In the 1960s Star Trek they could pretend that in the far off future, when good progressives ran things for a long time that a glorious utopia would happen - all races would turn out to be the same, women really are equal, etc.
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50 years of total cultural and social power and the pain of being proven wrong and not being able to admit it has grown unbearable. The catch phrase of the new science fiction - "Maybe we don't deserve to survive"
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That's a cry of "we've given you people 50 years to live up to our fantasy but you keep stubbornly refusing, now we just want everyone dead" This is the plot to Westworld; people turned out to be insufficiently progressive, so an avenging AI will finally (ahhh) wipe them out
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Neal Stephenson's latest book proposes just such an absurd future: white fly-over America and blue America split up. What's the result?
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His vision is that fly-over America can't produce baby wipes or dental care while blue America has a 2nd generation Eritrean woman producing major breakthroughs at the intersection of the fields of human cognition and machine intelligence as a Princeton undergrad
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He posits an alternative to living in this world though; a computer simulated dream world that can only be entered by being brain scanned after death. Of course everyone chooses this.
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Don't worry though, unthinking, soul-less AIs keep the real world going by generating power and keeping up with the need for increasing amounts of computational hardware sphere for the real essence of humanity - a gnostic world where finally people aren't bound by the physical.
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Neal Stephenson has about 30 IQ points on the Westworld tv writers but they're both in strong agreement that there's nothing possibly biological about this and that the death of all humanity is preferable to acknowledging that that trait is heritable.
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