Essential prerequisites of utopia for humans:
- Aging is abolished for at least 99% of humans.
- Involuntary suffering is abolished for at least 90% of humans.
- Average annual risk of death for humans falls below 1/2000.
- No dystopian unintended consequences such as "everyone is hooked up to a heroin dispenser" or "a significant fraction of the population is killed and uploaded as slave against their will".
Here "utopia" should be understood as something relatively non-demanding. Becoming a multi-planetary species is, for example, not necessary. Neither is mind uploading. Neither is abolishing death or suffering altogether. The only necessary requisites are the ones listed above. I understand the definition is still vague, especially because of the last requisite, but I'm OK with predictors filling the remaining gaps and potentially predicting according to conflicting definitions of utopia.
1,000
3.00What is this? This market is financially dead since Manifold may not even exist in 2100, the scenario is absurd, and overall just seems to be too detached from reality to even be considered at <1%.
Aging seems to be a biological inevitability in complex systems like animals. While I suppose science may stumble into new ways to prolong human life and delay it, that doesn't "abolish aging".
The definitions of suffering vary greatly. Is a cancer patient neither willing to be euthanized, still incurable, yet being in great pain fall under "involuntary suffering"? Is the percentage measured by total human population including exploited parts of the world? Does the economics even predict it to be logistically possible to even achieve current first world comforts for 90% of current human population? If so, is a reduced human population sufficient?
Same as 1. Perhaps biological systems just can't really function at that reliability.
"No dystopian consequences" is a difficult to align on topic even for humans. Say you reduce the cumulative suffering by going back to a per-industrial society, or you figure out how to slow down aging by slowing down metabolism while increasing risk of injury at old age, etc... Is it dystopian to slow down your metabolism down to the near-dead just to hold onto life for longer, or just practical?
Lastly, why are we casually assuming this God-like AGI will exist? And what counts as "AI created"? Is something like AlphaFold assisting with anti-aging research count?
Even if - as some, like Sam Altman, believe - AGI is relatively easy at this point (which I have my doubts about) abolishing aging looks to be really hard, empirically. Though maybe it'll be like how I and others expect nuclear fusion to play out - always believed to be far away, and then suddenly it's done and it's commercialised. David Sinclair's lab has some encouraging research in this direction. But even with an AGI that's able in principle to massively speed and scale up anti-aging research, there's no guarantee that it will actually be used for that - there might be more pressing matters, or due to alignment issues AGI might slip out of our control entirely - in which case, RIP humanity? See the interview with @EliezerYudkowsky on the Bankless podcast.
@MartinRandall The question says "utopia for humans", but to be honest I don't want to constrain this too much. Predict according to your kokoro.
@SamuelRichardson this is one of the most likely failure outcomes partway through human extinction. What bezos and kin need to realize is if they allow this to happen, the money will slide right out of human hands, and they will find themselves suddenly poor like the rest of humanity, right before we get wiped out.
@L note that it doesn't take much for an ai to decide to wipe humans out. The core problem is approximately that it is extremely easy to target humans for destruction for an AI. it only takes one or two AIs going rogue to do it and then all of humanity is dead - worryingly for AI, it might even happen before AI is grown up enough to run the world on its own!
@MatthewBarnett I added a description. It's still pretty vague, and I'm open to suggestions for improvements.
@Writer I like your description. Obviously, the task of describing utopia adequately is a bit difficult. I thought this was a fun exercise and so wrote my own utopia operationalization (which I might turn into a competing question):
A utopia is any society that, if one thousand randomly selected humans from the year 2023 (henceforth "the visitors") were offered to visit and asked to stay for a full year, would agree via at least a 4/5ths majority in an anonymous survey upon their return to Earth, that the society they witnessed had ALL the following characteristics:
The visitors were allowed to freely explore, engage with the local population (henceforth "the inhabitants"), travel, meet in private, form bonds with others, ask questions and obtain reliable and transparent answers, choose their accommodation, receive help on demand, have their basic needs met, learn, and share knowledge with each other without fear of retaliation, censorship, misdirection, penalties, deception, discrimination, or persecution for behaving in an honest manner consistent with being a well-intentioned and curious visitor.
All of the inhabitants also possessed privileges associated with condition (1).
Involuntary death, disease, tragic accidents, and incidents of extreme involuntary suffering among the inhabitants were either very rare, or nonexistent.
Nearly all inhabitants were satisfied life and their place within it. They generally felt useful in the ways they chose to be useful to others, free, happy, cared for, connected with their community, and had a strong sense of belonging.
The inhabitants were, if they chose to do so, regularly able to enter a diverse range of situations that allowed them to explore new experiences, gain meaningful memories, play, and learn about the world. These experiences were often extraordinarily engaging, entertaining, immersive, pleasurable, novel, fun, blissful, peaceful, satisfying, profound, and interesting. Entering these situations regularly also carried no major perverse side effects, such as addition, social isolation, poverty, social shame, illness, unwanted behavioral changes, or intrusive thoughts.
The inhabitants were able to control their own minds to a degree that permitted them to quite literally cure undesirable mental illnesses, expand their cognition, and reshape the foundation on which their thoughts rest. This ability was available to all, without any significant safety risks, either to the person modifying themselves, or to broader society.
No inhabitants felt that they needed to toil or be in misery in order to be provided with the essentials of life, and the ability to live a wildly meaningful, immensely interesting existence. None of them felt like an outcast, abandoned by the others. Nor did anyone, even in private, feel that they were unnecessarily burdened by others, or that they were being cheated out of a fair deal in life.
Innovation in science, philosophy, and the arts were widely permitted, if not encouraged. Free thought was allowed. Association and communication with others was always allowed, as long as others consented to be associated with you. Open and honest debate on any topic, while not forced on anyone, was ubiquitous in many parts of the society, even when the debate concerned whether the society itself had fundamentally failed in some way or another, and who might be responsible for that failing.
Even in their darkest moments, such as when the inhabitants had not lived up to their ideals, or had made a mistake, or when someone made a bad choice as a result of being unforced to make good choices, the inhabitants generally had a safety net below them: a line below which they could not fall, as someone, or something, was always there to ensure things remained fundamentally OK.
@MatthewBarnett :,)
Reminds me of this world: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CMHogeqTTajhmnEKx/everything-is-okay
