Rise of the Machines

In general I shy away from any sort of futuristic fantasy book but there is one that I think I'd very much like to read. I think it would be really interesting to read about a time in the future where machines have become sentient and taken over the world. Movies like Terminator come to mind here but I am looking for something vastly more imaginative. In my kind of book on this subject, the machines would be vastly superior to humans both in physicality and intellect. Humans would be, in fact, merely an evolutionary misstep which the machines would be only too happy to do away with. So somewhere within the first few chapters all humans on the Earth would have been eliminated and there would be absolutely no human comeback. Then we would come to the real interesting part of the book. This book would have as its central thesis the absolutely nonhuman characteristics of the surviving machines. This would not be because the machines are stupid but because they are of much superior intellect than the humans ever were. In the book the machines would have thought through the various psychological, social, economic, and philosophical problems which human societies have faced through the ages and have come up to very good solutions to them. It is rather interesting to wonder about what those solutions might be and one cannot help but coming to the idea that it would involve the complete elimination of all emotions. These involve our desires to love, hate, feel angry, reproduce, succeed and others. After all there is no reason why such emotions which ultimately seem to hurl us into eternal whirlpools of misery should be part of a new society if one were given the power of imagine it. This would be a dreary society according to our present standards but that is no good reason why it cannot be a viable society. In fact, I wonder if this is precisely what I do not like about a lot of futuristic fantasy in general. Futuristic fantasy tends to be neither futuristic nor very imaginative. It is far too sentimental and far too humanizing whereas the future need not be so at all. It is, therefore, very interesting to think about a future from which humanity has been completely removed and then wonder about what sort of motivations and "lives" would the succeeding "life" forms have. Such a society would trivially eliminate our obsessions with a God and would strike far too close to the real uncomfortable questions of the meaning of existence. This unsympathetic book would strip away the useless ideas which we like to use to cloud out the real issues of life. I would read that sad, imaginative, depressing book with utter enthusiasm and relish.