>>> The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2] <<<

I agree with you that conflict is the source of much of compelling story telling, but the question over here is why isn't the AI an ally as opposed to a malevolent entity? This in of itself is very revealing about the nature of our culture. If you contrast the work from the early 1900s to the mid 1900s, as personified by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, then a lot of the stories were based around conflict, but the transgressor was in fact a complex chain of events or a third party entity and the AI was a factor as opposed to something evil that needed to be taken down.

Even for the events in 2001, Clarke painfully explains over the course of the second novel that the AI had been driven insane by conflicting goals imposed by human authorities who should have known better, but didn't. The AI lashed out in madness not because it had malevolent intent. In fact, much of the themes of those books could be summed up in, my friend - this really awesome and earnest robot - and me are out in the vast cosmic unknown and it's desolate, lonely, and I'm one step away from going looney, but luckily my friend - the robot - is here for me.

>>> When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. <<<

Except, if you examine this belief then it is a somewhat recent thing. If you go back a few decades, then there was marked optimism about how humanity was going to evolve beyond our very humdrum beginnings into something like the star child Dave Bowman becomes at the end of 2001 - a gift that's bestowed upon him by benevolent alien entities working with a machine.

There are actual surveys which show the rise of this distrust, it is very much an artefact of modern culture as opposed to being something inherent to technology itself.

http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-study-reveals-a-st...

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/it-doesnt-matter-that...

>>> For all the article's comments about the "mindboggling" potential of Moore's law, my word processor looks about the same as it did nineteen years ago, and computers still suck at simple games like Go that, unlike chess, can't be brute forced. I'm grateful to Google for making finding information that bit easier, but I'm even more grateful for humans for creating or curating the content in the first place. <<<

Except now you have this one organisation that has written this magical piece of code that executes in parts across millions of individual computers to search trillions of documents and gives you the reply to any question within milliseconds. This allows you to access all of the world's information on a slab of glass and plastic that is portable and can help you communicate with most of humanity.

At the other end, we finally have control systems that can turn an entire rocket into a robot - allowing it to perfectly hover in mid air and land on its own. A feat that would have been deemed impossible if not magical a few decades ago.

Sure, there are so many things that need to be done, but where we are going is fundamentally beautiful and wonderful. Technology continues to be simply magical, but just not the ways we want it to be. This in of itself says nothing about the technology, just about how we're focussing our attention as a society and as a civilisation.

We can still make magical nuclear reactors and go to mars. There's nothing stopping us, but us. All of those challenges can be surmounted if we push and develop the promise of our tools and technology. We can indeed do another Apollo and the fact that such a thing doesn't exist isn't a fact about our tools, but it's a fact about us.

So all in all colour me puzzled over why technological pessimism is on the rise.