Yep. Most mass-market space operas are guilty of this. Despite having knowledge and resources to fly to other planets, humans in them still have to shoot kinetic bullets at animals.
However, stories, in order to be entertaining (at least for the mainstream public), have to depict a protagonist (or a group thereof) who are changing because of conflict, and the conflict has to be winnable, resolvable -- it must "allow" the protagonist to use his wit, perseverance, luck and whatever else to win.
Now imagine a "more realistic" setting where humans went through a singularity (and, possibly, coexist with AIs). If the singularity was friendly, then this is an utopia which, by definition, has no conflict. If the singularity was unfriendly, humans are either already disassembled for atoms, or soon will be -- and they have no chance to win against the AI because the capability gap is too big. Neither branch has much story potential.
This applies to game design as well -- enemies in a game built around a conflict have to be "repeatedly winnable", otherwise the game would become an exercise in frustration.
(I think there is some story / game potential in the early FOOM phase where humans still have a chance to shut it down, but it is limited. A realistic AI has no need to produce hordes of humanoid or monstrous robots vulnerable to bullets to serve as enemies, and it has no need to monologue when the hero is about to flip the switch. Plus the entire conflict is likely to be very brief.)
Now imagine a "more realistic" setting where humans went through a singularity (and, possibly, coexist with AIs). If the singularity was friendly, then this is an utopia which, by definition, has no conflict.
There is Friendliness and there is Friendliness. Note: Ambivalence or even bemused antagonism would qualify as Friendliness so long as humans were still able to determine their own personal courses of development and progress.
An AGI that had as its sole ambition the prevention of other AGIs and unFriendly scenarios would allow a lot of w...
A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?