Is the future channeling Charles Stross or Iain M Banks?

Reading about China's "AI+" policy makes me wonder what the very near future will bring. While the West grapples with culture wars and populism China is forging ahead into the future of energy and emerging AI fuelled knowledge. Are we approaching the future of Accelerando by Charles Stross, or the Culture as imagined by Iain M Banks?

• China Releases “AI Plus” Policy: A Brief Analysis

This morning I serendipitously also happened to listen to this excellent and well articulated News Agents interview with Jack Clark, Head of Policy at Anthropic (makers of Claude Code), in my opinion the most interesting of the AI developing companies today. That interview also made me feel like we are facing a fork in the road. SciFi parallels aside, will we see ever more concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, or will the risks be mitigated and the gains more evenly distributed?

• Are we sleepwalking into an AI 'economic bloodbath'?