Street Life Scene in a Dystopian Sci-Fi Megacity № 3

This one’s titled “Patrol”. You’re never far from the organs of state coercion when you live in a police state; doubly so when they can leverage autonomous patrol vehicles like this AI-controlled police car.

A word in the nature of AI in the dystopia: a lack of investment in basic research many years prior to the present day has reduced the speed of technological progress in the development of the cutting edge of computation (and many other fields).

Because they never leveraged truly ubiquitous, microchip-scale, room temperature quantum computing, general purpose AI remained out of reach… until it was realized that neural nets could be built from the extracted tissues of lobotomized prisoners, dissidents and degenerates alIke. This organic neuron-on-silicon hack yields immensely useful artificial general intelligence, and since the neurons have a useful life of a month or so, there’s a constant need for more lobotomies; ethnic minorities in the provinces serve the purpose nicely.