Rising Choir

Major breakthroughs in collaboration and prosperity. 

Progress in collaboration was achieved through V.O.I.C.E., a global preference polling tool, which collects ideas and proposes compromises for (local) communities, cities, nations, and up until international levels of coordination. Finding positive-sum interactions, Pareto-improvements, or also called win-wins is achieved through a vast amount of compute. V.O.I.C.E. stands for Voice for Open Source Information and Community Engagement and is an orders of magnitude more potent than today’s open-source survey research tool Polis. It enables direct democracy and has replaced political representatives for a significant part of governmental decisions. By 2045 everyone can simply share a preference with the world by voicing it to the many interfaces on smartphones or social media platforms. In addition, V.O.I.C.E. A/B tests millions of policy suggestions to thousands of global citizens such as “Would you be willing to pay 1% more tax if it would lead to outcome Y?”. As a result, V.O.I.C.E. builds an understanding of the preference space of humanity and searches for mutually beneficial steps. 

Vast increases in the economy have been achieved through humanoid robots which can learn >95% of tasks simply through simulation or observation and direct conversation with humans. By 2045 there exist about two humanoid robots per human on Earth. Due to robots’ high productivity, this has resulted in a 10x of labor in the economy and a 20x GDP growth, leading to the abundance and affordability of most goods.

For AGI to be developed or develop itself there are two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. First, the AI itself needs to be of a critical size (e.g have enough parameters) and secondly, the duration and size of it’s context window (how much it can keep in ‘mind’ at any point in time) need to be large enough for self-improvement to be possible. Both aspects have been severely limited in this world. 

The first point has been limited due to simple economic reasons. Models that are capable of doing >90% of economically useful tasks were developed in the late 2020s. We don’t know where the threshold to AGI exactly is, but we were lucky in the sense that these productive models fell short of that threshold. As a result, most funding and investment went into ‘dumb-and-specialized’ models that could be run locally, making them more efficient, requiring less compute and energy to be price competitive. 

The second point fell under strict regulation with the Robot Act of 2030 in which indefinite context windows for autonomous agents have been banned, and larger context windows (eg. lasting more than a day) have been heavily regulated. 

Abundant Energy has been achieved through a combination of solar & batteries (and other low-carbon tech where sensible). Two decades of development reduced the cost by another 90%. Most grids deployed 5-10x their daily energy requirements in generation capacity to account for the worst Dunkelflaute of the year (a period in which it is heavily clouded and without wind). As a result most societies have abundant free energy 100-300 days in a year. This free surplus energy is being utilized for two key things predominantly:

• Running AIs / Compute / searching for improvements in global-preference-space. 
• Running energy-intensive carbon capture technologies to address Climate Change.

Misuse of humanoid robots, for example for terrorist attacks, are being prevented through high levels of regulations and capacity limits in their context windows. All commercially available robots can not be updated over the internet and need to be brought to maintenance units or certified calibrators to receive updates. The certification process has mandatory humans in the loop which uses a combination of verified humans (via TOPs) and smart contracts. 

New risky technological developments, such as steps towards AGI, are being closely observed by actors everywhere in the global society. Due to the ease of coordination that V.O.I.C.E. brings, global scrutiny can be organized to pressure companies, forcing them to convince the public that their next research developments will be safe. 

Ironically, the progress stifling powers of too much coordination make the world of Rising Choir fall short of its grant potential for now. But trust and hope reign, that we will get there eventually. 

We see four primary ways of interaction: 

• The classic way of talking to your neighbor still exists. We imagine the increased prosperity allowing for a reduced workload and thus more time to meet up with others and enjoy life.
• Meeting up at in-person events which have been facilitated via V.O.I.C.E.. For example when several people are asking / polling about local dance events, people see that preference rising in their community and can say if they want to join or co-organize.
• Connecting via intentional digital communities and dedicated communication channels. See the example of the extended family chat in Sofía's story below. 
• Partaking in national and global conversation via V.O.I.C.E.. 

We expect the economy of 2045 will still be comparable to 2024. A lot of jobs have been disrupted and transformed, and new ones emerged. Social safety nets have been implemented and thanks to (humanoid) robots the cost of goods has decreased significantly. As a result basic needs can be guaranteed to every citizen. Overall people don’t have to work anymore to survive which allows them to spend more time with their children, family or friends. There are still plenty of developments in the world ongoing and…

This depends on where you live and what your preferences are! Ever more open borders allow you to move to the cultures with their architecture, dress code, and traditions that fit you. The range of lives you could lead in 2045 is so vast that we don’t make predictions here. Living styles depend on where you live and...

Beneficial trends: 

• Increase in the participation of the people, having their opinion heard through V.O.I.C.E., and as a consequence a more equitable society and more informed decision making processes. 
• More participatory forms of democratic governance result in policies that reflect more of the people’s genuine policy preferences (instead of models relying on approximating those preferences through a middleman representative).
• This in turn grants greater perceived legitimacy to policy processes and outcomes, creating stronger public trust in public institutions. (In countries implementing V.O.I.C.E-enabled democratic models, at least.)

Concerning trends:

• There are constant opportunities for the human tendency to be outraged. How can this be counteracted in a constructive (but not condescending) way?
• Not all countries welcome the unprecedented tech-aided political participation that V.O.I.C.E promises. Some communities opt-out and stop contributing to the global hive mind.

Today’s values which are reinforced and broadly distributed include increasing equity, accessibility to all, acceptance, and shared mutual understanding. Cooperation and peace are also valued highly. 

On the other hand, negative discrimination and segregation due to religion, race, ideology, or personal opinions are reduced as much as possible by this 2045. 

Finally, new values have also been added to this society:

1. A paradigm shift in the understanding of military deterrence took place.
2. With increasing levels of collaboration and interconnected economies and societies war becomes less reasonable. With the costs of a high weapon arsenal being transparent, societies don’t see a large army as something valuable but more as something costly. Thanks to V.O.I.C.E people also understand the necessity. As a result mutual deproliferation efforts are being supported by both international as well as national voters, to increase national prosperity. 
3. Radical tolerance: Since people have increasing faith that every voice can be heard and taken into account in political & policy outcomes, the environment in democratic societies using V.O.I.C.E no longer feels like an “us vs. them” zero-sum battle. As a result, tolerance is naturally easier, when people don’t so much operate on a scarcity mindset and feel like they have to push someone else down in order for them.

We lack the words to describe the emergent system that will run V.O.I.C.E. in the year 2045. It is a combination of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Linux open source ecosystem, and a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), but with clearly identifiable clusters of stakeholders consisting of nations and UN-funded infrastructure.

The source code and algorithm are public and independently verifiable which led to the adoption of a unified standard in 2032. Before that varying forks of the tool existed, which were merged over time. 

Supply chains and trade have been shaped severely. See the section on microeconomics below. 

The whole idea of political offices and representatives has shifted significantly. Initially, some politicians running for specific positions signalled their democratic values by committing to adhere to the poll results of V.O.I.C.E. when making decisions about new policies. This gave way for neutral 3rd parties to enter the political system. For an increasing range of causes relevant to the broader society political representatives have become more of a human in the loop than a political extension of the public. Some offices have disappeared, some new ones were created, and some have been de facto replaced by V.O.I.C.E..