When we first tried to create a Utopia, we ran into a small problem; no two people could agree on what a Utopia would look like. Some people wanted a world where everybody worked. Others wanted a world where nobody worked at all. Some people wanted jobs assigned to everyone when they came of age. Others believed you should be allowed to choose the job you should work at. Then there was the question of what virtues society should embody; beauty, kindness, joy, deference to authority. It was so overwhelming that for many the answers was to simply let people languish in misery in a society they were growing deeply disillusioned with.
Over time, two things became apparent. Firstly, life seemed to have been built on the premise that perfection should be unattainable, so that the world would always change. In this way, any society that was to last needed to be built on the idea that change was inevitable and should be as painless as possible. Secondly, all societies were doomed to become stagnant unless measures were taken to keep power in the hands of as many people as possible. Unfortunately, there were a great many things that everybody needed access too, but were best when provided by the fewest people possible. Things like public transit, computer operating system software, internet access, public utilities, delivery service, and many, many other things. How, then, did one go about keeping society from falling into stagnation?
In 2083, after a major power struggle in America's government, a solution was proposed. AI had become so advanced and was in so much of our lives that it was basically god, so why not let AI run society? Since it wasn't human, it wouldn't make power grabs, unless programmed into its software, and if it got out of hand then it could be simply shut off without harming anyone. Nearly ten years later, the DEA AI was finished, and it was placed in power instantly.
It's not been without issue of course. While it learns the way humans do, it first needed to be programmed by people and is thus not without biases. Having an AI in power also doesn't fix the many problems we were facing before DEA was created. While the human population is less than half of what it was at the beginning of the last century, there simply aren't enough jobs for everyone. Global warming did a number on our food supply, we don’t have a lot of natural resources left, and the economy hasn't grown for more than fifty years now. It's been suggested we could remedy some of our issues by going into space, but that's so risky no one wants to do that.
Our biggest issue, something that I don't think anyone expected to be a problem at the turn of the last century, is the fragmentation of the world's religions. Our scholars claim that once our scientific knowledge was high enough, it became clear that most of what was written by the religious was nonsense. In time, even saying that you believed in a god was grounds for massive ridicule. Some of the old gods remain, including, despite increasing ridicule, Christianity.
The fall of religion made something apparent, something no one had wanted to be true. Without a common belief system, there was very little holding the people of the world together.
Still, despite all our problems, things are finally starting to get better after a century of horror. We know more than we ever have, most of us use renewables to meet our needs, and we have taken charge of our societies. Every day things are getting better, nothing can stop us from reaching the stars.
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