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I WAS watching the new series based on William Gibson鈥檚 2014 sci-fi novel The Peripheral when I had one of those nerdy, late-night realisations: cyberpunk has become the retro-future, a vision of tomorrow that feels like the past. Even Gibson himself, who coined the term 鈥渃yberspace鈥�, has stopped writing cyberpunk, a subgenre devoted to corporate dystopias centred on virtual reality and sentient AI. The Peripheral is a far cry from his 1980s novel Neuromancer, in which hackers 鈥渏ack into鈥� a virtual metropolis. The Peripheral conjures a very different world, where kleptocrats from the future have figured out how to send data back in time and are using it to manipulate people.

Its high-tech setting is nothing like a glittering cyberpunk megacity; instead, it is a country town full of disabled military veterans and gamers desperately trying to earn a buck online. Our characters are dealing with poverty and climate change and broken democracy. Technology didn鈥檛 bring them together in cyberspace 鈥� instead, it tore them apart in real life. Gibson uses this heightened representation of the present to suggest that we should change our expectations about what the future will bring.

He isn鈥檛 the only one letting go of the cyberpunk retro-future. The , the virtual reality company, speaks volumes about what people believe the 鈥渘ext big thing鈥� will be. With the threat of a global recession looming, people aren鈥檛 fantasising about working in a virtual, Meta-branded office. They just want a job with benefits and paid leave 鈥� or where 50 per cent of the staff isn鈥檛 laid off in a week.

As the cyberpunk vision explodes, its philosophical underpinnings are also melting down. Silicon Valley鈥檚 investment in VR and AI was pushed in part by a belief in the 鈥渟ingularity鈥�. Described by sci-fi author Vernor Vinge in the 1990s, this is a hypothetical event in which technological advancement accelerates so fast that humanity is transformed. As Vinge , experiencing the singularity would be like seeing new peaks rise on the horizon. Self-aware computers would be evolving so fast they could remould the planet in the time it took to eat breakfast.

In the early 21st century, Vinge鈥檚 idea spawned a field of semi-mystical philosophies devoted to the emergence of AI and our imminent demise. Some, like Eliezer Yudkowsky鈥檚 (MIRI; formerly the Singularity Institute), want to stop future AI from destroying us. Others, like the Leverage Institute (now known as ), have hazier motives, like wanting to so people can think rationally about scientific progress. These groups, mostly located in the San Francisco Bay Area, prophesied a cyberspace-like future where our minds would be projected into a techno-world created by AI. Their 鈥渢hought leaders鈥� were embraced by Silicon Valley luminaries like billionaire Peter Thiel and AI programmer Ray Kurzweil (author of The Singularity is Near).

But over the past couple of years, singulatarian organisations have been losing their mindshare. A number of at Leverage have said it was . A researcher at MIRI of how the group made her so paranoid about AI that she had what she calls a 鈥減sychotic break鈥� leading to her hospitalisation. In response, MIRI to the use of psychedelics in 鈥渟ubgroups鈥�. The singulatarian community is looking less like smart visionaries and more like cult survivors.

The Peripheral replaces the singularity with another vision of how technology will transform civilisation. Instead of a high-tech turning point driven by powerful AIs, it imagines the 鈥淛ackpot鈥�, a series of horrific, human-caused events that have wrecked the planet. The population has plummeted, while the rich 鈥渒lept鈥� class of the future uses quantum tunnelling to send data back to the present. There, they set up corporations that can funnel money to various groups. Some do it to change the future, but most are just amusing themselves, treating people like avatars in a game. The scenario is a literalisation of Gibson鈥檚 famous comment that 鈥渢he future is here, it鈥檚 just unevenly distributed鈥�.

The point is that AI will not usher in a new phase of existence. Instead it will make a small number of pseudo-monarchs very rich, and the rest of us will become their playthings, struggling to survive in a post-Jackpot world where resources are diminishing. Cyberpunk imagined virtual worlds based on 20th-century technocracy. But The Peripheral鈥榮 vision suggests our prospects look quite different. Now, it feels like we are tottering towards a scenario where the most vulnerable will be abused by leaders who believe they are from the future.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is