snowyowl wrote:
I'll cut to the chase and suggest that the robots need to find out what it is they need to keep about humanity, and what is simply distraction or obstacle that should be removed. In short, they need to find the meaning of life. And then build a computer that fulfils that meaning.
This is a big part of why I didn't suggest some kind of digitizing of human minds or whatever. Honestly, I think my fantastic afterlife version is better, because it forces humans to live and grow in a world that they can't control first, and then take those experiences and create their 'paradise'.
I suppose, if we could actively digitize everything that makes a human (hormones, adrenaline, all those responses), then a similar idea could exist wherein humans are expected to live a certain amount of time and then sent to this supercomputer (if they choose) to live out their ever-changing 'MMO'/video game lives.
RyukaTana wrote:This is a big part of why I didn't suggest some kind of digitizing of human minds or whatever. Honestly, I think my fantastic afterlife version is better, because it forces humans to live and grow in a world that they can't control first, and then take those experiences and create their 'paradise'.
Yeah, I think there's a certain sort of poetry to saying that a utopia might only be achievable by forcing people to live through whatever awfulness life has to throw at them. Of course, that doesn't really go with the heaven (which presumably has a divine arbiter keeping the utopia in place) idea, but it's something to that effect.
As a heaven, it works well. And it's an idea that I've seen in other fiction - by placing artificial restrictions on people, you let them develop the qualities they need to overcome those restrictions. For example: By withholding knowledge from students, you teach them to do their own research, which (in the setting of the link above) is more valuable than the knowledge would have been.
Now, this is an interesting exercise! Let me take a crack at it.
1) When and where is your Utopia set?
Our own universe, say...1000 years in the future or so. Maybe two or three thousand, but on that general order of magnitude.
2) What major events in the past helped shape this world?
Environmental crises forced countries to share resources and cooperate; a new educational revolution fueled by widespread Internet access led to a decided leftwards shift in human politics. Religious/cultural-fueld violence flared up for several hundred years, but as education took its toll and the most violent groups weeded themselves out, the world grew gradually more peaceful.
3) What major technological advances have changed human capabilities?
Biological near-immortality is the big one. Improvements in gene therapy and organ regrowth for transplant have cured wide swathes of diseases and disorders, and the advent of constant biological screenings have virtually eliminated cancers - any precancerous developments are quickly detected and removed before they ever become a threat. Just step in the shower in the morning, and it can detect any changes to your bio profile and cross-check for problems. Nearly all tech is interconnected and, to a degree, open-source - you can, if you want, reprogram just about anything. AR has become a fundamental facet of day-to-day life, with some degree of augmentation more common than not in taking advantage of it - cyber-eyes and implanted audio links powered by blood sugars are more common than cell phones are today.
Solar satellites spread in a soft-Dyson ring around the Sun have nearly eliminated the limits on human energy consumption, at least for the near future. There are habitats spread across the Solar System, and some cold-sleep or virtual-mind missions headed for other nearby stars - maybe even a few close to arrival.
4) What major problems have been solved, and how?
Death, by anything but violent accident - and in nearly all cases, even so. Cancer is a thing of the past, as are most communicable diseases. Even a catastrophic injury can be survived by putting the victim on ice, then regrowing organs to replace damaged ones once they're thawed. Moreover, the advances in tech and wireless connections have allowed for nonstandard body configurations to proliferate - want to walk around with photosynthetic skin, or a tail, or two radio-linked bodies? Save up some credits and you can set it up.
Want to change ethnicity, or gender? Takes a few days to heal afterward, but it's a simple and easy procedure. Want to link your brain with those of your closest friends or loved ones - really share yourself, everything about yourselves? Some conservatives might frown, but you can.
5) What aspects of human nature have been changed?
Body image has become a fluid thing - people self-associate by idea and interests rather than based on biological features. Religions are still a big thing, but the idea of 'standard' racism is seen as strange or pointless, though there's still some discontent and prejudice between groups. There always is - though a common mediation tactic is to link minds directly between members of those groups, to literally see through each others' eyes and understand the inner life of their fellows.
Contraception has become the rule rather than the exception, and large family groupings are common - a fairly popular idea is the "tree" structure, with groups of interrelated families living in linked homes so the cousins and grandkids and all can play and grow together.
6) What ideas and virtues are you attempting to popularize?
The value of diversity - of ideas, of bodies, of philosophies - is its resilience. With room for all ideas to grow and crossbreed, and resources for people to live and love and experiment, war can be eliminated - no need to fight seriously when resources are plentiful and nearly all barriers are fluid.
Neither a creeper nor a jackass be; if you manage these two things, everything else should work itself out.
The principal problem, from my perspective, seems less about setting up a good system (many ideas on those lines have already been presented here), but on making it stable over multiple generations. Internal and external conditions are never static, and it's self-evidently necessary that there be some sort of decision-making body tasked with adapting things appropriately to the changing context, but equally self-evident that any such "government" might be corrupted and manipulated to serve selfish ends. So the question is, how do you ensure that your society is "robust" against corruption in high places?
Personally, I think that while harsh anti-corruption measures sound good, you're simply pushing affairs back a step. If there's corruption among the enforcers, they could prejudicely enforce the rules to remove those they dislike and keep those they like, forming a sort of power-behind-the-thrown. "Who watches the watchers", and all that. You could have them subject to scrutiny as well, but then it's turtles all the way down.
It's far better, I think, to remove much of the motive and practicality of becoming corrupt in the first place. Conflicts of interest should be rooted out where found, of course, but it's even better to try and make sure they never arise in the first place. Towards that end, I would have government officials entirely sequestered from society by the end of their term. I imagine an island resort populated by former government officials and possibly their immediate families. There they could lounge, write memoirs (to be published posthumously), keep up with all the latest media and sports, etc - but relinquish all private property and the potential for any future personal earnings.
Obviously this would be unattractive to many current politicians. Personal ambition would almost entirely cease to be a motive for entering high-level politics. There'd still be some seeking to eek out some advantage there so they have more to leave for their kids, but the very shift in focus from personal ambition to familial ambition would encourage forethought about future generations and how policy changes now might affect them. It would take the short-term blinders off, and promote better long-term planning. And, heck, it would make plain old benevolence a much more reasonable motivator for entering that realm. The thought that you're doing good for your country would make giving up your mainland life more worthwhile.
Of course, mere well-meaning benevolence does not imply competence. There are well-meaning Liberals and well-meaning Conservatives, and both may disagree harshly on proposed actions even if their motives are pure. Ideally, I'd like to see candidates for high office being required to take competency tests in relevant areas (perhaps drawn randomly from actual exams given to such students at any random major university the year before), with their results made public well before any election. There might be implementation issues there, but at very least any such test should be opened to public scrutiny, so that any potential biases there could be documented, discussed, and accounted for in making informed decisions on how to interpret the results - which is the reason to make the results public, rather than having some sort of cut-off mandatory score. In any case, the simple fact that their knowledge and insight on such subjects are to be measured should encourage prospective politicians to become solidly competent in those areas, and while even professors often disagree, I would rest more easily knowing that high officials have an educated and informed basis for their decisions.
These steps are only part of the picture, but are practical and achievable in any sort of democratic utopia, and should help significantly in ensuring that future generations of leaders guide the country in profitable directions.
Oh my god guys how can it be so hard to create an utopia. I've been trying for a week already but every time the result fades into global conquer or singularities or the end of life, be it technological, biological or anything else. What am i doing wrong? If necessary, here's the script for my latest attempt
"I wanted to write this for a long time, but i find it too hard to solve all problems and not gain more evil than good in the meanwhile, so i'm starting with a somewhat childish utopia to warm up for the real challenge.
1) When and where is your Utopia set?
Earth, 2200 (as in 186 years from now)
2) What major events in the past helped shape this world?
Three major events: The Revolution. The Fall and The Pump.
The Revolution was widely acknowledged as "75% completition towards singularity" and it meant the uprising of virtual technologies for economic, bellic and cultural means. The fact that leaders of big countries suddenly relied in a machine not yet "pushed to the limit", combined with each country's desire to outdo its peers, created a technological race not unlike previous arms races, but with scientists as mercenaries this time.
The Fall was an averted singularity situation foreseen through the merging of the machines tasked with waging war and the machines tasked with keeping economies stable, eventually solved by shutting down large-scale warfare machines altogether through fear of giving an emerging intelligence the means to erradicate the previous one.
This concensus was reached through a worldwide summit of the brightest minds unrelated to governments and the technological leaders of different countries.
The Pump was the result of several decades of preparation (mind you, the previous events happened in a lapse of a century) for an stable singularity event where the few technological leaders of several countries (that is, the 4 or 5 guys who managed more than one country's technology at a time) created a conglomerate with enough strenght to, in a lapse of two decades, gather 90% of the world's technologies in the hands of few people. Their plan was to reach a global singularity before standalone technologies were able to engineer larger-than-human intelligence and engineer their own in a beneficious way to mankind.
The result was a machine more intelligent than mankind with nearly every resource at it's disposition who still shut itself down after giving humanity the keys to create a more "perfect" civilization to thrive, and also a civilization where the machine itself could become part of the world from the very beginning.
Through these century-and-a-half, not much has been done for the environment, eventually making the situation seem bleak enough to merit a world-wide escape, which the artificial intelligence orchestrated in his short life. Now, at 2200, the question is... will the leaders of the world, having already created a technological barrier between them and low or mid-class citizens, allow everybody to come with them? Or will they leave the rest of the human race to wither while only the best and greatest flee from doom?"
Seriously, this is not an utopia AT ALL and it's frustrating.
Well, I can tell you the biggest problem you're having. Most successful utopia scenarios are reliant on some sort of extremely major event that isn't caused by human action but affects nearly the entirety of humanity, forcing nearly everyone to work together to face and confront it. There are other scenario types that result in a single unified planetary government, but that tends to be the one that is least prone to it being unstable.
And before you try quoting Star Trek at me don't forget that in the Star Trek setting World War III nearly wiped out humanity, and it was a couple of decades of mob rule until the inventor of the warp drive built his initial warp capable ship and did a test flight, without any type of government support, getting the attention of the Vulcans who'd be observing Terra for a couple of centuries waiting to see if they'd wipe themselves out or develop a working warp drive. It was the need of a functional government to handle the major interactions with the Vulcans that resulted in the formation of a fully functional government again, and ultimately causing everything to settle down peacefully (well, after the problems with those who didn't want alien involvement were resolved).
Simply put, most utopia scenarios have some type of major event that nearly wipes out humanity, and it's the survivors who build the utopia, usually in reaction to what caused the apocalyptic scenario but sometimes in reaction to some new outside influence. Either way you need some type of event that forces the majority of humanity to work together or perish. The only two settings I can think of that didn't heavily rely on that are Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series (all novels), although there wasn't a true utopia in it in the end, and Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation (and its sequel, both are GBA remakes of Super Robot Taisen I & II for the SNES), which does at least have a 'unified' world at the end. The reason I wouldn't call either one a necessarily true utopia is that in both most of the various nations are still around, and in the first example there are still wars going on, they're just a lot fewer and a lot shorter thanks to a 'big brother' nation who steps in and resolves all of the conflicts before things get really nasty. The second example does end with the majority of nations actually working together, but there still isn't a true 'World Council' or 'World Government', but thanks to an outside threat they do stop fighting with each other.
