The hinge is agency
The hopeful end touches the darkest one.
At +3, the best future looks less like a hero story and more like agriculture or industrialization: a disruptive, civilization-organizing shift measured not in protagonists but in statistics. More people living longer, beyond subsistence, with room for creativity and progress. Hollywood hasn’t found the script, because diffuse progress has no third act.
Uplift and subjugation can produce the same outcomes. The difference is whether people still get to decide.
As long as no single system holds the decision, people still get to make it. Keeping it that way is the hard part.
±4, the bridge across the top: a benevolent superintelligence that decides for us. In I, Robot and Minority Report the handover is voluntary; subjugation arrives without a war. Banks’ Culture is the kind reading of the same position. −3 is the scenario the researchers fear; ±4 may be what happens if things go exactly the way they want.