>if they actually got to that level of intelligence the tech would have been "acquired" by military/other companies/whoever I don't doubt that that would be a

>if they actually got to that level of intelligence the tech would have been "acquired" by military/other companies/whoever I don't doubt that that would be a very real consideration, a pressure out there in the world that anyone developing AI would have to contend with. I think the problem is with treating this like an inevitability. You are always going to deal with the idiosyncracies of the world: personalities, motivations, contingent world circumstances. And beyond that, I think we have to keep in mind that this is, after all, fiction. The writers may arbitrarily structure their world in a manner that puts a spotlight on things they feel are interesting. And, within the limits of that spotlight, they may consider things like artificial intelligence in a way that is sincere to the subset of futurist considerations they are interested in investigating. And perhaps that involves suppressing plausible forces we would expect to see, such as military and corporate interest in advanced AI tech.