There's a very popular young adult novel out called Scythe written by Neal Shusterman. In this novel there is a benevolent cloud-based AI in charge of ruling over the whole world named The Thunderhead ( because The Cloud wasn't impressive enough).
It's cool to see part of this fictional world coming to life
I assume that concepts descended from 'policy' and 'enforcement' will gradually be delegated to AI. Just as I assume more people will spend more time in VR, and a later generation will not make the same strong distinction between this reality dream, and the VR dreams.
I feel technologists tend toward a kind of over-skepticism, relative to scifi writers, because they know too much about the status quo, and they're used to getting value from drawing on that knowledge. But I wonder if there was any practicing technologist alive in 1960, who could have understood or predicted that we would have, e.g., unbiased photorealistic rendering in whatever color space you like. Or that pulling a piece of glass out of your pocket to have a face-to-face conversation with people around the world would be a passe thing any 12 year old does.
But he would also say the dream is in your head. The thing is how to wake up from it. Reality is out there, where the material stuff is. Just shifting from one dream to another dream seems like a failure to me. I hope we don't go that way.
It's cool to see part of this fictional world coming to life
reply