Alternative Fun Facts: Compromises

Technology will soon be able to make all our wishes come true, and it’s going to be a catastrophe. This story takes place shortly after that catastrophe, and here’s how it goes:

It was a simple modification: instead of trying to make human beings’ greatest dreams come true, from now on the AI overlord would settle for each person’s second-greatest. It worked like a charm. The second-most-powerful longing was found to be almost always less megalomaniac and damaging than the first, and the sum total of this slightly more compromising world was far more stable and prosperous than it had been under the old system.