All that episode said is that Batman couldn't read in his dreams. I remember this nightmare I had. I was before an exam sheet. I read the exercise. I thought I understood it, but just to make sure, once i reached the bottom, I reviewed it, starting from the top. It had changed. I SPENT ALL THE NIGHT LIKE THAT: It was the most horrible nightmare I ever had, even worse than right after seeing Jurassic Park, when I dreamed of the T Rex coming to eat me on the toilet.
Anyhoo, I just checked the Internets for a while. No mention of a study (I must have made that up, somehow, which deeply disturbs me, it's the second time in my life my memory makes shit up), but plenty of people saying they can read, can't read, or can read but if they check for content they find the text changes offscreen.
There's a difference between reading something where the text changes, and being wholly unable to read. It would be easy to create a webpage in which the text changed periodically, just using Javascript.
Also, note that in the Batman episode, he makes the same claim that you did, that the "reading" part of the brain doesn't work in dreams.
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).