowed to self-actualise and become what they want to be, without discrimination and economic barriers, and we enjoyed every moment of it.

While in the real world machine learning algorithms (incorrectly called AI) are tools of capitalist appropriation of the digital commons, of surveillance, and of commodification of human cultural production and creativity, wielded by techno-feudal corporations, we can imagine a different future where they are used to the benefit of people and under their democratic control and oversight.

And yes, even one where people come in all shapes and sizes, not all of them necessarily made of cells and carbon, and yet everyone has the same rights to enjoy life to the fullest.
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We would say we deserve this.

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Commando Jugendstil is a solarpunk creative collective. Their projects merge technology and art with the idea of transforming the city into its sustainable version, while focusing on co-designing solutions with local communities, to stimulate a just transition that can spark from the ground up.

Tales from the EV is a small collective of storytellers. They fell in love with solarpunk while helping the Commando write Midsummer Night's Heist. Their collaboration has been going strong ever since. Members of TftEV are involved in climate justice activism with XR UK and the GNDE campaign.