Whereas fantasy authors write stuff like "a sufficiently large pile of books becomes an intelligence" (Pratchett) and that's pretty much what's happened...
I don’t recall his robots having problems with creativity nor lying - precisely Daniel in the post-Foundation books was found to have developed a zeroth law which he used not only to lie but also to creatively get the universe back on Seldon’s plan after the Mule disrupted it. There were also stories in the robot/Spacer era pre-Foundation where robots lied precisely because they had to to save a human life or themselves. And the robots were creative - the human inspector those series followed relied on the creativity of his robot companion to help him.
(1) Butlerian Jihad. Sanderson's Skyward at least had a reason.
(2) Banks's Culture had a possible future. I'm sure there are others, but not many.
I think about this a lot, and while I have tons of near future sci-fi ideas (which probably would have seemed very far future, 10-20, years ago), I just can't conceive of anything much farther out. I guess that's why they call it the "singularity".
>the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
Star Trek and Banks' are post-capitalist futures.
The only slightly fleshed out bit of Star Trek is the military, not the planetary society.
> I agree with Ursula Le Guin that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” To me, the interesting parts of science fiction isn’t how accurately it extrapolates into the future, but rather, given a future circumstance, how might be?
You can read her views at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand... .
"""Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look!"""
Science fiction is about the present, even when it describes the future.
CamperBob2•1h ago