Book Review: Deep Utopia talks about a book (you’ll never guess its title) that asks:

What if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted? […] Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would people’s lives become boring and meaningless?

In our world we are very much focused on doomsday scenarios and how everything is going horribly wrong, to the extent where if you were watching a movie that started with the above questions, chances are that you’d expect the utopia to actually secretly be an awful dystopia. But that’s why I particularly appreciate somebody writing that book anyway, and another somebody writing about the book.

Having said that, if you’ve watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, watched The Matrix, and read The Culture books (just to name a few of the more well-known stories that among others, feature this theme), then you’re already pretty familiar with most of these ideas. Ultimately, the question – once you take away material constraints – always becomes: what makes for a happy person, and/or a good life? Is it meaning? What if we can construct meaning? What then?

For all that books like this one try to examine worlds with all material constraints removed, it still assumes that a human is fundamentally the same human we are today. But then, to me, it end up feeling not so dissimilar to a lab experiment with feeding rats heroin and marveling at how they’ll willingly starve to death. Our bodies and minds were not made for a world with no material constraints (or, you know, heroin): our desires and feelings have nothing useful to contribute in that kind of environment. So I think ultimately I agree with Scott Alexander’s assessment that the book does not go far enough.

Nonetheless, you can appreciate the book for what it is: an exploration of how our value systems interact with our human desires, and how could you optimize that if you didn’t have to worry about material things.

Bonus points for linking to THEOLOGICAL ENGINEERING EXAM 1, which I found absolutely hilarious.