Re: The sci-fi futures we didn't get
See Wikipedia’s nice summary of The Marching Morons from 1961. The story predicted Trump, (right down to the Real Estate Developer) but Kornbluth needed suspended animation for a few hundred years for the tech to make the story viable. However, his novella, is really about sociological issues. The “elites” made the anti-hero World Dictator, when he convinced them that he was “the only who can fix it.”
Alfred Bester’s *Adam but No Eve* from 1941,“ imagines an ego-driven scientist (picture Bezos/Musk, hiring the technicians):
“(He) develops a catalyst that induces iron into ‘atomic disintegration’ uses it to power a rocket. Despite warnings of dire consequences and acts of sabotage, he takes off in the rocket with his dog in tow.”
“He and the dog land on a devastated world full of nothing but ashes.”
“Story ends as he is waiting to die, hoping that the bacteria in his body will live and eventually evolve into intelligent life.”
The reptile brain is going to be the bane of humanity, not a particular tech. AI doesn’t have to *want* to improve itself and take over. Want is a feeling word and so far emotions are the province of biology. But…some utterly selfish/foolish person will hire someone to program the emotional motivation into it.
Our real "culture war” is authoritarian regimes v democracies. Reptile v Mammal “brains.” If “We the People” don’t win and protect our last chance to have a say in our future, then authoritarians will either destroy all life or we will wind up living in some form of Afghanistan with local warlords, battling each other and, say, China.
North Korea or Denmark?
My playlist just offered up Leon’s *Ballad for a Soldier* which is kind of a musical summary of this issue.
I have to run. Still trying to find all the leisure time the futurists predicted.