I think this is indicative of a bigger thing. I noticed that in the last decade there was no major technological shifts. From like 2014 progress came to a halt. Everything new is just a slightly better version of the previous thing.
If I am not mistaken, even AI is purely software and was possible in the past but just too slow to be really usable due to the hardware at the time.
Also, optimism in general kinda died some time ago. There is a reason why almost every sci-fi media is a dystopia.
Well, what in science isn't iterative? The artifical neurons are built upon the perceptron, and the transformer neural networks are built upon the non-transformer neural networks. Nevertheless, transformers are ground breaker because they, eh-hu,
transformed the AI landscape. Never before could an ANN model maintain context of past event, the transformer model changed that. All of the people joke that AI generated South Park episode was poorly written, yet, if one lets a pre-TNN model generate a script for South Park, it won't even be remotely coherent. Now there's a story that has a start, a middle, and a end, and more importantly, those parts actually connect logically, even if certain things can be factually wrong -- the TNNs aren't databases, use a database for fact-checking; in fact, I won't be surprised OpenAI will soon train a model which can use tool to query the internet and also evaluate the "factualness" of the sources, before summerizing all "factual" data, for bing's new top-of-the-page briefing feature.
As for sci-fi optimism, I don't know, I guess I just never read anything like that before; When I was in school, some 2 decades ago now, I was very into sci-fi and subscribed to, among others, a few magazines that published sci-fi novellas. I can summarize a few that had left an impress on me (I don't remember the titles nor the authors):
Topic: cloning
Synopsis: a tragic subway crash happened a over one hundred people died, a governmental service used their database to "resurrect" those who had died and eligible for the service with their lastest uploaded memories. The protagonist began doubt his or her past and had an existential crisis.
Topic: teleportation.
Synopsis: a man was berated by all around him for driving a car instead of using the teleportation services, and one day decided to try it out. He ended up finding out that the "teleportation" only copies his memory to a new body in the destination, and everyone he knew has died many, many times. When his clone gets home from work and greeted his wife, he recalled the experience very pleasant and told her he'd love to try it again.
Topic: dinosaurs
Synopsis: earth was invaded by a vast fleet of aliens, who turned out to be intelligent dinosaurs who left earth many millions of years ago. They had conquered many planets and domesticated their population as foodstock. The humans fought but lost, when the lead scientist emerged from nuclear fallout, more than a decade had passed. He discovered that his grandson had accepted the rule of the dinosaurs and despise his resistance against them. He was told all human would be raised in worry-free environments, well-fed, and kept in pristine condition, so they may be slaughtered at the age of 16/18 for their tender loins. The scientist rejected the dinosaurs' offer with a permenant and honored place in their society, and laid down on the wasteland to die, so he may be food for whatever species that replaces humanity.
Topic: AI
Synopsis: a man is infatuated with a woman, with whom he struck a friendship. He found out that she had a talent for music but is unappreciated and mocked by the public because AIs can create far better music them humans. The woman eventually left her dreams behind to enter an academy that amounts to life-long celibacy in that society, and the man was alone and disillusioned.
There are more of these, like the works of Philip K. Dick, which are all very skeptical about the impact of technology on the human condition, some questioned while science can improve our lives, can it nourish something beyond the physical; others, like I have No Mouth And I Must Scream, straight up questions if human is truly the master of science.
In that regard, many sci-fi works today are like that -- more cynical, more dystopian. Black Mirror, even M3GEN, had all attempted to examine the contradictions between the human experience and technology, not how it may be improved by the latter. From my reading, Mercerism in Gibson's Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep is primarily a means for him to vent his belief that humanity inherently require spirtuality to exist, even if the source of said spirituality is fake. I think, at the end of the novel, when the novel version of Deckard found a tortoise in the nuclear wastes and brought it home, his wife casually showed him that this miracle is actually just another synthetic (robot) pet, implication being it's thrown away by some other human, Deckard simply accepted it, and treated it as a real pet -- this is Gibson's way of saying "mind over matter", that what's real is in the mind and mind alone, and thus Mercerism has value by faith alone.
In this regard, sci-fi has not died, it merely transformed. It now reflects how the world at large view technology: anxiety, worries, fears.
