Wouldn’t a true utopia include something like:
Every single human spending their entire lives high on a futuristic opiate-like drug
Special AI working day and night to optimize the human brain to sustain this level of opiates for hundreds of years without losing the sense of please or dying
Another AI working to convert all matter in the universe into human brains and opiates (without destroying other brains of course)
Its not very fun to read or discuss but isn’t this the true endgame for humanity? Why settle for a “good life” when everyone could have a “perfect life”?
The movie Yesterday sort of tackled this in an interesting way. Imagine a parallel universe where everything is the same but the Beatles never came together. Would someone releasing their exact music in 2021 still become highly successful and considered a musical icon? In the movie the answer is yes. In real life I imagine the answer would be no—the same exact music would no longer sound innovative and would thus not become particularly successful. This New-Beatles band might reach the level of a Top-100 artist but they’d never see the same level of admiration as the Beatles did and still do.
So I believe we’re simply not judging more recent art works by the same standards, resulting in a huge bias towards older works. Beethoven is only noteworthy because his works are a cultural meme at this point—he was a great musician for his time, sure, but right now there’s probably tens of thousands of musicians who could make music of the same caliber straight on their laptops. Today’s Beethoven publishes his amazing tracks on SoundCloud and toils in obscurity.