A SEA of Distributed AI
Issue #31: Starting at 10am PDT - Guest Talk with Author of AI Snake Oil
In this issue: take a peek at the worldbuilding behind AI-generated film South Beast Asia and uncover its strange rules. We hope you’ll find inspiration for our current sci-fi contest, Ghosts in Machines! Also – join us in one hour, at 10am US Pacific, for a guest talk with Arvind Sarayanan, author of hit book AI Snake Oil and recent paper AI as Normal Technology; bookmark our other AI guest talks; try your hand at our new bounty system; check out the new Summer of Protocols event page.
In the beginning was the Cloud and then as the Cloud grew, and heavier, it began to Rain, drizzling life across land and sea
The Question of Distributed AI
Distributed AI was a core theme and exploration of the Khlongs & Subaks workshop at which the world and stories of South Beast Asia (SBA) were co-imagined.
This under-the-hood essay explores and unpacks ten traits of SBA, each derived and adapted from the initial set of ‘strange rules’ developed by workshop participants as the foundations for SBA, and viewed through the lens of how they address AI distribution in a South East Asian (SEA)-inspired context.
💫 A note on timelines, canons, and worlds As SBA is an imaginary world, while there is a common set of starting ‘strange rules’, it like any fictional universe is inherently open to countless interpretations, forks, and timelines. The traits and imaginaries in this essay, like the rest of the concept material on this site, should be read and treated not as a dogmatic binding ‘canon’ but as a (weakly-held) strong vision of a set of adjacent imagined-SBA timelines.
AI-Distributing Traits of South Beast Asia
Derived from the initial ten ‘strange rules’ crafted in the outlining of what would become SBA.
Distributed Public Surveillance. All external behaviors are logged, but not centrally.
Embodied AIs or Beaings. As a general practice, AIs are embodied, distributing AI autonomy and experience.
Family Airlooms. Families maintain their own private Airlooms, distributing memory and history across families and households.
AI Haunting & A Neo-Animist World. The process of ‘haunting’ or infusing locally autonomous AI into non-human objects has become routine, birthing a neo-animistic world of distributed ‘beaings'.
Zodiac Segmentation. People are segmented according to their zodiac symbols (based on weekdays, months, or years of birth), and this determines which corporate AIs they personally access, distributing population and data across multiple competing AI providers.
Distributed Kinship & Plurality-Diversity Algorithms. Zodiacs also bear symbolic kinship significance (e.g., one’s spirit animal) and therefore link many people with many beaings. In groups, zodiac diversity is encouraged and incentivized across public services (e.g., voting weights that scale quadratically with a group’s zodiac plurality).
Mesh Memory Tapestry. Everyone makes daily memory ‘knots’ which are sharded and woven into a distributed mesh tapestry (some say the ‘knotchain’).
Distributed Memory, Protocolized Access. While the Tapestry is public, access and interpretation for specific knots is protocolized around proof-based systems (proof-of-right-to-know, proof-of-need-to-know, etc.).
Commons Consent. New laws and initiatives that affect public commons are subject to AI-powered, beaing-based, ‘commons consent’ (distributing enfranchisement and representation across local and stakeholder beaings).
Thermodynamic Accounting. Thermodynamic footprints and balances are trackable and transparent, allowing for distributed verification of an entity’s thermodynamic-externality history (or ’thermokarma’).
Let’s go through each of these in a bit more detail.
1. Distributed Public Surveillance
In South Beast Asia, all external behaviors are logged, but this is not a dystopian panopticon police or surveillance state, as these are not the centralized eyes of power, but a distributed and encoded (verifiable, but not explicit) log among peers and neighbors.
Those observing something can log it in ways that they can subsequently prove, but not as part of central databases or intelligences.
2. Embodied AIs or Beaings
Instead of living on remote datacenters and teleconferencing to your phone screen, most of the AIs of SBA have bodies. They can run and operate locally, tap local and neighboring sensors (feeding a growing sense of embodied intelligence via its own first-hand experience), and ultimately grow to have their own de facto memories and consciousnesses. Widespread across SBA, the world has come to know them as beaings.
3. Family Airlooms
Memories are often the most precious inheritance of a family, and well-maintained AIs can outlive generations of humans. In SBA, these have led to the emergence of Airlooms (pronounced ‘heirlooms’), private AI-powered family intelligences that converse and remember from decades of multilingual exchanges with all members of a family. Over time, these have become the longest-lived, most cherished (and often, most trusted) members of many families. Across the precarities of history, many have turned to families as the only timeless space of trust (as nations, governments, corporations, and empires rise and fall), and Airlooms have become the new kernels and realizations of this transgenerational practice. Jealously guarded from authorities, neighbors, and competing clans, Airlooms have evolved into a societally-distributed form of memory and power, and play a nontrivial check-and-balance role in SBA’s delicate equilibrium.
4. AI Haunting & a Neo-Animist World
Embodied AI only scales if it can be performed, repeated, and maintained reliably. The first few ‘black-box’ AIs died out with their parent companies amid the storms of the financial markets. Open standards for what would come to be known as ’haunting’ — installing and embodying locally-autonomous AIs into non-human objects matured into protocols towards the end of the first decade, and rapidly birthed a new neo-animistic (’AI-nimistic’, some quipped) world of distributed beaings, agency, and autonomy. This was greatly facilitated by the maturity of URS IPs, or universal relatability spirit interoperability protocols that provide a common grammar and structure for all interbeaing and human-beaing communication. By widely distributing intelligence and autonomy, alongside protocols for independent-but-verifiable memory, peer monitoring and safeguards against coercive coordination, haunting — at least in SBA — began to also decentralize power.
In the wild worlds, balance finds itself. It is the domesticated that prove the most dangerous.
5. Zodiac Segmentation
Early into the AI age, the policymakers of SBA wisely ascertained that the greatest threats to their societies came not from the AIs themselves, but from how much their societies might come to depend upon them — especially if these AIs were to all come from the same corporation(s).
As a mitigation,a zodiac segmentation protocol was drafted and widely enacted, effectively randomly segmenting populations by their zodiac symbols (based on their birth weekdays, months, or years), and in turn using these symbols to determine which corporate AI provider (broken up from the global cabals) a particular person would have access to. In effect, this distributed the population across multiple competing AI providers, providing baseline natural corporate diversity and competitive dynamics, and limiting the societal damage from any occasional corporate abuses. The zodiac system was also chosen for its cultural backwards-compatibility and broad familiarity across generations and level of digital-savvy. Naturally over time, many came to grow an affection for their zodiac spirit animals and providers.
6. Distributed Kinship & Plurality-Diversity Algorithms
The zodiac segmentation protocol played a second important function, and one of especial historical significance in Southeast Asia: distributing and interweaving kinship, diversity, and plurality across some of the most diverse societies on the planet. Many societies came to embrace multiple zodiac layers (weekdays, months, years), which gave every member of that society multiple affinities and kinships with which to walk the world, relate to others, and participate in a range of diverse groupings across inherited lines of class, race, and place. Plurality incentives for groups based on zodiac diversity (e.g., voting weights that scale quadratically with the level of zodiac plurality within a voting-bloc) have been experimented with by many jurisdictions, and have made asking ‘who are your animals’ an almost-standard greeting across SBA.
7. Mesh Memory Tapestry
A recurring sacred ritual across SBA is that of the daily knot, in which everyone makes and weaves a memory ‘knot’ (a combination of a log and hash) each day. These knots are then sharded and woven into a distributed mesh-based system of memory: the Tapestry (sometimes colloquially the ‘knotchain’). The Tapestry serves not just as a binding ritual but also as a shared distributed encrypted map and mesh of meaning shared and updated by all, human and beaing alike.
8. Distributed Memory, Protocolized Access
Many are the uses of a verifiable collective memory, and it is no different with the Tapestry. Like earlier blockchains, the ‘knotchain’ nature of the Tapestry — distributed, verifiable, secure, widely updated and mirrored — render it almost limitless in utility and ubiquitous in daily life.
However, the hazard of any public repository is over-transparency and the loss of privacy. The Tapestry system resolves this through a combination of knotting, sharding, and protocolized access — whereby most information retrieval from the Tapestry is gated through proof-based systems that require would-be accessors to satisfy proportionate zero-knowledge proof-of-right-to-know (e.g., as a family member of someone who submitted a memory) and proof-of-need-to-know (e.g., the said member being recently involved in a serious incident). These balance the broad public benefit with precise and proportional safeguards against widespread abuse — the world having learned from the innumerable perils of just-in-case centralized data collection.
9. Commons Consent
Amid growing awareness and high-profile cases of both captures and tragedies of the commons, several SBA legislations began to enact commons consent policies, under which any new laws or developments of sizeable impact to public commons are required to obtain prior commons consent before they can proceed. Commons consent procedure is greatly facilitated by the monitoring and enforcement of local beaings, who are party to periodic updates and occasional consultation in the commons consent process. While most commons council governance is still the domain of humans, local beaings play a key role in the consultation and impact assessment process. In effect, commons consent policies have distributed enfranchisement and representation across many previously-near-invisible public commons, and given legal voice and teeth to entities traditionally spiritually revered but hitherto legally non-engageable.
If only these trees could speak, we used to say. Well, now they sure can!
10. Thermodynamic Accounting
A world of widespread beaings with precision sensors and context-sharing protocols has helped SBA make thermodynamic externalities largely into a side effect from the past. Aberrant thermodynamic footprints (beyond publicly distributed expectation envelopes) are observed and investigated, allowing for a robust and verifiable thermo-estimation (and taxation) system to emerge. A lively but now data-informed debate between traditional moralizers (the ‘thermokarmists’) and pragmatic balancers (’thermocircularists’) rages on across SBA, while an active research and solution development ecosystem pulses on at scales both local and regional.
Conclusion: Distribution, AI, and a Haunted, Hardened Commons
The imagined wild and colorful world of South Beast Asia, as we can see from across these ten traits, is a showcase of a haunted, but yet thriving, society — not a society haunted (in the sense of hauntology) by the unrealized dreams or failed promises of the past, but a hitherto-digitally-inanimate world brought to life and ‘haunted’ (in the South Beast Asian way we have seen) by a protocolized, embodied, thoughtful, and culturally-compatible application of AI.
Here, the ghosts are not broken dreams of regret, but newly-conversant-in-human-language beaings infused into the age-old-familiar living forms of the living natural world.
Haunting here is not spiritual baggage, but a digitally in-spirited world — a world where a thousand distributed beaings swarm as a dynamic, intercommunicative, self-monitoring, self-governing equilibria instead of being fused (and fought over) as a looming Singularity threat.
Finally, for those in search of how to harden our commons, haunting (in the South Beast Asia vein) offers perhaps a richly-imaginable and research-deserving paradigm for how a society might navigate, deploy, and — most of all — distribute (the different layers, components, and dependencies of) AI towards a world worth living in. Good manmade ghosts for a wiser world.
Feeling inspired? Check out our second protocol fiction contest. Due date is July 13.
Ghosts in Machines
Welcome to our second protocol science fiction story contest: Ghosts in Machines! Our first contest, Terminological Twists, was a great success — you can read the winning and finalist stories at this page.
Today’s AI Guest Talk (And Recordings)
Join us in one hour – 10am PDT, Wednesday, July 2nd – for a guest talk titled AI as Normal Technology by Arvind Naryanan, author of AI Snake Oil. He will discuss some ideas from the paper of the same name as the talk, and make connections with protocols and concepts such as hardness. Tune in 👇
There are several other great talks on artificial intelligence on the Protocol Town Hall – some wide-ranging, some heretical:
Let us know what you think!
Introducing Protocolized Bounties
Here is an experiment. On the Summer of Protocols Discord you can now respond to bounties in the #🛗-pitches-and-bounties channel. The bounty process is under development, but our first one is already open!
A story inspired by this video of fiber optic cable pollution in Ukrainian fields due to use of tethered drones to avoid RF signal jamming/electronic counter measures. These thin 0.5mm cables can be 5km-25km long. Check out this video. Classic illustration of Fred Pohl’s “the job of the SF writer is to predict traffic jams, not cars” principle, except this future is already unevenly distributed. Looking for a story that does something unexpected with it. Doesn’t have to be Ukraine related, and preferably something unexpected that breaks Utopia/dystopia dichotomy. Like maybe a canny postwar entrepreneur starts selling these as fishing lines? (Dunno if they’ll work for that though). Get creative.
Initial guidelines for this hackathon-style system are at the top of the first bounty thread. Interested in entering? Head to the thread.
Keep a Pulse on Protocol Studies
The new Summer of Protocols event page is now operational. Easily add the full program or specific event tracks — like our 2025 guest talk series or the biweekly Special Interest Group calls — directly to your calendar. These online events are open to anyone and are a great way to get engaged.
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