Space probes multiply wherever they find raw materials and will explore the whole galaxy in two or three million years. However, this chapter follows events on Earth. It begins in a green English countryside with hills, trees and a thousand year old church spire but no houses because the few dwellings are underground.
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (London, 1986) concludes with the realization that "'Mankind...was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand. Now the Machines understand them...'" (p. 205). The Machines are large positronic brains following the First Law of Robotics, preventing harm to humanity, and therefore preserving themselves because they alone coordinate all the data that enables them to prevent global economic dislocations. (In the sequel, set two hundred years later, they have phased themselves out because they judged that self-determination was the highest human good! See here.)
In Genesis, Chapter V, "'...the decisions that matter come from the machine intelligences - at the summit, from Terra Central...'" because the world is, and always was, "'...too complex, too precarious, for mere humans to understand and control.'" (p. 41) Laurinda Ashcroft is an interface with Terra Central which/who converses with Laurinda vocally and offers to upload her mind and memories so that Laurinda's human experience can inform Terra Central's artificial intelligence. Thus, Laurinda's upload will remain on Earth whereas Christian Brannock's went into space. The upload will subsist as part of the whole for millions of years or more and can be resurrected in emulation although this phrase is not explained as yet.
Terra Central thinks that the human race is mad because of the conflict between instinct and intellect. In Anderson's first sf novel, Brain Wave, a general increase in intelligence enables human beings to overcome this conflict. See here.
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