Restraint And Unrestraint

Let us revisit "restraint." (See Restrained Fantastic Fiction.)

Usually we want a fantasy or sf author's imagination to be unrestrained. His or her imagination should be disciplined to the extent that it conjures up only logical implications of a fictional premise but also unrestrained to the extent that it pursues those implications to their ultimate conclusions. A novel might begin with a single present day technological innovation and end in a technologically transformed future society.

Poul Anderson went all the way with:

increased intelligence in Brain Wave;
futureward time travel in "Flight to Forever";
immortality in The Boat Of A Million Years;
AI in Genesis.

However, sometimes restraint is the logical conclusion:

in Anderson's Psychotechnic History, immortality is a dead end because organisms can be kept alive indefinitely only by shielding them from all radiation deep underground;

in the same future history, the first robot is unemployed because all other machines can be automated, e.g., a self-driving car does not need a robot driver, a fully automatic factory needs no robot workers etc.

Thus, although, from the premise of automobiles, the real world has reached the conclusion of a society where automobiles are everywhere, the premise of robots need not entail a society where robots are everywhere. Isaac Asimov did both. In I, Robot, the Frankenstein Complex entails first that every robot is programmed with "Laws" against either harming or disobeying human beings and, secondly, that robots are used only off Earth in any case whereas, later in his future history, there is an extrasolar planet where even the poorest human being must have one robot servant provided by the otherwise individualistic community.