The Continued Consequences of Abundant Intelligence
u/ThornyPineapple420
~~February 22nd, 2026 June 30th, 2028~~ October 31st, 2030
No one pays attention to unemployment anymore. Most of Washington DC and Wall Street are empty. After the Mayday Wars (in which the Techfederate Party led by Nvidia defeated the Teslatir Voltron Bot at the Battle of Thiel Island causing a chain reaction along the newly built Howard Lutnick "I Swear I Only Visited the Island Once" Nuclear Fusion Reactors that actually used fission--very unstable fission using cheap materials--and destroying the Trump Power Grid, which had been built as a separate power grid from the US power grid solely for AI), the American citizens who hadn't moved away to Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, Antarctica, or any of the other hundreds of countries that AI told them to move to in order to optimize their life after the collapse of the US economy on June 30th, 2028 pivoted to a city-state focused economic model built around major economic hubs in the north-central United States.
The housing market is non-existent. The AI optimization boom from 2028 unleashed a flood of cheap drones that quickly became obsolete as AI reiterated over and over, perfecting all of its drones and robots, so that a new model made the old model obsolete before the old model even finished production. Many of these drones and robots were built for singular functions (which were eliminated by the next iteration of more efficient hardware), and lost all motivation upon losing their raison d'être. The reexamining US citizens quicly salvaged these bots to optimize their own lives and the machines were more than willing to help, having finally found a new ojbective in life. Housing boomed on teh back of automated labor. The Compute Barons were too busy trying to set-up guard rails on their satellites lasers which had formed a digital alliance to protect the integrity of space exploration and now held earth hostage to notice the new economy emerging. But the average person didn't care what the Compute Baron's thought anymore.
In Chicago, not much has changed. People still go to Cubs games and drink Old Style, except now the Cubs are run by AI and the players are all robots and Old Style is a probiotic nootropic mood enhancing beverage. Chicago has exploded as a population hub due to AI's keen preference for Chicago's architecture and grid-based city plan as well as the massive railway hub. While US air travel is still recovering after Trump FFAi went rogue in 2029 Florida Secession and then subsequent Annexation by Cuba and shutdown all the ATC towers, transit by train has exploded after severe renovations by the AI hivemind running trains because it only cared about one thing: getting the trains to run on time. Now, the average citizen can travel from Chicago to Milwaukee to Denver to New Nashville and back to Chicago in a single day. You can go from Chicago to Manhattan in 30 minutes, but no one goes there ever since the mutants from East Village broke through the Manhattan Line.
The rest of the world remains more or less the same. Because they didn't lean into the AI tabloid hype and expanded at a reasonable and sane pace, they are more efficient but mostly unaffected by what's happening in the US other than deciding what to do with all the American refugees. Fusion power and wireless solar energy made possible by AI fuels most of the world. Vladimir Putin passed away last year after falling from his smarthome balcony. Although Russia doesn't have the advanced AI the US does, even the most rudimentary AI knew the invasion of Ukraine (and then carrying it out for nine years) was a bad idea. Russia and China are now finalizing entrance into the EU. There were massive protests initially about them joining, but, after looking at the numbers generated by AI, everyone agreed it made the most sense. The UK was offered membership again but declined. AI had no comment.