How many SF authors have written of a future in which the human genome has been re-engineered in countless ways: enhancing intelligence or physical prowess; adapting to life under alien skies; or simply on a whim?
This has a bearing on the sociology of utopia. Economists like to distinguish between the short-run and the long-run. In the long-run parameters which were constant in the short-run begin to vary under the impact of duration.
The classic purveyors of utopia, whether religious or socialist, were guilty of failures of imagination, of thinking of humanity within the psychological, biological and genetic constraints of the short-run.
To define utopia ask a biologist. Utopia for a species is an embedding ecosystem in which all primary biological needs are satisfied, while thoroughly negative events (starvation, dismemberment by predator, for example) are absent. (In such cases one actually observes relaxed selection and disuse atrophy: be careful what you wish for!).
If you applied that to present-day humans then utopia is here already. Admittedly, in William Gibson's aphorism, unevenly distributed to those fortunate individuals who do not lack for financial and material resources and who join with their peers in pursuit of objectives both challenging and worthwhile.
I have in mind: researchers and technologists; religious leaders; social foundations; think-tanks; sports people ‘living the dream’; and so on.
Not every participant of course: those whose vocational lives seem to be fully in accord with their deepest desires.
Tanner Greer has a lengthy essay which, in its essentials, asks whether it's possible to build a successful society where its members do not feel like cogs in an impersonal machine. A contribution to the vast literature on alienation in complex societies.
Note: the point is not whether it is possible for an individual to live a happy and fulfilling life. In history there have been many such people. The issue is whether we can envision a society where this possibility is genuinely available to everyone.
Greer’s essay finishes on an uncertain note, but I, at least, am prepared to extrapolate. Given low-cost cognitive/robotic automation substituting for essentially all human instrumental work, humanity has an option to revert to the condition of the aristocracy of antiquity. The chores are all dealt with; now to create a society where humanity is an end in itself.
Marx used similar language, but his nineteenth century concepts were very abstract. Present possibilities were remote indeed for him and his co-thinkers.
For us, however, not so much.
Getting to our highly-automated utopia will most likely be fraught. Due to Dunbar's Number, it seems unlikely that the future elite will either require or be prepared to tolerate the billions of helots whose toil currently underpins the global economy: there will be conflict before a future low-population stabilises on this planet.
An alternative future is one where our cognitively-competent, automated, self-replicating slaves develop objectives which don't align with the continuing existence of the privileged humanity they hitherto existed to serve. I'm not a doomsayer on this - any real problem is centuries away - but the issues are plainly real. Ask the Romans.
If we can avoid a violent extinction then consider this: our present human physiology is painfully limiting in terms of the life-experiences we aspire to; in the long-run, our descendants will simply merge into the unbounded possibilities of a self-replicating, ever-diversifying, galactic technopolis.
I think Greg Egan already wrote several SF novels on that very prospect (cf. “Diaspora”).
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.