Now do we or do we not have flying cars and jetpacks? How about information-based teleports? Or, even better, slave robots teleports? Since people can retain their personality with just their heads, why not go the next step and have them use interchangeable, remote-controlled surrogate bodies for anything they'd need to do in person? I haven't seen the movie "The Surrogates", but I heard it has a similar idea that it completely failed to exploit properly.
Also, what about the exploration of dreams? I accept Paprika as a source of inspiration, but not Inception: that movie has so many glaring resarch errors it's hilarious. For one thing, you can't read in a dream, that brain area doesn't work, and all tries of reading by lucid dreamers have resulted in either failure or awakening.... (I know, I have to find the research paper I read that in, cuz links or it didn't happen). Actually Inception would be a more appropriate inspiration for a story about cyberspace:
You still have a dimension that can affect people's minds. There are dangerous security "systems" that can hurt people in the real world. You need a team of experts to pull of a typical hackers' Impossible Mission plot, part of which is getting to the "target system" in the first place. The environment can be "programmed" and cheated, and the setting straddles the line between Cyberpunk and Post Cyberpunk. Oh, and there's a Haunted Technology subplot too.
Now do we or do we not have flying cars and jetpacks?
We have those things, but then we don't have them.
If you want to make a story that sounds plausible, try and consider not just "would this technology work?" but "if we could make this, would we use it?" Consider the other things we'd be able to make if we could make that particular technology.
So, the usual bet is that the GAI, both F and UF will be created at around that time at the latest. I'd like to set a novel, a thriller, right at that critical moment where everything could be lost or won, and humanity is in the balance. But human societies and the way they interact with each other will have changed a lot by then. So, well, I haven't read throughly enough here to understand how far we are anticipating what will happen. Not just the friendliness of AI development, but our own impact in the world, and how it will react when it finds out about us and our goals, and takes them seriously.
So I was wondering if you'd help me out here with some brainstorming. I'm looking for some seminal ideas for how the world will look like by then. We don't need to be 100% precise, although keeping the pieces of the setting vague by avoiding Burdensome Details is a way of avoiding glaring mistakes, and gives a Lord Of The Rings, Ruins In The Distance feel of false depth. Don't hesitate to suggest seemingly weird but actually reasonable ideas: the future I want to build is a Weirdtopia. The point is to frighten, wonder, and suck the reader in.
Let's see, for a start: cryogenics and cybernetics are a solved problem, and people's heads are being resurrected and put on mechanical bodies by default (they could ask for recreated biological bodies, but usually after the first tantrums... they don't ^_^). The audience can be given someone to identify with through a Temporal Fish Out Of Water, one of the resurrected Human Popsicles. The funny part is that, even though that person happens to be a transhumanist AND a singularitarian, they hadn't surpassed the Shock Level (I think that's what Yudkowsky called it when you were enthused with an idea because you don't think of it as normal yet?), and they are only marginally less freaked out by the world they find themselves into than the normal sci-fi fan readers (or even the mainstream ones, if this ends up so good as to have any).