The Shared World: Arizona Sun-Tech-Topia in 2071

This is a concept art for a Sapiente, a “wise machine”. This one is named Kairos One (K1), established near Tucson Arizona, here depicted in the year 2071. Commissioned in 2048 by its parent company Kairos, it was operational in 2054. It was the first operational "Hyperscale General Artificial Intelligence System" of the Shepard class in North America, the pride of the state of Arizona in these troubled, some might say interesting, times.

Materialy, a Sapiente is an hyperscale-calculator (mixing linear and nonlinear quantum computing in the yottaflop range) coupled with vast libraries of curated data. The Shepard class has four similar centers for redundancy and constant on-going maintenance. It runs 24/7, coupling heavy electrical consumption with daylight cycles. At night, the system is using a mix of nuclear power and gravitational storage. The chimney towers depicted are not a nuclear plant but massive water cooling stations. It goes without saying that the energy and resources consumption of such a system is staggering. In fact, it represents the culmination as much as the end of a developpement model that has reached its limits. Thus, only a handful were made, the egregious cost of such a system makes it impossible to generalise.

A typical Sapiente oversees older networks of data centers and energy grids, managing a vast array of factories, cities, farms, satellites and ports, all interlinked at a state scale. By extension, they became the state itself.

This is part of the Shared World, a science fiction project, which explores the themes of ecology and artificial intelligence towards the end of the 21st century.