I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.

A life where bots tell us what to do every second - get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person - is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn't even notice.

I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I dont mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that's different but it's familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.

Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system much less a brain the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.