Editor's Blog
6:00: I wake up euphoric after a wonderful night of programmed dreams. After climbing out of my deprivation pod, I challenge my synthetic heart with 350 pushups — the recommended workout for a 114-year old. Next I gaze out the window of my 153rd floor home at the other Farmpartments, all energy self-sufficient and covered with dwarf fruit that the robo-monkeys pick for us in the night. What should I do first? Get my e-democracy voting over with, or loosen up with my Sexbot? I chose the latter. As I grunt happily with my Margaret Sanger model, I hear my wife in the next room doing the same thing with her love-droid. Ha, ha. These were great 80th Anniversary presents for each other.
6:30: Now I’m voting. What a chore. With representative democracy, instead of the every-two-year ballot box, I now vote on numerous issues every single day. My phone shows me myriad ways that the budget can be balanced. I check “b” and move on to the propositions.
7:00: My son Lexus e-calls to find out how I voted. We generally disagree on everything. I tell him I voted “no” on the proposal for government-supervised eugenics because I support the rights of parents to choose. “But those moron Luddite kids are failing in school!” he screeches. “They’re so retarded that they can’t do calculus in kindergarten! Plus, they’re crippled with near-sightedness and acne!” I interrupt. “You’re arguing about a tiny demographic,” I counter. “Hardly anybody has kids anymore; only one in thirteen women” (fertility rates plummeted when immortality arrived in 2041.)
7:15: My wife joins me for breakfast. I’m very happy with our In-Vitro Meat Box. Last night I loaded in some saltwater crocodile cells and this morning I have nine chunky sausages to devour. Chewy. Delicious. We both drink the supplements that our wrist doctor, a medical monitoring bracelet, recommends, then we chat about our grandchildren and make plans to rendezvous for an orgy with our ‘droids at 11:00.
7:45: I go for a relaxing 20-mile run; naked. Nobody wears clothes anymore, because our community is domed and temperature-controlled. My synthetic heart has a maximum rate of 320 beats per minute, but I set it at a 70% because I want to loiter along at 20 mph. I do “the pre-history loop” so I can go by the waterfall to see the new dinosaurs that arrived, recreated from fossil DNA. They’re friendly, due to genetic therapy. I swim with the dolphins when I’m done, then I hunker down for some work.
9:15: I am an Urban Aesthetician. This means I examine the city planning designs that the robots have developed. I choose my favorites, adding suggestions. I’m working on OgoniLand this morning, the Hippo Family apartment-boat complex (where 100,000 people can dwell), embedded in the Niger delta. I add 9 Flamingo Towers and 3 GiraffeScrapers on the shoreline. I also add water-slides because the Niger is the warmest, cleanest river in the world ever since the oil-eating bacteria unpolluted it. I listen to music while I work and play chess, half-attentive, with an old Bobby Fischer model that I handily dispatch.
10:15: Shopping Time! I browse through my phone, looking for a “Pog” — a dog-pig hybrid — friendly like a canine, but you can feed it anything and it’s got that pink funny tail. I don’t have to worry about the price because money was abolished along with copyrights and property back in 2038.
10:30: Laugh Time. I watch a podcast of the recent rude jokes. There’s a character sketch about Luddite kids that’s horribly cruel, but I can’t help laughing hysterically. My lymphatic system is pummeled with chortles.
10:45: My wife arrives early because she wants to have a conversation before the orgy. “Mental foreplay,” she explains. She talks about her job. She’s an Asteroid Mining Manager harvesting platinum and other precious metals. This bores me, but I don’t want to ruin my chances for some bi-guy fun with her sexbot. So I just smile concernedly and ask occasional questions. Sure enough, she shuts up at 10:59. We pop our horny-pills and have nasty fun with our ‘droids.
11:30: Meditation Time. This is immensely harder than laughing, but I need it severely. Even though I’ll live forever, and I never have to do mindless labor, there’s still the angst-ridden questions: Why am I here? What is meaningful? I have eternity to figure this out, but I’d be happier if I solved it today. Should I join that mission to Titan? Should I worry about robot insurrection? Finally, I decide that I need to build my own city. I’ll ask for a nanobot team but should it be underwater? Or in outer space? I drift off in my imagination, knowing that whatever I create there, will eventually be realized in my hedonist-futurist world.
See Also:
Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasms
Get Naked, It’s Good for Your Brain
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29 Comments
Overly Optimistic for forty years hence, so here’s what I think your typical day will be in 2050:
You awake with a start, perplexed from a night of horrific nightmares. Little do you suspect that I have hacked your deprivation pod to give you a taste of the horror I shall unleash this day. As you seek comfort in the arms of your robotic lover, you are shocked to discover that all the sex-bots have been reprogrammed into kill-bots! (also the robo-monkeys). You flee to the streets in a mad panic, your wrist doctor warning you that your artificial heart is being pushed passed it’s safety limits (also if you’re wearing a bracelet, you’re not naked). There’s a massive explosion in the distance, and you realize the nudo-dome has been breached! The nudists are helpless against the hordes of foots soldiers clad in fullerene-plated, powered exo-skeletons. The normally passive dinos are spooked by the chaos and stampede through the streets, adding to the pandemonium, trampling people and pogs alike. My minions slaughter the dolphins as well, because dolphins are jerks. Trust me. Amidst the invading soldiers, ramaging dinosaurs and rebelling robot sex monkeys, you’re immortal life is braught to a rather premature end, all your hopes and dreams destroyed, but I care not. I care only that another city had fallen to my forces. I set my sights on Ogoniland next. Your e-democracy will fall, replaced by my real tyranny! I have done this because like all utopias and dystopias, your heaven is my hell. Such will always be Humanity’s fate. All Utopian efforts will be inevitably foiled by those who find such a Utopia horrifying.
Out of curioisity, have you actually been married forty years and have a son named Lexus, or was that not really ‘you’. Also, I googled Margaret Sanger. WTF?
Surely you mean “Direct Democracy”, not “Representative Democracy”.
Hi Armand, this is Hank Hyena, the author — thanks for your very amusing letter and your carefully-written satire. I think Margaret Sanger is a good choice for a sex doll because she was an early proponent of birth control and women’s sexuality. Plus I think she is hot. I have certainly not been married for 40 years but I have been married for about 20 and I have two daughters, neither is named Lexus. Regarding your comment, “like all utopias and dystopias, your heaven is my hell” – I have heard that muttered before, and I think it is a cynical cliche. Surely most of us can agree on various lifestyle improvements, can’t we? If you don’t want the dolphins, I will get rid of them, but who doesn’t want dinos around? That is just mean! Can we come up with a truce, before you attack OgoniLand? Your rebuttal seems to mix up the robo-monkeys with the sexbots, so maybe you want a switch? I will let you have intercourse with the robo-monkeys and you can use the sexbots for gardening if you wish. There, are we okay now? You can wear clothes too, if you must. So what else do you have a problem with? Please don’t mess with my OgoniLand – don’t you like waterslides? If you are intransigently evil, we can build a separate city for you and you ilk, okay? I am prepared to bargain.
The real trouble with this scenario is that in real life, evil is not a property of genius, it’s a property of stupidity. That many, in the present, are so terrified of non-extant evil geniuses that they choose actually-extant evil stupidity as a replacement is more a problem of lack of information than anything. If ubiquitous information is achieved before ubiquitous stupidity, mass evil will cease to exist; if ubiquitous stupidity is achieved, total annihilation is the only outcome. I’m an optimist; I think information is winning and will continue to win. Factually and historically speaking, violence has been on a constant decline proportionate to advancements in information technology, and I expect it will continue to do so. Information tends to arm the intelligent with alternatives to violence and means to prevent it much faster than it arms the stupid with new ways to murder and steal. In the past century even as the stupid/evil have created and used horrors like nuclear weaponry, intelligent individuals armed with the power of information have preserved vastly more lives than the stupid have managed to destroy. Even if I’m wrong, I don’t fear any scenario where my sex monkey attacks me just before the nudesphere is destroyed. Neither of those things will have a chance to exist because mass stupidity will have long since driven us all extinct.
Hi Hank. I like your hedonistic world. It’s a world we should all strive for.
It’s similar to my novel “Forever Pleasure: A Utopian Novel”
Except it’s a journey through a direct technocracy and later through a hedonistic techarchy.
Hi Starlynn — let me know where I can read your novel, it sounds interesting to me, and I agree with the route, getting there through a direct technocracy, thanks for your comments — Hank Hyena
Hi, this is Hank Hyena — I looked up your book, I might buy it, seems interesting. You wrote other books, too…? Christian books? I am surprised if you are a Christian advocating a hedonistic future – can you explain? Do you believe in the Christian notion of heaven? Maybe I am supposed to buy your book to find out?
Hi again Hank,
The book is not a Christian book. It’s actually more hard science and speculative fiction.
You can buy the book from Barnes & Noble online:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Forever-Pleasure/Theodore-Eastman/e/9780595505630/?itm=2&USRI=forever+pleasure
You could view part of it on Google:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ENUUz40G3bcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=forever+pleasure&source=bl&ots=6ezzo2D_P0&sig=iMq6YEZSIj_5VqcUNF-kR9wU79A&hl=en&ei=oDlKTNumKYrWtQOmj8RI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CDsQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Amazon has it too.
Thanks for the interest.
Hi Hank, wife and two daughters-
Your article is one of the first I’ve read about immortality that sounds possible, or even optimistic. Issues like joblessness for future generations, or religious nihilism sound worked-out. I’m wondering if you are already half-way to Hedonistia in your paradise. Are you still in paradise?
Joblessness in future generations – ? I hope so, the nanobots can do all the work. Religious nihilism? I’m not sure what that means. Religious belief will disappear with immortality. Thanks for the comments, I think I know who you are, and no, I don’t live in Costa Rica anymore, although I really do miss it.
Hi from Italy,
well, the article can be wrong about the date, not about the content. Joblessness. Yeah, interesting point, now we are actually facing joblessness. Nobody ever imagined that the reason we’re having to do with it is that there’s an increasing number of tasks that can be accomplished automatically. Some factories are completely automated. Increasingly sophisticated business applications make the work of hundred of employers superfluous. This will become more obvious when AI will emerge and robots get more efficient. We will remodel our concept of “work for a living” as economy becomes able to auto-sustain itself.
Very fun thought experiment, Hank. And so is Armand’s for that matter, but damn, Armand! Why are you so cheezed off at the thought of making life better? Do you have any ideas for a utopia – or hell, even a better-than-what-we’ve-got-nowpia? Or are you just the kind who would rather kick down somebody else’s sand castle than try to build one yourself?
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/07/mit-3d-food-printer-virtuoso-mixer-and.html
Digital Fabricator
The Digital Fabricator is a personal, three-dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients. Its cooking process starts with an array of food canisters, which refrigerate and store a user’s favorite ingredients. These are piped into a mixer and extruder head that can accurately deposit elaborate food combinations with sub-millimeter precision. While the deposition takes place, the food is heated or cooled by the Fabricator’s chamber or the heating and cooling tubes located on the printing head. This fabrication process not only allows for the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques, but, through a touch-screen interface and web connectivity, also allows users to have ultimate control over the origin, quality, nutritional value and taste of every meal.
MIT has made a food printer, exactly as I said would be coming in the In Vitro Meat article.
Primative, crude, will never hit the market in it’s present form, but 3d printing of food has begun!
Sounds like a Madison Avenue advertisement for Hitler’s master race, only this time you have a sci-fi veneer to the marketing. What’s ironic is that the people who promote all this human augmentation are not exactly stellar examples of how you can get the most out of what you’re already given to start with. If you need prosthetics to make yourself more effective you might try changing your fallible way of thinking first…
@ Dave Fitzgerald
I’m not knocking down Hank’s sand castle, I was just satirizing it. It was written in good humour; I was not cheezed off. I actually like Hank, and I’ve even put a link to one of his articles on my own blog. I just thought his vision of 2050 is overly optimistic, and a little silly, and don’t I think it was intended to be all that serious.
As a matter of fact, I do have my own ideas for a better-than-what-we’ve-got-nowpia. I’m an amateur speculative fiction author, I’ve completed a screenplay and a novel, which I believe I’ll submit to a publisher or literary agent before the year is out (And Starlynn/Theodore Eastman, as a published author yourself, any advice you could offer me on finding a literary agent or publisher would be appreciated). If you want to know more about my ideas on a better-than-what-we’ve-got-nowpia, you can check out my blog at http://sanctumofvespertine.blogspot.com/. The first blog entry back in October is a version of the foreword to my novel Deity: Cosmic Exile, and would contain the most information, though many of my other postings also contain my thoughts on improving the world.
@ Hank Hyena
Even if most people could agree on general improvements, it’s irrelevant. As technology increases, the power of smaller organizations and individuals increase. It’s conceivable that in the not too distant future, a single deranged individual could create a devastating plague in his home lab, with the potential of killing billions. People who are violently opposed to mainstream society, regardless of how few they are, could still conceivable bring that society crashing down.
Here are the changes I would make to your Hedonistia. First the deprivation pod. You don’t explain how this thing programs your dreams, but I assume it involves some sort of brain implant. I would never get anything that could potentially allow my brain to be hacked, because that scares the
s%*! out of me. I would also sleep less. If the descendants of drugs like Modafinil were available over-the-counter, were non-habit forming and without side affects, I would take them.
Number Two; no sexbot (I intentionally confused the sexbots with the robomonkeys for the sake of humour). I’m not very interested in sex and would hesitantly classify myself as a Grey A (look it up on AVEN wiki), and if it were safe and feasible to do so in the future I might have my sex drive removed all together so I would no longer have to masturbate. I believe you’ve said before that’s you’d like to be a twenty two year old Swedish woman who can have 15 orgasms a day. Not me. I’ve mentioned other objections to sexbots on your original post about them, so I won’t repeat them here. I would like cultured meat, but I’d probably buy it from a deli rather than have my own meat maker.
I do not expect immortality to arrive by 2041. I have no ideological objections to this, it’s just pure scepticism. Extended lifespans are quite possible, but not immortality. I’d go in for gene therapy that extended my longevity and health-span, take advantage of nutragenomics, regenerative medicine and new drugs to maintain my vitality well into my hundreds, but I don’t expect to live forever. I’d also like myostatin inhibiting genes, and if I were absolutely convinced it was safe I’d get gene therapy that would improve synapic efficiency/ density to increase my intelligence.
I’m not a big fan of being drugged into unconsciousness and sliced open, so I doubt I’ll have many elective surgeries, so no artificial heart for me. The only cybernetic enhancement I would want would be nanites in my bloodstream. They’d have to be incapable of being reprogrammed so they can’t be hacked, and non-replicating so I won’t have to worry about them turning me into a pile of grey goo. These nanites would do repair work, clean plaque from my arteries, and hunt down pathogens and cancer cells. I might also get some respirocytes .
I think you underestimate how controversial genetically modified babies will be. You probably expect the outrage will die down just like with IVF, but I disagree. GM babies aren’t just about reproductive technology, they’re about the rights of the unborn child (which some people hold sacred) versus the reproductive rights of the parents (which others hold sacred), making it much more like abortion, which is eternally controversial. I think everyone would agree that nobody’s parents have the right to genetically modify them against their will now, so why then should parent’s be allowed to genetically alter their unborn children without their consent? The closest thing to this right now is male circumcision. There are men who feel violated for being circumcised as an infant, even though their parents only had their best interests at heart. Wouldn’t genetic modification be viewed as a far greater violation? I personally think that GM babies will be at least as controversial as abortion, and probably more so since it has the potential to create a race of genetic superman.
I’m not ideologically opposed to dinosaurs, but something in my gut tells me it’s a bad idea. I’m not sure how you plan to go about it. I don’t think it’s possible to clone a dinosaur that’s been dead for 65 million years. I’ve heard about genetically modifying a chicken embryo to create dinosaur like features, but that’s still not really a dinosaur. However it’s done, a Jurassic Park like scenario is unavoidable, and when that happens I’m sure it will elicit a facepalm from me.
Finally, no nudo-dome. I don’t think doming a city is very practical, and even it was, exposing your genitials in public is taboo in most Human societies, so I doubt the entire population of the dome would convert to nudism. I can imagine domed nudists resorts, but not cities. Plus, you’re neglecting how cool clothes are going to be in the future. They’ll be e-textiles, and they’ll be made of carbon nanotubes. They’ll be bullet proof and last forever. They’re be climate controlled, and be able change shapes and textures. In addition to my indestructible suit, I’d also wear a pair of iShades for augmented reality. They’ll be iContacts too, but I’ll go for the sunglasses since I won’t have to touch my eyeball everyday, and because the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.
Hi, this is Hank Hyena, the author. Thanks for writing in, it is always interesting to hear from people like you, although I have no clue as to what it is that you fear and why your ilk is always talking about Hitler. Please help me out on this – what links my utopian story to Nazis? was it the reference to eugenics? ANd your reference to “not exactly stellar examples” and “changing your fallible way of thinking first” ??? I don’t know what you’re talking about unless you are just another Christian who is peeved at transhumanists who want to improve what you think is God’s already perfect world. So help me and other befuddled readers out with some more details of your thought process if you can.
HI Armand — thanks for writing in, I really appreciate your response and your openness in explaining why you want what you want. It really does illustrate why one person’s heaven is another’s hell. Keep in touch regarding your book and I wish you the best with it. I still might put your name “Armand” in my book as a evil character because it is an excellent name and I like your scenario that seeks to devastate Hedonistia. You are a good writer and I thoroughly appreciated your satire.
Hi Armand, Hank Hyena here again — I just read your blog, I’ve actually read it before — and I wanted to praise your skewering of Peter Singer. Very nice. I really do find him perhaps the most over-rated idiotic philosopher of all time. thanks
I, for one, thought the satire was dead on… and understood as satire.
Hi Hank Hyena here. Thanks Valkyrie for sending me that link. I have been obsessed with urban FarmScrapers for a while, thinking that was the best way to make food. I lived in Costa Rica last year and I got so alarmed watching the jungle cut down for agriculture, I’d like to keep the jungles and make agriculture dense and urban with FarmScrapers. But your food printer suggests (am I right?) that FarmScrapers won’t be necessary, we’ll only need small gardens with the very best produce that can be copied with the printers. Correct? I love the space-saving possibilities of this invention. thanks again and keep me informed of progress.
depending on the progress made in making 3d bioprinters in the next decade, which considering how much has been done just this year, I expect that progress to be pretty fast, it might even eliminate the need for a garden unless you just want the pleasure of growing plants.
Full scale industrial printers could become the norm in the meat packing industry, with bioprinters using pure stemcell stock to produce all the needed “cuts” of meat, letting them grow and “exercise” via electrostimulation to the desired “tenderness”, then ship the still living meat to the store for the absolute freshness.
Smaller desktop printers might work a bit less sophisticatedly during this time, as the stocks would need to be smaller as opposed to the unlimited feed a commercial printer is likely to have, so it would probably be more limited in what it could make, but it is still a step closer to the “Star Trek” replicator. Also, not knowing the time frames needed to “grow” and “exercise” a cut of meat or if that process could be bypassed, sped up, or even necessary depending on exactly how the technology becomes implemented, it’s hard to say if a desktop printer will become as as viable as commercial printers would likely be. It does still open a lot of possibilities.
Especially as “food” would not be the only thing that gets printed. We may not get “home food printers” this decade, but I would be surprised if we didn’t get “Desktop Manufacturing Units” capable of printing out an enormous number of consumer goods.
True “Home Replicators” may have to wait til next decade, when we start having true nanotech available.
Thanks for the unique vision. I always enjoy your articles. It’s interesting to compare and contrast your vision with my own; in many ways, we’re much alike. In other ways we diverge spectacularly. For instance, in my vision of a perfect future we’ve finally really abolished slavery. Since I’ll have no need for masters, I’ll have no need to give my opinion on how they should rule me, so this whole concept of voting and “democracy” (i.e. a system where slaves pick their masters, or where everyone is a slave to everyone else) goes right out the window.
Instead of answering, “Would you like for your overlords to threaten you with violence if you don’t do this or that?” I might spend a few moments browsing through requests on a social network as to, “Would you be interested in participating in this or that?” I would abhor answering any question about whether or not luddites should be forced to accept genetic modification. The only response, in my future, is “what a monstrous thing to suggest!” Any reservations I have about the hardships their children will go through due to having genetic defects will be assuaged with the knowledge that, as human beings, they have the same rights as any other; if they wish to go have their poor eyesight or allergies fixed, like any other human they’ll be able to stroll right into a gene clinic and have it done – whether or not their parents like it. If their parents attempt to prevent them through use of force, their parents will be liable for the harms they’ve caused.
In my future, parents don’t have the “right” (e.g. claimed privilege) to enslave their children any more than adults have the “right” to enslave eachother. They don’t own the child, ergo, they do not have the right to make decisions for the child against the child’s will. How will children be protected from making bad decisions, you may ask? Well, naturally, outside providing a safe environment for them and convincing them that they ought to stay in it, they will not be. Mistakes are how humans learn, and in our future, any mistake that does not result in death really *will* make you stronger. Though sometimes deadly mistakes will be made, it is vastly preferable to my ideal society to respect universal ethics compared to using that possibility as a delusional excuse to murder and pillage under the banner of “protection” as we do today. In order to preserve absolutely the human rights of others we will preserve absolutely individual sovereignty.
Another place we diverge is on the subject of property. I would argue that as long as there is scarcity, there will be property; that is, as long as anyone has to work to produce anything, they will rightfully expect to own what they have produced. Scarcity doesn’t exist in any practical sense with information, so I think copyright will go right out the door and soon – first because it is unenforceable, and later because nobody would dream of resurrecting stupid ideas like intellectual monopoly (nor will there be anyone around to grant them and back them up with the business-end of a gun, as we’ve abolished slavery). But as to real belongings, I doubt you’ll be any happier if someone walks away with your pog in 2050 than you would be today if they walked away with your dog, declaring that, since property doesn’t exist, it’s not yours and you can’t protect it from confiscation. Nor would you be pleased with me showing up at your farmpartment and sleeping next to you in your bed uninvited! These concepts of you and me, yours and mine, our external identities, our sentiments about objects, can’t even exist without the basic principle of ownership, and I doubt we could achieve, desire, or even truly imagine a world where they don’t exist. And after all, why would we want to, when the cost of resource gathering, organization, and production have flatlined to the point that our perception of value is shaped primarily by identity, individuality, and sentiment rather than material or labor costs?
Anyway, keep up the good work. With luck and effort we’ll both live to see at least one of these futures, or perhaps in our inability to agree you’ll have yours and I’ll have mine and we’ll find a way to co-exist
Hi, Hank Hyena here — great comments, I appreciate your well-thought out improvements for my utopia — I have checked out your blog before, and I’ll do it again. I’ll be publishing future reports from “Hedonistia” and I hope to get further critique from you
I mainly agree with you on most points, except the one about democracy.
Humans form collectives. It is instinctual. A collective is a extremely beneficial survival mechanism, because by forming a collective, individuals enable co-operation, which leads to division of labor, which enables each individual to collectively provide for their own NEEDS. By sharing the work, they reduce personal expended effort. Regardless of the complexity of the collective, which our modern day shows can be exceedingly complex, with multiple nested sub-collectives in the greater whole, this basic relationship is maintained. Individuals join collectives to provide for NEEDS (food, shelter, medical care, education, and security)
This is compounded by a secondary instinct which also drives us to form collectives, the reproductive instinct which drives us to compete with one another for “STATUS”. Status dictates the “pecking order” and is determined by numerous factors, with “High Status” individuals instinctively “deferred to” by all lower status, right down the line.
These two instincts are the prime drivers for all human interaction. Co-operation for survival, Competition for reproduction.
This means that a “government” will ALWAYS be created. There will always be a “status pecking order” in any collective, and the “high status” members will ALWAYS SEEK GREATER AND GREATER STATUS through “governing” the lower status members of a collective.
I quite agree that slavery of any sort needs to be “outlawed” but who’s going to enforce that law? Who ever enforces that law is the “Government”.
Period.
Of all the systems of government humanity has created, only one is not modeled on the “Aristo/serf” division that is the inevitable result of human instinct, and that is democracy. It is the sole government in which the many are not subject to the few. Universal democracy of the kind Hank is portraying is the sole means which we currently are aware of to prevent the endless repetition of the same old “have’s vs have not’s”. But it can only do so in an environment in which transparency and accountability are paramount, and in which all individuals accept that the responsibility of “government” lies with the individual. Fail to govern for yourself, and others will do it for you.
Does that mean that the concept of “daily voting” as Hank pictured it is correct? Probably not. In a society in which individual accountability and Collective accountability is assured, we will probably need very few laws which would even need to be “enforced”, including those about “violence”.
(After all, if we have the technology to “rebuild” you from scratch, with brain backups, full body tissue repair, and any of a number of other “medical miracles” I personally expect to see a massive resurgence in violent “sports”. Why would it matter if you beat your opponent to death if you can shake hands with him after he’s revived five minutes later? We are about to negate the very reason for the existence of a vast number of laws, and the fewer we have the better. Individual liberty is always preferred, limited only by accountability, and the needs of the collective to ensure collective survival. As I see it, Armand’s little “terrorist” scenario could simply be an artist staging an “Experiential Entertainment!” allowing the residents of Hanks little “dome” to “enjoy” a recreation of the “bad old days”, which they could selectively “forget” later if they chose. The “damage” done by the terrorist attack, even the “lives lost” could be temporary.)
Democracy isn’t about “picking your masters”. Properly done, it is about allowing collective needs to be addressed by the collective, and promote collective survival, while preventing the reproductive status game from interfering with that provision of needs by not allowing high status individuals to hijack collective resources for personal gain. It is the only system we have yet devised to prevent status from being the sole factor that determines how collective resources are used. After we’ve fine tuned the process, defined the absolute minimal set of rules we can agree on collectively, and developed sufficient technology to remove human needs from the market place, I would be surprised if “voting” on anything came up more than every few decades. Properly implemented, the “government” could be largely as autonomous as all manufacturing is likely to be, with all of humanity merely a “board of directors” guiding it.
And we will have “personal property” in that any “instance” of a particular molecular or atomic pattern would belong to the individual who “instanced” it, so Hank’s “personal Pog” would be his, but an IDENTICAL COPY made by anyone else would not be, even if that copy contained all the “memories” of Hank’s Pog. However, with animals, there is a grey area, as any creature capible of sentience should be allowed personal free will, so if that Pog is “smart” enough to qualify as “sentient” copying without the Pog’s permission would be another matter.
But again, with metamorphological matter, which is also likely by the time of Hanks scenario, personal “possessions” could be endlessly reconfiguarable, and a “home” like Hank’s could be as much “Virtual” as real, enabling him to access it nearly anywhere. Thus “personal property” might be open to re-definition as well. If I “rez” my lightcycle from a handy cloud of utility fog, is that set amount of “foglets” my personal property now instead of the communities? Or just the Bike model, which I have stored in my databanks?
Against Stupidity, The Gods Themselves Contend in Vain.
Fortunately for us, we need not rely on Gods, only the overpowering will of the vast majority of people to prosper by creating things that improve their lives and others
The reliance on benevolent overlords to set things straight and render “justice” is what gets us mass indoctrination, mass ignorance, and mass violence in the first place. There are so many faulty assumptions wrapped up in that mindset it’s impossible to thoroughly analyze here (or perhaps anywhere), but the most obvious is that no single being has the intelligence or grasp of information to set to order an entire society better than can be done by the collective actions of each individual.
The most obvious objection to your more pessimistic satire is that, if you as a mad genius individual, have the ability to execute massive city-wide robot sex monkey hacks, build armies of exoskeleton-armored thugs, and create mass explosives and plagues the corollary is that many, many other individuals have access to similar technology and will be doing positive things with it. If an individual can create a plague in his garage in your scenario, it is likely that thousands of others have the ability and the will to cure it within hours of its detection (the natural dynamics of disease prevents a plague so virulent as to be deadly before that time period from spreading very wide). If you can create mass explosives at home, a thousand others can deploy swarms of tiny chemical sniffer robots to detect and neutralize your explosives before they reach your target – I know I intend to have just such a swarm buzzing around my home. Hell, what’s to stop us from hacking your exoskeleton army to disarm and begin miming sex acts with the monkeys (much to the chagrin of their undoubtedly psychologically damaged inhabitants)? Anything that applies to you applies to me after all
Hank Hyena here — this is wonderful, I really believe you & I & Justen and even Armand are all working out the kinks together in a utopian future society. I look forward to your upcoming comments regarding the next Hedonistia installment, which will feature societal changes caused by the digital printer that you informed me of. Thanks!
I appreciate your creativity, Mr. Hyena, and, while I doubt your exact hedonism will appeal to most people, I’m not going to get caught up in that. I’m more interested in the problems of the future that are absent. What about the annoying co-worker? Or what about the playground bully? What happens to the chronic cocaine user? What about the teenager who dies because she doesn’t crawl out of the VR pod while her parents are out of town and because she turned off her sensors (“they always make her get out too soon”)? Or the fact that privacy in public is impossible due to lifestreaming? That your wife could post a video online of your fun with your sexbot, if you happen to annoy her, and she just does it thoughtlessly? What about the kids who fail calculus in kindergarten… what kind of lives will they have?
Hi Anonymous, author Hank here to answer your questions:
Q: What about the annoying co-worker?
Answer: we work very little, robots do the work, we also work virtually or e-work, thus no “co-worker”
Q:Or what about the playground bully?
Answer: traditional school is extinct, bullying fades due to gene therapy
Q: What happens to the chronic cocaine user?
Answer: there will be cures for that and other simple addictions
Q: What about the teenager who dies because she doesn’t crawl out of the VR pod while her parents are out of town and because she turned off her sensors (“they always make her get out too soon”)?
Answer: the VR pod is far too intelligent to let anyone die inside it
Q: Or the fact that privacy in public is impossible due to lifestreaming?
Answer: Privacy is not highly valued, we are all similarly flawed and sympathetic to others
Q: That your wife could post a video online of your fun with your sexbot, if you happen to annoy her, and she just does it thoughtlessly?
Answer: People will be bored when they see that I don’t do anything weirder with the sexbot than they do
Q: What about the kids who fail calculus in kindergarten… what kind of lives will they have?
Answer: Justen has an excellent answer below to this predicament