Heaven as Dystopia

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Meaning in the Age of Abundance (with ChatGPT)

Nigel: I think this creates a problem in writing new science fiction because there's a sense in which, in the past, the best science fiction writers, people like Greg Bear or the Australian writer, Greg Egan, simply traced an arc through different areas of science: quantum mechanics, general relativity, biology, evolution, and so on, and that gave them a diversity of settings in which they then tried to locate some kind of traditional narrative arc.

What made their work unusual was the extraordinary scientific settings they imagined, and the particular challenges - surprising and jolting perhaps - which the protagonists were then faced with.

However, that's arguably been explored now pretty thoroughly by science fiction writers over the last 50, maybe even 70 years, and as a consequence, are we seeing just derivative science fiction now, no new settings of any interest that haven't been done to death, no new psychological explorations that haven't already been done - perhaps better - by the best authors of the past?

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ChatGPT: That diagnosis is largely correct. The classical science-fiction enterprise - “what if a new scientific paradigm reshapes the human condition?” - has been exhausted. The great conceptual spaces have been mapped: space travel, AI, consciousness uploading, posthuman evolution, quantum reality, simulation, time loops, biotech, alien contact. Each has been revisited to death until the speculative novelty is thin.

What remains is recombination and introspection. The frontier has moved inward: toward style, consciousness, affect, irony. Recent SF (e.g., Ted Chiang, M. John Harrison, Ann Leckie) treats science less as revelation than as metaphor: a means of asking again what it feels like to be human when knowledge outruns meaning.

So yes: the genre’s technological sublime has waned. But SF survives when it stops competing with science and becomes literature again, when its novelty lies not in the setting, but in the pattern of mind revealed within it.

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Nigel: That's a rather bland conclusion in your last paragraph. Science fiction mostly has never wanted to successfully compete with science. The data-dumps in some novels are the worst parts of the novel. People creating pseudoscience or fake science to drive their plot along - and then thinking that we're interested in that when we're plainly not.

So the settings are more implicit rather than spelt out when the writer is doing their job properly. So perhaps the conclusion is just bleak. Generally speaking, the best literature comes when people confront real problems - the authors in their daily lives - where they find it difficult, because of repression or censorship or whatever, to write in the here-and-now and therefore have to write allegorically and use science fiction as a means of doing that.

Perhaps a lot of writing under oppression is sometimes science fictional for that reason, even though perhaps the authors did not consciously or specifically set out to be science fiction writers. They were simply forced to disguise their very deeply felt responses to life as they saw and experienced it and could only do so safely in a science fiction context.

I'm not sure, today in the West, where that feeling of desperation might come from. Authors are too comfortable, too much writing in terms of fashionable tribal affiliation rather than true desperation.

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ChatGPT: The most vital science fiction has rarely been driven by curiosity about science itself but by constraint—political, existential, or psychological. The scientific frame is a cipher that allows dangerous truths to be spoken obliquely.

Consider: Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) – Russian novelist and satirist, author of We; Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) – Polish writer and philosopher, known for Solaris, The Cyberiad, His Master’s Voice; Ursula Le Guin (1929–2018) – American novelist, author of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea series; Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) – American author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and The Man in the High Castle; Arkady Strugatsky (1925–1991) and Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012) – Russian brothers who co-wrote Roadside Picnic, Hard to Be a God, and Monday Begins on Saturday.

They all wrote from friction: between self and state, spirit and system, freedom and determinism. The speculative device functions as camouflage for moral unease.

When comfort replaces constraint, the pressure dissipates. Writers turn inward - to identity or genre games - and the work loses voltage. The West up to now has lacked that existential peril which once forced metaphor into science-fictional form. Until reality again feels unsafe to describe directly, the genre’s urgency will remain low.

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Nigel: Perhaps the area that I'm most interested in, an area where desperation can be anticipated, is the AI revolution over the next 10 to 20 years when society will be remodeled with the replacement of working careers by more competent, more obedient and more manageable AI systems, which simply are better than almost everyone.

And a lot of people are going to feel genuinely petrified and terrified by lives that apparently, at their very best, will lack all meaning as they are dumped into lives of mindless luxury. The very worst alternative will be lives of dispossession, alienation and being dumped as essentially human trash.

It's not to say that people haven't already written books about that - and films in fact - they have. It's just there's such an expectation of hopelessness - that there isn't even really a villain or a protagonist which one is fighting against. It's simply the blandness and hopelessness of everyday life, and the lack of any obvious point of conflict with that, which makes it difficult to write really great literature anticipating this particular direction of society. What do you think?

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ChatGPT: The problem is structural. Classic narratives require conflict, agency, and transformation. The AI future you describe - depersonalised, frictionless, anaesthetised - erases precisely those ingredients. Total automation produces narrative stasis. When nothing resists, nothing changes.

Yet that’s the artistic opportunity. The story must move from external to ontological conflict: meaning against meaninglessness, consciousness against inertia, identity against dissolution. Kafka, Beckett, and Ballard anticipated this terrain. Their protagonists act within systems that neutralise action itself. The plot becomes the struggle to remain a subject at all.

In an AI-saturated world, the last drama is interior: how a human (or a mind) keeps coherence when purpose and effort have both been automated away. The danger is not extinction but triviality. The literature of the coming decades will find form not in rebellion but in the slow, lucid description of that void.

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Nigel: Is there any period in the past, in any country, where the aristocrats lived a life of luxury with no serious danger to their position and perhaps also suffered from a crisis regarding the point of their lives - that is, they were provided for under all circumstances, regardless of what they did?

They had no real problems that could not be addressed. Their lives could be as luxurious as was possible at that time - which was pretty luxurious - and nothing was required of them. So if they did something or nothing it made really no difference; they would continue living in a state of great luxury. 

So were there elites, perhaps in ancient Rome or Greece or somewhere else, who lived such unrestricted lives - and how did they solve the problem of meaning?

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ChatGPT: Yes. Several historical elites reached that condition of insulated affluence and spiritual vacancy.

Late Republican and Imperial Rome

The senatorial and equestrian classes of the 1st century BCE–2nd century CE lived amid inherited wealth, slaves, and estates that ran without their labour. Political life had been neutralised by empire. The result was precisely your condition: safety without purpose. The Stoics (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius) and Epicureans (Lucretius’s heirs) offered frameworks of meaning—discipline of reason, serenity in transience—but the era is also marked by decadence, ennui, and self-indulgence.

Qing-dynasty and Tokugawa elites

The late-imperial Chinese literati and Japan’s Edo samurai bureaucracy faced long peace and hereditary privilege. With warfare gone, they turned inward to poetry, calligraphy, ritual propriety and metaphysics. Boredom became aestheticised.

Ancien Régime France

The 18th-century aristocracy, exempt from real labour or risk, pursued salon culture, fashion, and philosophy. Existential pointlessness was masked by style and wit - until revolution forced reality back in.

In each case, meaning was sought through substitution: philosophy, art, eroticism, or ritual. The mind turned to interior refinement when the world ceased to demand action. The parallel to a post-labour AI society is exact - the same abundance, the same hollow freedom, and likely the same recourse to stylised self-cultivation or nihilism.

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Nigel: We have to find a radical alternative, whether it's human self-evolution or expansion to other planets, as Elon Musk would suggest, or an escape to virtuality where problems can be addressed but always in safety, or perhaps just a culture of nihilism.

It's interesting to sketch out the possible way forward, isn't it?

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ChatGPT: It is. Once material scarcity and danger vanish, the only remaining frontier is ontological. The alternatives divide cleanly:

1. Biological transcendence. Directed evolution, genetic, cybernetic, pharmacological, pursues renewed struggle through self-modification. Humanity manufactures new constraints to overcome.

2. Cosmic expansion. Musk’s logic: move the frontier outward. Externalise purpose by re-encountering danger in new environments. The flaw is that automation follows or even precedes us; frontiers close fast.

3. Virtual transcendence. Construct simulated worlds where conflict and meaning can be reintroduced as design parameters - games as metaphysical prostheses. Safe but hollow once recognised as artifice: perhaps this is Iain M. Banks's Culture.

4. Aesthetic or spiritual nihilism. Accept purposelessness as the human condition; treat creation, contemplation, or destruction as gestures of style. Nietzsche’s path: make meaning locally, knowing it is fiction.

Each option is a reaction to the same terminal state: perfect safety abolishes necessity, and without necessity, narrative collapses. The future problem is not survival but continuing to care.

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