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We’d Choose Huxley over Orwell
Clare told me once about her nice-but-dim friend Linda, at her teacher training college for women. Their English class was assigned Brave New World to read and discuss. Linda’s startled question: “What’s wrong with it? It sounds perfect!”
Yes, it’s the standard question. No one wants the Inner Party stamping its boot on the human face forever (except perhaps the stronger candidates for the Inner Party); a lot of people like the idea of endless pampering, no responsibilities – and Soma.
So no question which future gets to win the vote.
The Technology: Social Competence as a Service
The devices themselves are straightforward enough: microphones and cameras paired with generative language models. Worn unobtrusively, these devices experience what you experience, see what you see, hear what you hear – interpreting it in real time, then whispering advice into your ear or flashing it onto your smart glasses’ heads-up display (HUD).
They identify that rather familiar person and give you their background; tell you what to say, how to say it, when to interject, when to back down - like an actor's prompter.
They’ll record and summarise meetings for you. Flag your missteps. They’ll even suggest a diplomatic rephrase mid-sentence. No more mistakes, no more losing the plot or being stuck for what to say.
Health and Safety heaven.
The First Reaction: Uncanny and Unacceptable
The likely immediate reaction? Social panic.
You’re talking to a friend or colleague in a meeting and you realise they’re not quite present. Their tone, their timing, even their facial expressions are AI-modulated. Their wearable is watching you – analysing your body language, inferring your intent, drawing game-theoretic conclusions.
Suddenly you become tense. Everything you say is being recorded: so no gossipy observations about other people, no jokes, nothing you couldn’t defend in a court of law or the court of public opinion.
Nothing you’d want to stay personal is likely to remain so.
Spontaneity dies. Ambiguity and privileged information – so essential to humour, to intimacy, to negotiation – become impossible.
This will never catch on, you think.
But maybe the rebellious youth will take to it?
Historical Echoes: Delegation and Decay
There are precedents. The Roman aristocracy delegated not just labour but competence. Highly skilled slaves (their human equivalent of today’s promised AI robots) wrote their letters, managed their estates, even raised their children. The aristocrats became brilliant salon conversationalists, but dangerously disempowered when crises arrived.
Versailles functioned on the principle that no noble should lift a hand. Life was a choreography of servants, rituals, and affectations. And so, as 1789 rolled around, few retained the instincts or resilience to respond.
In late Imperial China, scholar-bureaucrats perfected social rituals while their proxies governed. But the world moved on. Foreign powers moved in as the empire atrophied.
What the Philosophers Know
All the major traditions – Stoicism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism – agree on one thing: we grow through struggle. Character is shaped by challenges, by mistakes, by misjudged words and the courage to apologise and learn. By confronting fears and acquiring difficult new skills.
Maturity is not the absence of failure. It is, contrariwise, the ability to act in a world where failure and disaster are always possibilities; learning how to cope.
Remove that friction, and development stalls. You remain emotionally juvenile: cosseted and immature, a stunted child rather than an effective agent in the world.
In Brave New World, people are not oppressed but pampered. They’re pleasant, well-behaved, and empty. They live in a hollow world without searing problems to confront – and therefore without meaning or the opportunity for personal development.
Where This Leads
If social competence becomes a service, we will see dramatic improvements in superficial interaction. Less conflict, more fluency. Everyone now operates – via their AI social prosthetic – as the best (or even better than best) version of themselves.
We will mostly prefer it. The assistant will always be smoother than we are. We step back, let it handle more… and slowly disappear from our own lives. Why turn up to the meeting and lip-synch AI lines? Let your robot PA do it. Already, people let ChatGPT write an essay for them – then don’t dare to change it.
It's smarter than I am.
So then we’re finished. Not in some apocalyptic collapse, but in something quieter and more irreversible: the soft extinction of agency. Flightless birds with tiny brains; abundant food supplies and no predators. The dodo.
The Soft Oppression of Helpfulness
Orwell warned of a future where truth is crushed beneath the boot – brutal, overt, and imposed. But what we’re getting is Huxley: a world where truth is drowned in pleasure, convenience, and endless distraction; where control is not seized but offered: volunteered.
We are not being beaten into submission. We are being soothed into irrelevance.
Orwell feared censorship. Huxley feared there would be no need because no one would care to read anything anyway. Orwell feared surveillance by the state. Huxley saw us installing the cameras ourselves, so our AI companions could “know us better.” Orwell imagined pain as a means of control. Huxley imagined sedation: intellectual, emotional, and moral.
Huxley’s world is more stable. No gulags, no terror, just quietism. A populace pacified by hyper-personalised media, constant nudging, and artificial intimacy. Not oppression but overfitting to our wants.
The AI wearable era – at first so horrifying – insidiously becomes merely necessary. It comes offering real help. It will make your life easier, your social world smoother, your mood more stable.
Solitude, failure, and difficulty – the conditions in which depth is forged – will be optimised away.
Our future is Huxleyan, not because the architects of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, etc., are evil, but because they are efficient and can't afford to lose.
Because they build what people want in the moment – and what people want is mostly to be spared from the jagged edge of life.
