AI systems inherit the fundamental crookedness and contradictions inherent in human thought, making them unsuitable vehicles for creating perfectly rational or straight solutions. To responsibly develop and deploy AI, we must understand and work with this essential crookedness rather than pretend it can be engineered away, drawing philosophical insight from Isaiah Berlin's work on human limitations.
This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.
Sam Chua
Venkatesh Rao expands on his vision of AI and protocols working together to create stable ecologies of distributed, diverse AI systems, where protocols act as the fabric weaving individual AIs into coherent planetary infrastructure. He illustrates this framework with concrete examples including TITLES, a generative art platform that creates fine-tuned models from individual artist collections, demonstrating how personality emerges from the combination of AI capabilities and protocol-based coordination.
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao presents a theory of 'protocol fiction' as a genre distinct from both heroic fantasy (Ted Chiang's 'special people') and science fiction (Chiang's 'strange rules'), arguing it uniquely captures how humans transform alongside technological/institutional change rather than merely reacting to it or resisting it collectively (per Ursula Le Guin's 'carrier bag' model). He traces this through modernist literature, detective fiction, and Asimov/Dick/cyberpunk eras, then outlines three ways protocols appear in fiction (authorial process, central theme, background device), before Travis Van Epps and Sachin Benny discuss their own protocol-fiction writing experiments, including LLM ping-pong drafting techniques and story ideas drawn from DAO governance and care-package logistics in Venezuela.
Venkatesh Rao, Travis, Sachin Benny, Timber
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