Not trying to be in vogue. If anything, my limited knowledge of history shows me that dystopian societies are far more common than liberal democracies. In fact,

Not trying to be in vogue. If anything, my limited knowledge of history shows me that dystopian societies are far more common than liberal democracies. In fact, I'd argue that it's a cyclic thing. And good luck with adding still more technology to the stack and expecting better things to come out of it. What's going to be required is a new set of societal mores about our interaction with tech. I have no idea how long that will be in coming, if ever. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with a new religious movement, that'd be cool. I'm a big supporter of tech and science and an overall optimist -- if you think the human race evolving into machine intelligence and then dying off counts as optimism. As I said, that's a tough call. You could argue it either as a great thing or a terrible disaster. I do believe that we have several inflection points ahead of us: getting off the planet, transhumanism, the panopticon, and so on. We have to make it through each of these successfully in order for the species to continue. Let's hope the answer to the Fermi Paradox isn't just that intelligent species tend to self-destruct.