I think the future will be a large group of Amish like who will be pacifists and shun technology and a group who live in the citadel with AI creating everything in their consciousness. Deeply unhappy but addicted to the rat race.
Neal Stephenson's Fall [1] is by far not his best book, however, the first part has a chilling depiction of societal divide into Ameristan and, for lack of a better word, the blue states that feels entirely plausible.
I just finished the audiobook version of this on a long drive through the heart of Ameristan. Very plausible. Remember Moab!
It's a shame, the Ameristan near-future dystopia parts of Fall were quite good, but the virtual world plot became increasingly silly. My mood would pick up whenever I landed on a chapter that got back to the "real world" plot.
I told my wife that we should consider being farmers in the future. She said we'd starve to death. Can't figure out if I agree with her.
Shunning technology on its own won't lead to pacifism. Otherwise, what you described is pretty much a typical fantasy setting.
I think even the little that we have seen from chatgpt is a sign that generated content will always be heartless, poor quality but people will be ok with it and adopt it. So I think it would make sense that eventually this will break the market into two.
Or… you view it as just another perspective just like that from a human coworker where most ideas are throwaway but you take what you like and leave the rest. Understandably we all want AI to be perfect but what we have today is much more human.
Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap") is well known, and a lot of money has been made and time spend consuming a significant chunk of that 90%. AI only needs to be better than 90% of that 90% to succeed.
When anabaptism was new, there were also many non-pacifist sects, but those eventually all failed to survive the conflicts they got into the with the wider non-anabaptist world.
I'm slowly coming around to this conclusion as well.