For a realistic but largely utopic near-future setting, I recommend Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Much of the plot involves a weak and possibly immersion-breaking take on AGI, but in terms of forecasting a near-future world where most problems have become substantially more superficial and mild, the background events and supporting material is very good.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone reference the Culture series in connection with these posts yet. The series places a utopian post-scarcity and post-death society — the Culture, run by benevolent AIs that do a good job of handling human values — in conflict with societies that are not the Culture.
I’ve only read The Player of Games myself, and that book spends more time with the non-utopian than the utopian society, but it’s still a good book, and one that many people recommend as an entry point into the series.
I haven’t read The Culture series but/and I really enjoyed this meta piece about it: Why The Culture Wins: An appreciation of Iain M. Banks for a really excellent discussion of meaning-seeking within a post-scarcity utopia. An excerpt:
In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. … Such a postulate can be entertaining, to the extent that it involves a dramatic rejection of Marx’s view, that the development of the forces of production drives the relations of production (“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”). Put in more contemporary terms, Marx’s claim is that there are functional relations between technology and social structure, so that you can’t just combine them any old way. Marx was, in this regard, certainly right, hence the sociological naiveté that lies at the heart of Dune. Feudalism with energy weapons makes no sense – a feudal society could not produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would undermine feudal social relations.
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One interesting consequence of this process [of globalized cultural evolution] is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European – there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.
Comments for Utopia links will go here.
For a realistic but largely utopic near-future setting, I recommend Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Much of the plot involves a weak and possibly immersion-breaking take on AGI, but in terms of forecasting a near-future world where most problems have become substantially more superficial and mild, the background events and supporting material is very good.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone reference the Culture series in connection with these posts yet. The series places a utopian post-scarcity and post-death society — the Culture, run by benevolent AIs that do a good job of handling human values — in conflict with societies that are not the Culture.
I’ve only read The Player of Games myself, and that book spends more time with the non-utopian than the utopian society, but it’s still a good book, and one that many people recommend as an entry point into the series.
I haven’t read The Culture series but/and I really enjoyed this meta piece about it: Why The Culture Wins: An appreciation of Iain M. Banks for a really excellent discussion of meaning-seeking within a post-scarcity utopia. An excerpt:
The Fun Theory Sequence (which is on a similar topic) had some things to say about the Culture.
Sorry to come in late, but I do have a link for a near-utopia here:
https://orionsarm.com/ is essentially as utopian as it can be, barring the 3 powers of time travel, reality warping or thermodynamics breaking.