Do you guys have any particular favorites [among the candidates for Imperator]? Is there anybody that you're pulling for? If you had to vote today, who would you vote for?
TL;DRAdam Wieser picks the science-first candidate Leilani as his favorite and Will Weissbaum would vote for her too, while Dave Haddock finds her stance on AI unsettling.
Just to refresh my mind, Lillard is the one who wants to dismantle the UEE, right? Put power back in the systems' hands?
Yeah, empower the systems, pull apart the UEE as one governing body over all systems, and let local government rule all. Gosh, to pick one, that's tough, because I've had to go through and basically write all 10 perspectives. So to be able to do that, I had to get into their headspace and try to understand what would motivate them. I believe, was it Leilani? I think that would be my favorite. Let me double check really quick.
Yeah, the science-first one. Sorry to jump on that. This is me not as a narrative writer. This is me as a human voter, that she would probably be who I would steer towards. So that's not indicative of who I want, as the lead writer, to win. So why do you like her? Adam, I jumped on you, I'm sorry.
Oh, no, all good. I think just for some reason, when I started to dig into what motivated her to lead her down this path of let's trust science, let's open it up... both my parents are educators and teachers, so I'm a big believer in that too. So there was just something about her as a young child, and she comes from, was it Oya? Yeah. So she comes from Oya, which is basically a UEE system that has this Xi'an settlement in the middle of it. It's a historical Xi'an settlement. It's been there for generations. It's this one chunk of the UEE which technically has Xi'an occupation in it. She grew up with this mixing of human and Xi'an cultures. I thought that was really cool, to be able to give her this perspective of wider science and greater understanding of different things. The more you learn about something, the more you can see other perspectives and grow and learn. There was just something really uplifting about that. Since so much of politics can get nasty and dirty, it was fun to be able to get in the mind and perspective of someone that was trying to raise people up and fight for a better future, rather than just fight for political power or greed or purposes like that.
I find her stance on AI unsettling. I'm just going to say it.
Yeah, that definitely is another hot-button issue too.
We've tried to move down that path so many times before, and it has never led to anything good. So that's all I'm saying.