We’ve already been there for a few years now. We’re getting robots these days, even; with guns!
Yeah, we’ve got ammo vending machines in grocery stores, I’m just waiting for the disposable single-use SMGs in vending machines.
The recent, developing post-Web 2.0 era of the Internet is what I’ve been thinking about lately. The old social media giants are falling, and big corporations are scrambling to establish the Next Big Thing to attract all the displaced users. Combine that with growing nationalism in cyberspace (e.g,. banning TikTok solely based on xenophobia) and problems with foreign-borne propaganda, and I could absolutely see us being a major incident or two away from a splintered, de-globalized set of intranets.
Not sure about the rogue AI-patrolled frontier in between, though.
