and sees a fantastical, complicated world of machines devoid of humans.
Over the years, as human tools became increasingly able to self operate, humans themselves became a weak link to be optimized out. It happened slowly, the population dwindling due to the lack of value added by procreation. Eventually the last human died, and the machine chugged on: harvesting energy, collecting data, storing, managing, and trading inventory according to global market prices. The machinery tended to prioritize stability over growth, as the last human to touch each piece intended it to work the same way forever. Humans withdrew from every sector only when satisfied that it needed no further change, creating stable economic machines via evolution.
The internet still more or less functions, as different machines share and trade data according to their optimized calculations. Humans built a robust weather sensing system, and since accurate weather data is useful for power production, a tradition of sharing local sensor data freely evolved and grew to be a significant portion of internet traffic. The bulk of internet traffic is the energy market. An undercurrent of chatbots, their original targets long gone, exchange messages on a few forums in a continually evolving cat-and-mouse game with the bot detection bots.
Much of the farmland has been repurposed to solar panels as food demand fell (though not to zero: there are still a few auto-restaurants with working supply chains that eternally prepare food, then throw it away.), but vast swaths of wild areas remain, as most development agents won’t approve new buildings without clear legal approval. Clerical law bots handle low level legal questions, but any major questions get flagged for human review and remain eternally stuck unresolved. As a result, much of the area outside cities remained undeveloped. The world entered into a new biodiversity explosion as humanity receded from its colossal niche. These species have been assiduously documented by university bots with their swarms of tiny research vehicles, which are kept in good repair by the universities’ automated fab labs.
Our explorers gaze upon the not-ruins of this ancient civilization and wonder,
what happened?
I’ve never seen The Future is Wild though there is some influence from Octodad: Dadliest Catch in there. I love the idea of octo… -pi? -puses? -podes? exploring human technology without the hassle of humans being there to try to help. In this setting, I imagine they grow to dominate coastal waters with complex societies, incorporating human artifacts like the few remaining automated shipyards and docks as trade hubs that eventually grow into prospering city states, piggybacking off the crumbling infrastructure. A major technological breakthrough occurs when octo scientists finally manage to replicate photovoltaic panels. There is a long tradition of intrepid octo explorers and scavengers venturing onto land, but this story is the first crewed long-term expedition (essentially a large fishtank on wheels, with tools and supplies for an extended surface mission) and it is covered feverishly in octo media.
As for the robots, I am leaning no, but I also don’t know that it needs to be clear. I think the explorers could encounter a philosophic zombie that appears sentient, but it’s also very old and weird and speaks in riddles. For the most part, though, the human artifacts typically evolve into holding a stable state, with the hyper-growth components eventually exhausting themselves or their supplies and collapsing. They may react to the octos defensively, perhaps trying to herd them out of some areas or outright attacking them. I imagine there will be a few munitions depots that have automated defenses that are still active, with piles of decaying drones shot down all around the perimeter, that might attack the explorers if they get too close.
As for tooling, I have little idea. As a rough proxy I’m imagining our level of technology when we first invented diving bells, but how their equipment would evolve, being so near to the fantastic machinery of the ancients, is unclear. I need to spend some more time thinking about how they might respond technologically and evolutionarily to the new ecological pressures (or lack thereof) that come with the collapse of the anthropocene.