Big Questions Part 1
Life on Earth had been generally positive since the Transition: war, famine, aging and disease were things of the long past. A complex system of technological restrictions imposed by a sentient global computer network, created at the time of the Transition, prevented the various risks earlier futurologists had foreseen as potentially accompanying the advent of advanced nano-bio-info-cogno capabilities. Rogue wireheading was avoided via restrictions on mind-altering technologies, those that were available being carefully controlled by The Guardian. Most humans happily occupied themselves via social and sensory pleasures, but a significant subset also enjoyed more intellectual pursuits: mathematics, science, literature, art. A small minority, on the other hand, chafed at the restrictions placed on them and, for various reasons, wished that the advanced technologies that had enabled the Transition had been used for purposes more ambitious than the creation of a carefully-controlled human utopia. Post-Transition society tolerated this level of malcontentment due to the general value it placed on freedom of thought; and also because the overall socio-technological system in place was so powerful and robust as to render the odds of this malcontentment having any practical impact almost vanishingly small….
