Inside the World of South Beast Asia: Ten AI-Distributing Traits

Sam Chua

In the beginning was the Cloud and then as the Cloud grew, and heavier, it began to Rain, drizzling life across land and sea

Preface — 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 SEA-inspired context.

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💫 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.

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Ten AI-Distributing Traits of South Beast Asia

Derived from the initial ten ‘strange rules’ crafted in the outlining of what would become SBA.

  1. Distributed Public Surveillance. All external behaviors are logged, but not centrally.
  2. Embodied AIs or Beaings. As a general practice, AIs are embodied, distributing AI autonomy and experience.
  3. Family Airlooms. Families maintain their own private Airlooms, distributing memory and history across families and households.
  4. 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'.
  5. 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.
  6. 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).
  7. Mesh Memory Tapestry. Everyone makes daily memory ‘knots’ which are sharded and woven into a distributed mesh tapestry (some say the ‘knotchain’).
  8. 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.).
  9. 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).