Comment by sosomoxie
19 days ago
Dystopian cyberpunk was always part of the fantasy. Yes, scale has enabled terrible things.
There are more alternatives than ever though. People are still making C64 games today, cheap chips are everywhere. Documentation is abundant... When you layer in AI, it takes away labor costs, meaning that you don't need to make economically viable things, you can make fun things.
I have at least a dozen projects going now that I would have never had time or energy for. Any itch, no matter how geeky and idiosyncratic, is getting scratched by AI.
They're possible, but they're not exactly relevant, and you couldn't do something like that on newer hardware. It's like playing a guitar from a museum because the world just forgot how to make guitars. Pretty dystopian.