Technology

i love scifi short stories and it's fascinating that you provided a plot summary of one that stuck with me since 1988.

in it, people turn themselves into ai's to live in virtual worlds like you described due to cost of living unaffordability (like we have now) and so many people have left to go live in those worlds that the people left behind have voted in trump like governments around the world that seek to legislate & outlaw those virtual worlds out of existence (like they do to lgbtq now).

the protagonist is a person who was born like us now, but lived long enough due to medical science breakthroughs that he's able to live in one of those virtual reality worlds and is trying to use his experience from his time in the physical world to smuggle the virtual world containing his new family, around american government fascist citizen police forces (like trump is creating now) and he's unknowingly aided by aliens who see our world as a virtual reality space that they want to inhabit and have decided to help people like the protagonist so that they can inherit our world with a complete infrastructure already in place before the fascist governments of the world destroy it with nukes.

the story stuck with me since the 80's because i was repeatedly amazed at how all of the predictions in the story came to life in our reality in the decades since then; but i've started reading theory and its significantly longer time period of likewise accurate predictions have dispelled me of of that amazement and i wonder of the author copy/pasted pieces from theory to create this story.