Plausible way to curse humanity to a pre-industrial society?
It's common in sci-fi for large medieval-esque populations of humans living in the ruins of a former technologically advanced civilisation. My story is one of these, with a large population of humans locked in a pre-industrial society after an A.I. rebellion but I feel I need a reason that these humans haven't re-formed a technological civilisation after a long period of time so the A.I. have 'cursed' mankind and their descendants preventing them from ever becoming an industrial society again. The problem is I have no good idea how on this curse would work, obviously humans can't just be genetically engineered to "not think about that sort of stuff." So how should my A.I. prevent mankind from ever regaining technology?
Answers should preferably stick to known science though can used highly advanced technology.
EDIT: I now think I have a solution, specifically a combination of the self-replicating nanites route only my nanities will be inside the human brain, curbing excessive curiosity & technological thought and the "Robots destroyer all advanced technology with lasers" route for when that fails. This also gives me an excuse to turn what's left of the internet into a hallucinogenic dreamscape accessible by the nanites in human brains, which has a lot of story potential. Thank you for all your answers! Even if I didn't end up using them rest assured they were helpful.
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1 answer
Instill a terror of fire. Either all fire or anything more than a cookfire (if some fire is necessary due to climate, wild animals, etc). If it's all fire, food is either eaten raw or lightly cooked in the sun (including dehydration for food storage).
The idea is to stop the society from forging metal. It could still use some metal by pounding it (in ancient and even more recent times, some metals could be found in chunks, plus there would be salvage in your story). But without the ability to melt metal, create alloys, create metal tools, etc, it would keep your society from advancing technologically.
The terror would have to be pretty severe and not just basic fear. Otherwise a small percentage of the population would be the fire masters and could learn to forge. If done through technology, then perhaps instead of a terror of fire, it would be a limit on how hot any place can get on earth outside of a volcano.
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