“Hey! That’s just a machine programmed to kill me, it’s not making the decision to kill me itself!”
To be fair, it might be too late by then, but it also might be true that it’s not just the fairy tales with happy endings that are not realistic. No sense worrying about T-1000s coming for you in real life when that whole movie was mostly special effects, if the world is about to die then I don’t see it coming from machines. We don’t know where free will comes from or even if it’s just a math equation or something truly beyond explanation, but computers don’t seem to have it.
Scarily enough, the Quran (of all the things that implies, I am not saying this is actually reality, only that parallels should not fall into place that way under random chance) points out that this conclusion was engineered in some sense, that electronics were never going to give us godhood due to the limitations of reality. It’s kind of blunt in saying it, so I get why the skepticism needs to stay involved, but the idea is that our “household gods” of Siri and Alexa and such are really just basic circuitry compared to a housefly or mosquito, let alone to anything larger or capable of emotional attachment.
Sorry if this is preachy, I’m a writer who hasn’t done enough writing lately and I’m just at a stage where I feel like it’s too late for my writing to matter.
Yeah, no worries, I get it.
I’m a perennial optimist, so I look more at the Star Trek future than any of the dystopias, though dystopia is my favorite type of book (setting? genre?). In every dystopia, we get the same general theme of the human spirit pushing against evil, with the difference to other stories being the lack of success.
I think people take these warnings to heart and avoid worst of it. I don’t think we’ll get to the Star Trek utopia, but I think we’ll get closer than any of the various dystopias people concoct. Humans are late at responding to issues, but we generally do respond.
I think the same is true for AI. It’ll start as a helpful piece of tech, transform into a monster, then we’ll correct and control it. We’ve done that in the past with slavery, nuclear weapons, and fascism, and I think we’ll continue to overcome climate, AI, and other challenges, albeit much later than we should.
Actually, I’m glad to know you’re interested in utopian settings. I was mostly depressed because my utopian sci-fi story I published (I won’t spam but DM me if you use Amazon for reading books) had been outright attacked by other writers for being “too optimistic”; for some inexplicable and seemingly irrational reason, the idea of an artificial afterlife built entirely by human hands is outright offensive to Atheists. It was, admittedly, an unorthodox utopia: Resurrecting 125 billion people at a rate of (iirc) ~2.5 people every four minutes (I did the math, I just no longer have the notes) for 30 million years (Homo Australopithecus to Homo Sapiens Sapiens) and giving all of them immortality (via respawns with a 9 month timeskip every time you die 3 times in a single week), mental health care, privacy, security, education, water, food, mail and courier service, library membership (they saved the books that were burnt or lost too), shelter (hey, some people like living outdoors), transit, electricity, television, internet, and recreational drugs in that order and without being the only provider.
Basically, a constitutional oligarchy with municipal elected officials with full intent and obligation to transition to full democracy on vote, and which strives to balance capitalism and socialist regulation of that capitalism (because yes, outright communism would never actually work, but socialism is the “parent category” of communism and is why we have both TGVs and Interstate Highways in real life; taxes and tax-funded public services are the definition of socialist policy and I honestly believe they’re the best option seeing as it’s worked more or less consistently since the 1950s) because the oligarchy are REQUIRED to survive on the smallest income in the entire society (the leadership live completely on the same Universal Basic Income as the poorest citizens, and thus must raise the UBI to raise their own income) which leads to greater equity without complicated systems of bureaucracy.
To be fair, I don’t know if it would work, given all the historical factors involved, but I actually did research about what has and hasn’t worked and relied on that over my own opinion as much as possible. So it really hurt for people to outright reject it because ‘I don’t want anyone to get inspired to create anything like it entirely based on my hatred of an unrelated religious philosophy’ was/is(?) prominent among the current trend of ‘the societal implications of technology (Hint: wE hAtE tEcHnOlOgY aNd NeRdS!!!)’ in the sci-fi writing community.
Long story short, thank you, optimistic readers who want optimistic stories are in short supply lately.
