The year is 2042. You log in to work in the morning. Your various Zoom vtuber clones have attended five simultaneous daily stand-up meetings. You can't really tell if the notes they took mean anything, but probably not - no human has been to any of these meetings in years. Probably safe to disregard them.
You work for a publishing house, so you received fifteen thousand scripts for novels overnight. Your Outlook assistant claims all of them were AI-generated, so you delete them unread. No real way to know.
You order food from a delivery service. Doesn't really matter what or where, the pictures and descriptions are all AI-generated and the food is drop-shipped from a ghost kitchen somewhere. Half of them claim to be McDonalds, but what you get is a sticky pizza bagel.
Outside, the Nasdaq reaches an all-time height.
@kaye Give it another thousand years.
Aliens land on this planet and find that all humans are extinct and have been for a few hundred years, but this economy is still running and the NASDAQ continues to climb as the bots trade with each other.
Mass transit continues to travel through the empty cities carrying parts to repair machinery.
AI continues to post ads on the Internet.
The aliens decide to make the Earth a museum, where their students can visit to see how not to run a planet.
@jenzi @kaye Aliens receive the stock quotes, along with what are apparently videos of our planet, from our satellite transmissions and conclude the Earth is a fantastically wealthy place they cannot wait to visit.
When the first diplomatic mission arrives, they find an entirely dead planet. The stock quotes were from AIs. The videos were advertisements for video games also written by AIs.
@black_flag @kaye If you get to the point of interstellar travel (which I assumed about the aliens) then yes you will have a global government.
Otherwise, one kamikaze starship destroys your planet. Relativistic projectiles are nasty and there is no defense against them. There's a book called The Killing Star about this (Earth gets it!)
@mike805 @kaye I already liked the first one, but the second one completes it perfectly.
Could be a nice dystopian short story, with glimpses in various time periods. Short flashes like these two, with ever further steps. A scene in five years, in ten, in twenty, in fifty and so on, with the one in thousand years as the conclusion...