Achieving Utopia #

Problems #

Humanity has some big problems that need to be solved before we can safely say we have built a utopia.

Wasted Human Potential #

Most people spend their productive time doing work that does not materially move our society forward. As discussed later, people have the potential to create completely new ideas that radically and positively improve the lives of humanity as a whole. Any work that does not leverage this potential by definition wastes it, slowing our progress toward a utopia.

If our economy could somehow adequately value this potential, a lot of these problems might solve themselves (as the cost of labor would be prohibitive).

Maintenance Work #

This kind of work is currently necessary work that keeps society from backsliding. It is extremely important, but we should be working to automate it or find ways to avoid needing it to make progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WAe0f74Q0s

Service Work #

In my opinion, most service work is already unnecessary given the alternatives. It makes me sad to see so many people working as waiters/waitresses, cashiers, in call centers, etc. when there are (often better) systems that provide the same service without requiring people.

Not Seeing the Potential #

Rejecting the idea that all humans have creative potential is commonplace, and greatly harms the many people that are discriminated against when selection for creative roles occurs. TODO flesh this out.

Death #

The death of an individual is extremely tragic for at least these reasons:

All the knowledge and perspective the individual accumulated over their lifetime is lost permanently. Records can only partially remedy this.
The social web the person was a part of is violently damaged.
The people close to the dying person suffer greatly and are less able to create for a time (sometimes permanently).

To protect ourselves emotionally, we have built traditions and societal norms around accepting death and treating it an inevitable. Given our progress towards understanding aging (the cause of the vast majority of deaths), this is starting to become a problem.

War #

The terrible combination of the above two problems. Should be avoided at all costs.

Meritocratic Thinking #

Our society is structured so that more successful people are seen as more “deserving” that less successful ones. This can help with motivation to be better, but leads to a lot of injustice. In my opinion the emotions of all people are equally important to maintain in a positive place - meritocracy is often directly opposed to this goal.

Solutions #

In my opinion, we should be putting all people to work solving the above problems. In doing so, we should be able to reach utopia more quickly, and in so doing alleviate much suffering.

Humanity’s Superpower #

People have the uniquely powerful ability to come up with arbitrary explanations for how stuff works and then critically compare them against each other. This creative process has led to all major advances in human history, and is responsible for the accelerating rate of progress we all enjoy today. This progress is in turn responsible for alleviating a tremendous amount of suffering, and for creating a myriad of new ways for people to feel happy, satisfied, or otherwise good. It also has enabled people to automate many time and energy consuming tasks that have historically either directly caused suffering, or gotten in the way of further progress and/or doing things that feel good.

Creative thought as I’ve defined it is the most important tool we have to improve our state as a species (and to continue avoiding existential threats). Therefore, we should be primarily orienting our society to encourage creative thought and reduce the amount of time required to engage in non-creative work to keep things running. If we can successfully do this, then we will maximize our ability to solve all other hard problems facing our species, such as resource shortages, aging, climate change, and successfully governing ourselves. Additionally, arguably people will lead more fulfilling lives, as more of their time will be spent thinking about interesting things and sharing those thoughts as opposed to grinding away at Sisyphean maintenance tasks.

How can we do this?

Basic Need Satisfaction #

We need to ensure that every person on earth has their basic (food, shelter, medicine, mental health) needs met through automation. Worrying about basic needs is probably the biggest distraction away from creative thought that exists today.

Worrying about basic needs and/or accumulation of wealth for a rainy day can also lead to perverse incentives, where someone will work on something with money as their only object. Ideally, our economic system would make the most useful work the most lucrative (and this problem wouldn’t exist), but unfortunately this isn’t always the case. This leads to the all too common situation where people choose not to do the most helpful/important thing they could be because another option is more lucrative.

A simple solution to this would be to supply everyone with a nanofabricator that can produce food, tools, and everything else required to survive. Unfortunately, currently this solution is still science fiction, and we instead must rely on large shared systems that utilize economies of scale to provide needs at a minimum cost. Distributing resources in these systems is hard, and our growing wealth inequality today is evidence that we are doing a poor job.

So far, some kind of universal basic income seems to me to be the best short term solution to this problem. This would provide a “floor” that people wouldn’t be able to fall beneath. It would also allow markets to keep service production efficient, which wouldn’t necessarily be the case if the government simply provided the needs directly.

Tyranny of Other People #

All societies have some parts in which people are at the mercy of other people who control their employment status, political status, time, and/or access to resources. This often leads to disasterous results (see the atrocities committed by totalitarian regimes, or the depression caused by an abusive boss) and in general creates a lot of daily stress for the people that have to make sure their controllers are happy with them. Basic need satisfaction would go a long way towards eliminating this problem as well.

Freedom of Information and Education #

It’s hard to think creatively when you have no prior ideas to remix together into new ones. Making information and educational resources universally accessible and engaging is crucial to spark creativity. To do this we should continue encouraging the growth of the internet, and the growth of free and open publication of scientific discovery (and thoughts in general). People who write down novel ideas should have their needs covered by the automation described above, and therefore will not need to worry about how to monetize their work (which wastes everyone’s time and energy, and cuts people out of the creative process).

Specifically, I think we should severely limit copyright laws and allow people to copy and access all digital content freely, including source code, movies, books, school courses, “trade secrets”, etc. Direct compensation for this work would come from UBI and possibly grants if UBI doesn’t cover all expenses.

Freedom of Direction #

In the book “Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”, the authors argue that all hard problems suffer from deceptive paths to their solutions. Therefore, attempting to grade or judge performance by comparing a current state to a specific goal is misleading. This focus on objective thinking is particularly dangerous when applied to people - using objectives to encourage someone to do X or Y stifles that persons ability to exercise their most powerful tool: their creativity. Instead, that person will just act in accordance with the given objective, even if they have novel ideas they would otherwise try to pursue.

To approach utopia, it makes sense to try to constrain the behavior of individuals as little as possible so that the most novel ideas can be explored. One way this could be conceptualized is by encouraging flaneur-like behavior as described in “Antifragile” by NN Taleb. This has the additional side benefit of giving people space, time, and therefore ability to support the ideas of others that they discover and think are important. Related is Taleb’s “Convex Tinkering” concept, which supports the idea that randomly exploring many ideas is perhaps the most efficient path to discovery.

Organizations #

This concept can also apply to larger organizations of many people, like local governments. If those governments have a lot of freedom to experiment with different policies, this could lead to discovery of the best policies overall. In practice, this would looks like a confederation of autonomous states, like Switzerland and to a lesser extent the United States of America.

At the government level, this experimentation can be dangerous, so it is crucial that people are able to leave governments that they anticipate will harm them. This means that both some kind of universal bill of rights and resources that help people move are extremely important.

Influences #

This is heavily inspired by The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

Other reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/