Tech and utopia

Watched this clip about Picasso from an unnamed documentary, then read this piece about Iain M. Banks' politics. The former talks about how rapid advances in technology affected art in the early Twentieth Century -- science was everything, photography pushed artists out of realism and into abstraction -- and the latter talks about the idea that technology and automation will bring about Paradise, making the power of computing etc available to all, not just the ruling class. My brain decided these were connected and so here I am making this posting.

ETA: "He likened writing literary fiction to playing a piano, and writing SF to playing a vast church organ."