How do the megastates hold themselves together?
The megastates seem to all be walking corpses held together by inertia and duct tape. To name a few problems they all have:
- The control of the central AI authorities over their megastates seems to be limited, with no one entirely sure what's going on in other areas of their own country or the world at large
- Some local AIs have potentially already gone rogue with no one the wiser
- They all seem to be plagued by social unrest, especially Europa
- Most members of their human militaries are unwilling conscripts who can and do go AWOL if given the opportunity
Something that I haven't really seen mentioned, but in a world with super AIs and self-replicating cities, how can advanced technology continue to be manufactured by anyone? In a world with dwindling resources and where most, if not all pre-war industrial and technology centers were nuked; how can they still maintain the infrastructure to support a global war?
Large swaths of this world should have essentially gone "dark" a long time ago. No AIs, no war, maybe fragmented human authorities, but certainly no megastates. One day, these regions would just fail to respond to requests or commands from the central AIs. Maybe a resistance cell formed and convinced the local military units to defect. Maybe resources ran too thin and the glue holding everything together just came undone. The megastates couldn't reassert control over the regions, so they remained untouched. This would happen over and over, until the megastates themselves dissolved entirely. From then on, the world would revert to a sort of tech-warlord free-for-all as rogue AIs and regional human governments fought eachother for whatever scraps remained. I have a feeling the human governments would win out in the end, since a human being is a lot more adaptable and resilient than a state of the art computer.