What do we want from utopia?
I’m quite sure that everyone reading this (perhaps everyone) had the thought as a kid about how wonderful the world would be if they could just do whatever they want, whenever they want.1 As a kid, I fantasized about never having to do homework, go shopping, clean my room, eat, or even go to the bathroom.2 Everything in life that wasn’t playing ROBLOX or Minecraft,3,4 trying to do parkour at the playground or anywhere with some fences and walls,5 or playing one of the many run-around-the-yard games with my neighborhood friends felt like an obstacle in the way of doing one of those things.
I didn’t just wish this for myself, though. I also wished it for everyone. I hated that my dad had to work all day, even in the summer, and often couldn’t spend a whole lot of time playing basketball or doing some other activity with my siblings and me even if he wanted, as he additionally had other household responsibilities and was often rather tired. Likewise, past a certain age my friends often weren’t available due to homework or chores.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just opt out of externally imposed obligation? To be able to pursue only those activities that you find intrinsically worthwhile, without worrying about whether you’ll be able to live (and live well)?
I’ve been thinking a lot more about these questions recently, since first of all, these desires haven’t really changed into adulthood.6 The things that I’d like to do have changed—I now have a much greater interest in mathematics research, coffee chats, playing with my cats, hypertrophy training, reading, and so on—but I still lament having to do understimulating and poorly specified work in order to live, or to do household chores in order to keep a clean and tidy living space. I’m pursuing a PhD in large part due to the freedom that it affords me, as, thankfully, what I find enjoyable aligns well with academic research. Still, resources are a bottleneck to much of my research,7 so I am still forced to participate in supremely unenjoyable activities in order to attract funding or earn a salary.
Second, these questions have become relevant to discussions surrounding modern AI systems. I will, however, defer discussion of that connection to a later post, since I don’t care to speculate about the future of AI here.
Third, if you’ve seen my now page, then you know I have recently read Bernard Suits’s 1978 book The Grasshopper, which considers an especially extreme version of the world I imagined as a child and still imagine today.8 Briefly, Suits imagines a world in which (effectively) all ends—all needs and desires, physical or emotional—can be satisfied by sheer telepathic willing. He does this in an effort to expose what, if anything, remains worthwhile for humans to do, and posits that game-playing would become the predominant preoccupation.9 (He spends something like 90% of the book defending his definition of game, so perhaps consider reading the full thing only if you also have an appetite for the philosophy of language, or you’d like to turn the fire poker back onto Wittgenstein.)
On my first read, I was ecstatic to see a serious analysis of the idea of a world without instrumental necessity, one that didn’t cynically imagine a WALL-E world where humankind succumbs to hedonism. Suits recognized that lots of effortful activity can be valued independently of any productive ends, like my childhood engagement in parkour. I also felt the book was something like an antidote to the frustration I had felt after finishing Roger Williams’s 1994 novel The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect a few months prior, which I’ll discuss more later.
On further reflection, I began to doubt whether what I wanted was really the Suitsian Utopia. Would the activities I enjoy lose their meaning if their output could be achieved effortlessly by telepathic willing? I also realized that my stated wish—to be free and able to pursue whatever I found worthwhile for its own sake, without fearing for my livelihood—was sufficiently underspecified that it did not necessarily imply a world that present me would want, looking at it from the outside. Even if the Suitsian Utopia is desirable, it is possibly not the only answer to my wish. A djinn could snap into existence a world that does, indeed, satisfy my stated desiderata when experienced internally, but which does so by, for instance, engineering the world so that my developed interests would be in perfect alignment with my expected productive contribution. Would I want my wish granted in just such a way?
So, the natural question is: what do I (or we, if you indeed share my fantasies) actually want from utopia?10
- 1If not, then I am confused and a bit impressed. Respectfully: were you born a monk? A Stoic?
- 2I put off going to the bathroom for as long as I could as a kid. Maybe it seemed like a problem at the time, but I am grateful for the training, for now I am very good at holding in my pee during road trips and hikes.
- 3I was particularly obsessed with platforming games (obbies in ROBLOX, parkour in Minecraft), idle-style games (tycoons in ROBLOX, prison servers in Minecraft), minigames, and hand-to-hand combat (sword fighting in ROBLOX, PvP in Minecraft).
- 4Or Blockland, if anyone remembers that. I was a bit obsessed with LEGO-like games as a kid. I was also quite obsessed with Portal and Portal 2, and particularly getting Least Portals records on the leaderboard. For a period of time, I actually had a bunch of (tied) world records, even on stages with nontrivial records. To be fair, I did have a bit of help from Sven, who was one of the top players at the time and with whom I just happened to match (by accident) when playing co-op mode.
- 5I was not very good at parkour, to be clear. I couldn’t do any of the vaults except for the kong vault, and at best I could make two or three steps on a wall climb. I never attempted doing any flips after I landed on my neck during a front flip attempt on a trampoline once and became terrified that I’d paralyze myself.
- 6I reckon you have these desires too. How often do you fantasize about winning the lottery and quitting your job? I would bet good money that it’s at least once a year. We’re all just kids in adult bodies, I suppose.
- 7Not necessarily directly. In many cases I am bottlenecked only in the sense that I still need to pay for food and healthcare and rent, and I struggle to focus on my research if I feel that I will be incapable of covering emergency expenditure should something awful happen.
- 8Apparently there is also a Return of the Grasshopper, but I haven’t read it yet, and I am not entirely sure what it’s about. (Evidently, it’s a sequel to The Grasshopper.)
- 9Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (ch. 15).
- 10People I’ve discussed these ideas with have suggested I read Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia, but I haven’t started yet. For now I’m writing just based on my own reasoning and reading I’ve already done.