A few weeks ago, after the first preview of my play about artificial intelligence in San Francisco, I found myself talking to Edward (not his real name), an agreeable programmer with a ponytail who didn’t make much eye contact but was eager to discuss the performance and the tech world more broadly. “Have you heard of Iain Banks’s The Culture”? Edward asked. I hadn’t. The Culture, I would later learn, is a sci-fi series about a far-future, post-scarcity utopia run by godlike AIs, where death, suffering, and even traditional economics are obsolete.
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