AI 2034: Sophie's World 2.0

A Sophie's World 2.0 Saga

This week's issue of the Centaurian takes a slightly different approach. Welcome to a unique thought experiment that explores the future of human-machine collaboration. Through the lens of a captivating narrative set in 2034, we invite you to immerse yourself in a world where advanced technologies and artificial intelligence have transformed how we think, learn, and solve problems.

Over recent months, we have explored the concept of 'Thinking with Machines' from various perspectives—including Thinking Systems, AI interfaces, Mind Extensions, Collective Intelligence, and Agentic workflows. This story brings together a vision of how these ideas might play out.

NOTE: There are many new terms that represent new ideas and technologies from the world of Centaurian Thinking. We recommend you read it first and then check out the glossary, but if you want to look something up, jump to the glossary.

Sophie’s World 2.0

Sophie stepped out of her self-driving car, tired after her UnSimed row but eager to check the leaderboard in Planetary Guardians. As she entered her bedroom and strapped into her stretcher, she pulled up her Auroom (AR-room, pronounced "Auroom"). Scanning her reticular activation system (real-time RAS), which displayed all her incubations and anti-library, Sophie noticed an alert - that showed that she had dropped her rank in the game.

Without hesitation, Sophie logged into the game. Her console transformed into the view of a spaceship overlooking the planet. The details of a crisis flashed across her screen: the Earth's TScore had dropped to an alarming level. A massive volcanic eruption, melting permafrost releasing ancient pathogens, and a malfunctioning orbital solar mirror array. Sophie's mind raced; her extended memory system (MemX) popped up and was populated with the details of a series of incidents. Her maxed-out pattern-matching (PM) skills were already formulating a plan. At 11, she rebuilt her sim from scratch, allowing her to accelerate her PM skill mastery. She had been approached many times about selling her updated technology but was more interested in continuous improvement. Her assistant Pi emerged and started contacting her team while she was fine-tuning the plan in MemX.

Pi asked, “While I contact the team, do you need me to find a specialist in quantum computing? I know the team hasn't chunked this topic yet.”

Sophie absently agreed but had already moved back to her Unk Miners; she had them attacking the unknown space of genetically engineered algae that she had read some articles about last year.

Pi quickly assembled her team: her brother Wesley chitted her, “What do you need sis? It looks like you need to deploy my drone army! I've been training for an opportunity like this! Hopefully, this won't take long, I was up pretty late and still need to eat breakfast.”

“Don't give me that. You just want to get back to NeoSphere. I saw you and Joe were racking up credits last night,” Sophie shot back.

“You got anything on genetically engineered algae, yet? You know I can fine-mine faster if you give me an area of the unk to focus on.”

“Yeah, here you go. My agents found this quadrant of the unk-space. Focus your creative mining burst there.” Sophie felt another pang of sadness that she wasn't as good as Wesley at innovation. His ability to fine-mine was nearly skill-maxed.

Jayanti had popped up on Sophie's screen to say, “Hey, what's up? You need my coding factory again? You know it's how I like to start my days, Kx'ed-in.” She had one of the best coding agencies, and when she Kx'ed, her hybrid team orchestration was untouched. Wesley always joked that her talents were wasted since she coded like she was playing a real-time strategy game; he could use her on his Neosphere team.

Pi, already trained on Sophie’s needs and wants, had negotiated with Davine, a pricey but brilliant quantum computing specialist. She alerted Sophie that it would cost them $20K to get 10 minutes of his time.

Sophie chitted Wesley, “Hey can you get this JVC’d?”

“Sure, I can spin up ExC... you know JIT VC is archaic; next, you'll be asking Dad to help. Explorative Capital DAOs totally blag prehistoric finance!”

She could tell Wesley was already warming up his aug-drones while locked into Unking. She was going to say something about splitting attention but stopped since she knew he'd upgraded his SysZero space with Sys1 extensions.

Her Dad had always talked about being in a flow state, but ever since they mapped the brain, flow, and focus had been completely revolutionized.

Pi privately messaged Sophie, “We’re going to have to pay Davine up front. Do you want me to nag Mink?” Mink was Wesley’s Daemon, and Pi and Mink have had a close bond with the twins since they hatched. Sophie nodded.

Mink was managing both the ExC and dual-zoning to take all unnecessary cognition off Wesley. Mink chitted the team that they had spun up a C.Aug and were fully funded for the sprint.

Wesley popped back in, saying he'd mined and chunked the topic and had already developed the genetically engineered algae.

“Jayanti, are you ready to coordinate with… what was their name again, Pi?”

“Davine.”

“Yes, Davine. Are you ready to connect with Davine?”

Jayanti was already Kx’ing, and her Daemon acknowledged for her.

Everything was ready. Sophie sequenced the team and plan.

Wesley's drones dispersed genetically engineered algae to absorb excess CO2, while Sophie's nanorobotic swarms neutralized the ancient pathogens. Jayanti and Davine focused on reprogramming the solar mirror array, their quantum algorithms optimizing its reflective properties. Time seemed to slow as they worked, their virtual world indistinguishable from reality.

The crisis was averted, and the Earth's TScore stabilized. Sophie leaned back in her stretcher, a satisfied smile on her face. Another day, another global catastrophe was prevented. She unstrapped herself and headed downstairs, ready for a well-deserved breakfast.

As she entered the kitchen, her dad looked up from his Macro news stream quizzically. "Sophie, did you hear about this TScore correction today?"

"Yeah, my team and I just wrapped up another challenge in Planetary Guardians," Sophie replied nonchalantly, grabbing a piece of toast. “We had to deal with a volcanic eruption, ancient pathogens, and a malfunctioning solar mirror array. Pretty insane!"

Her dad's eyes widened, and a realization dawned on his face. "Wait, so you're saying that the crisis that was just averted was you and your friends?"

Sophie shrugged, taking a bite of her toast. "Yeah, that's what we do in Planetary Guardians. It's not just a game, Dad! What do you think we do all day? Play games?"

Her dad shook his head in disbelief, "I had no idea... I’m proud of you! You and your friends are superheroes!"

Sophie groaned, “Daaad!” But the magnitude of their accomplishments finally sank in. She shrugged, "Just another day in the life of a Planetary Guardian."

Unpacking The Story

The story is what we call a design fiction:

Design fiction, is often defined as the “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change” (Sterling 2012)

A dietetic prototype is a fully functioning object that exists in a fictional world, called the diegesis.

The story takes place in 2034, intentionally chosen to take into account Amara’s Law:

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Roy Amara

We undertook a world-building exercise to establish the foundational principles of our envisioned future world:

1. Synthesizing the Core Ideas of Centaurian Thinking: We distilled the essential concepts from research into ‘Thinking with Machines.’

2. Developing Implication Maps: We mapped out the implications of these ideas, utilizing the concepts of the adjacent possible and systems thinking to explore second and third-order impacts.

3. Constructing a Future World:

   1. Social Dimensions: How people would think, work, and transact in the future.

   2. Technological Dimensions: Potential core technologies and the development of naming conventions.

   3. Economic Dimensions: The economic landscape of this future world.

   4. Political and Regulatory Dimensions: Possible political and regulatory effects.

4. Creating a Micro World: To make the narrative more manageable, we created a micro-world emphasizing Centaurian Thinking:

   1. We selected a small social circle of teenagers who adapt to changes quickly to highlight societal shifts.

   2. We concentrated on technologies that epitomize the ramifications of thinking with machines.

   3. We focused on a single economic aspect: new venture funding.

   4. We deferred exploring the political dimension to a future article.

5. Story Arc: The story was crafted around the pivotal ideas from the implication maps and the constructed micro-world.

Glossary / Terminology Map:

General Future Technologies: These technologies are loosely based on projecting current technologies:

1. Planetary Guardians -- A videogame meets collective intelligence platform to solve real-world challenges.

2. Auroom (AR-room) and the console -- What an augmented setup might look like.

3. Stretcher: An exercise machine that also allows for augmented and VR play.

4. Earth's TScore: The idea of the Earth’s T-Score is taken from Will Wright’s game, Spore. In the space stage of the simulation game, T-Scores are ways of tracking the level of Terraforming — making a world habitable.

5. Macro news stream: The idea of having multiple different news feeds:

   1. Meta Level -- High-level pattern matching of historic rhymes.

   2. Macro Level -- Reading the macro signals of change across Social, Technological, Economic, Political, Ecological, and Legal domains.

   3. Mesa Level -- The general news feed that most people tune into.

   4. Micro Level -- Immersive and embedded feed from war zones, etc., using drones and other technology.

6. NeoSphere: A future immersive real-time strategy game meets a first-person business simulator.

7. Chitting: AirChat is a new social network that has taken off. Yes, this is based on the newly released social network, and chitting is the term used for interacting on the platform.

Augmented Personal Agents:

1. Pi (Personal Assistant) -- Personal assistant.

2. Mink (Personal Assistant) -- Personal assistant.

3. Pi and Mink have had a close bond with the twins since they hatched. This is how personal assistants grow with kids, syncing with family values and unpacking and nurturing unique personal motivational drives.

4. Daemon -- Another term for personal assistants; they are virtual pets.

Augmented Training: Sims are created to train mental and physical skills. They train different skills in immersive game-like environments. In the future, how you spend your time will determine which skills you build. You can max out a particular skill or build broad ranges of skills.

1. Sims -- Different sims are created to train and master different mental and physical skills.

2. UnSimed -- Sims become part of the language, and you need to differentiate when certain skills are unaugmented or unsimed.

3. Hacked Sim -- In the story, Sophie has hacked her sim to max out a new advanced skill -- pattern matching.

Augmented and Trained Mental Skills: A product of sims and augmenting and training skills is that individuals will have unique superpowers:

1. Maxing-Out -- A term to talk about being at the top levels of a skill.

2. Locked-In (Aug’d In) -- Short burst activities of being in an augmented thinking process.

3. Dual-zoning -- AI agents help with multitasking by managing swapping in and out of working memory for different tasks. This will allow people to multitask at high speeds by always maintaining multiple context windows.

4. Pattern-Matching (PM) skills: An advanced skill for finding and extracting patterns in noisy signals. It can be refined for different areas.

5. Kx'ing -- This takes the concept of 10x programmers to a new level. K stands for 1000x capabilities for tasks like coding.

6. Hybrid Team Orchestration -- A new skill of orchestrating a hybrid team of AI agents and people.

7. Aug-drones—Augmented drone control allows you to manage an army of physical robots, as discussed in the article about Big Hero 6 with the microbots.

Augmented Learning and Innovation: This area focuses on how learning and innovation change in a world with AI. AI will never be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent, but through agents and augmented skills, learning and innovating will be core functions in the future. This is loosely based on the unknown-unknown 2x2 matrix from Donald Rumsfeld.

1. Unk Miners -- The idea that you can use AI agents to mine new research areas in the unknown-unknown.

2. Unking -- Unking is a general term for exploring the unknown. Normally focused on augmented humans, like Wesley in the story, who can Unk through the Unknown-Known quadrant. This is different from agent-based brute force exploration.

3. Chunking (mined and chunked the topic) -- As knowledge is mined, it is refined and finally chunked into known-known libraries.

4. Fine-mining -- A term for a refined skill of Unking from the Unknown-Known quadrant to the Unknown-Unknown quadrant.

Thinking with Systems: This section expands on the idea of augmenting our thinking systems:

1. System 2: Reticular Activation System (RAS) -- This is a System 2 augmented process to visualize and monitor, augmenting attention.

2. System 2: MemX (Extended Memory System) -- This is a personal extended working memory system, sometimes called second-brain technology.

3. System Zero: SysZero space -- Extended working memory space is similar to MemX, but shared for collaboration. SysZero Spaces can interact with individual’s MemX’s.

4. System 1: Sys1 extensions - Extended unconscious memory. This takes the idea of working memory, which is a conscious process, and applies it to our larger unconscious memory system.

Next Week:

We will delve into this story and examine each element that constructs our future world in greater detail. We'll also align these elements with the core principles of Centaurian Thinking.