Overview of the world in the series (not necessarily the plot itself, no real spoilers):
Sentient AI is born and assumes leadership of Earth. It’s existance causes the toppling of governments around the world, after the people realize the AI could do a way better job than the humans at running the world. Pretty much the only thing not left to the Thunderhead (the AI) is the death of humans. Humans have achieved immortality, and thus something needs to cull the population. Thus the scythedom is born, consisting of people chosen to pretty much legally murder people. The world is a utopia, everything is damb near perfect, everybody has what they need, there’s no crime whatsoever, global warming is solved, there’s no corruption or war, and people live long lives. The only issues, explored within the books, are the Scythedom left in control of the humans, and although to a much lesser extent, the lack of motivation of the human species. After conquering death, the people of this world don’t really understand the art of the mortal age, with strong emotions based around love, death, and other such topics. You have a very long time to live, they don’t really feel a need to acomplish everything in their short lives as mortal mankind did. There was also kind of a genocide of those born in the mortal age but uh… we don’t talk about that… (genuinely wasn’t talked about much in the books).
I feel like even if the most optimistic predictions of AI capability come to pass, we still got like, a thousand years of continual slogging through human struggles before we see anything close to massive social shifts that would make the world an unrecognizable utopia like so many works of science fiction portray in the coming century or even decades in some flights of fancy.
AI’s development has only made me realize how ridiculously primitive and flawed our species really is. I doubt we will see anything but a larger spectrum of inequality, strangeness and suffering and enclaves of super-wealthy assholes fellating each other around the clock.
Arc of a Scythe series, I want that to be reality
Overview of the world in the series (not necessarily the plot itself, no real spoilers):
Sentient AI is born and assumes leadership of Earth. It’s existance causes the toppling of governments around the world, after the people realize the AI could do a way better job than the humans at running the world. Pretty much the only thing not left to the Thunderhead (the AI) is the death of humans. Humans have achieved immortality, and thus something needs to cull the population. Thus the scythedom is born, consisting of people chosen to pretty much legally murder people. The world is a utopia, everything is damb near perfect, everybody has what they need, there’s no crime whatsoever, global warming is solved, there’s no corruption or war, and people live long lives. The only issues, explored within the books, are the Scythedom left in control of the humans, and although to a much lesser extent, the lack of motivation of the human species. After conquering death, the people of this world don’t really understand the art of the mortal age, with strong emotions based around love, death, and other such topics. You have a very long time to live, they don’t really feel a need to acomplish everything in their short lives as mortal mankind did. There was also kind of a genocide of those born in the mortal age but uh… we don’t talk about that… (genuinely wasn’t talked about much in the books).
I feel like even if the most optimistic predictions of AI capability come to pass, we still got like, a thousand years of continual slogging through human struggles before we see anything close to massive social shifts that would make the world an unrecognizable utopia like so many works of science fiction portray in the coming century or even decades in some flights of fancy.
AI’s development has only made me realize how ridiculously primitive and flawed our species really is. I doubt we will see anything but a larger spectrum of inequality, strangeness and suffering and enclaves of super-wealthy assholes fellating each other around the clock.
Sounds like an interesting read