Hi!
I’m doing some research on utopias/protopias, and was wondering whether anyone has any more examples of concrete positive future scenarios.
So far I have these ones (same list with links here: https://www.existentialhope.com/posts-articles/dreaming-big-utopias):
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Max Tegmark—Life 3.0, Chapter 5: Aftermath: The Next 10,000 Years
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World-building Contest—Future of Life Institute. Contest on building positive future scenarios enabled by AI, including timelines, short stories and media pieces.
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Value Drift & Paretotropia | Robin Hanson & Mark Miller—Foresight Institute. On how, in the face of value diversity, it is desirable to strengthen civilization’s tendency to enable pareto-preferred interactions.
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Paretotopian Goal Alignment—Eric Drexler. On how radical economic growth enabled by technological progress may increasingly support pareto-preferred cooperation and goal alignment in the future.
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Posts on Raikoth, Archipelago & Atomic Communitarianism—Scott Alexander. A series of blog posts on a rationalist, AI-enabled utopia, and a post on a fictional society defined by a diversity of value-aligned communities that co-exist peacefully.
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The Adventure: A New Utopia Story—Stuart Armstrong. A longer blog post novella on a utopia where people would actually like to live.
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Protopia—Kevin Kelly. “The attenuation of war, the abolishment of slavery, the end of torture and the death penalty, universal suffrage, liberal democracy, civil rights and liberties, same-sex marriage and animal rights. These are all examples of protopian progress in the sense that they happened one small step at a time.”
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Future Imperfect—David Friedman. A realistic future scenario informed by economics, law, and history that is defined by things gradually improving.
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Post-Scarcity Civilizations & Cognitive Enhancement | Anders Sandberg—Foresight Institute. On a future step for civilization that is defined by technology-enabled post-scarcity.
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The Fun Sequence, especially Why Eutopia is Scary, Building Weirdtopia—Eliezer Yudkowsky. “This world was ridiculous, and it was going to wake up the neighbors.”
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Letter from Utopia—Nick Bostrom. “What is Tragedy in Utopia? There is tragedy in Mr. Snowman’s melting. Mass murders, we have found, are not required. What is Weakness in Utopia? Weakness is spending a day gazing into your beloved’s eyes. What is Imperfection in Utopia? Imperfection is the measure of our love for things as they are. What is Dignity in Utopia? Dignity is the affirming power of “No” said discriminately. What is Suffering in Utopia? Suffering is the salt trace left on the cheeks of those who were around before. What is Death in Utopia? Death is the darkness that enshrouds all life, and our guilt for not having created Utopia as soon as we could have.”
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Utopia Links, Visualizing Utopia—Holden Karnofsky. Selected links and visualizations on utopia.
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Aleph—Anders Sandberg. Poems, posts, and surrealist visualizations on beautiful futures.
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Utopia—Tyler Alterman. Pinterest board on utopias.
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Floating Worlds—Robert McCall. Oldie but goldie space opera art.
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Why Beautiful Things Make Us Happy—Kurzgesagt. Explainer video on the role of beauty in human lives.
Will MacAskill wrote one you can get to by scanning the QR code towards the back of WWOTF:
https://whatweowethefuture.com/afterwards/
This describes three utopias. It makes sense to have several since everyone has differing definitions of utopia.
The ‘Psychonauts’ sound like the Hedonistic Imperative version of utopia:
Yup! In this way it also has things in common with the mentioned “archipelago” utopia. Another example in this vein that I’ve heard good things about but haven’t read is Ada Palmer’s “Too Like the Lightning”.
Excellent, thank you!
Hedonistic Imperative—David Pearce. Eradicating suffering through biotechnology and paradise engineering.
Thaaank you!
Here’s a report on Positive AI Economic Futures published by the World Economic Forum and supported by the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI).
Thank you!