What is the meaning of life? Most people will respond by looking towards their own lives, or a typical human life, and trying to reflect on the most meaningful parts. Love. Family. Goals. Knowledge. Joy. The resulting answers tend to capture what present-day humans enjoy most about being alive, or what feels meaningful to us, but perhaps fall short of the ultimate purpose of all existence, for all time.
In his new book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom tries a novel angle on the “ultimate question”: cracking it open with a series of techno-maximalist thought experiments. Bostrom is best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies, which, after becoming a surprise bestseller, launched “A.I safety” from obscurity into the unexpected hottest policy debate of the 2020s. Unlike some of his peers, however, Bostrom is techno-optimistic by disposition: prior to raising the alarm about the “paperclip maximizer” (a parable in which a misguided A.G.I, told to “make as many paperclips as possible,” turns the entire universe into a paperclip factory), Bottom argued that every second of delayed space colonization is equivalent to the loss of 1029 human lives, advocated for the abolition of biological aging, and wrote futurist short fiction like “Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up.” In recent interviews, Bostrom has expressed concern that public sentiment is turning too far away from A.I. development, with long-term technological stagnation representing an existential risk only slightly preferable to extinction. Deep Utopia appears to be Bostom’s attempt to get back to what matters.
Fast forward 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 years. Bostrom imagines that the streets are not just paved with gold, but infinitely malleable. We have entered a state of “plastic” utopia––a few notches above a mere “abundance” utopia of infinite goods. Absolutely aligned A.G.I has solved every technical problem in the universe. Humans can alter their environment, bodies, emotions, cognitive capacities, and desires with a mere thought, or by taking a pill. Nothing is necessary. Anything is possible. What now? One by one, Bostrom ticks off some potential ways to spend time until the heat death of the universe. Shopping. Exercising. Learning. Bostrom finds that much of the activities we humans currently find “intrinsically valuable” actually have a large instrumental component; they lose their luster when one’s presence is no longer helpful, or even neutral, to the cause at hand. As such, humans might struggle in a world where the entire concept of “means” has been abolished. Even purpose-creating stalwarts like “parenting” crack under the pressure of “deep utopia.” If a child is better off raised by an A.I. nanny, who is flawed in all the right ways, optimally enriching and emotionally responsive, then every instance of “D.I.Y. parenting” (to use Bostrom’s term) would always be causing some harm.
Deep Utopia is part Platonic dialogue, part experimental literary project, part scratchpad for Bostrom’s new ideas. As Bostrom himself acknowledges, it is difficult to write, or theorize, about a world which would necessarily break every narrative convention created in the 200,000 year history of human language. As such, Bostrom often seems to settle for evocating the feeling of a want-less, suspense-less utopia, without actually describing its details. The book is structured around a week-long lecture series on the meaning of life given by a fictionalized version of Bostrom. Chapter titles denote the day of the week on which each lecture is given, but also mark the aimless, vaguely ominous passage of time. Monday… Tuesday… Wednesday… Thursday…. In 500-odd pages, Bostrom gives himself plenty of time to stop and smell the intellectual roses, introducing new thought experiments that don’t necessarily build to a thesis, but fit the general theme of “what matters.” Flip a coin: heads, you get the “perfect life”; tails, you die. At what odds would you take the gamble? Why? In an extended bit between lectures, a charismatic pig and his fox protége decide to abolish all suffering in the forest; they fail, but one of their accomplices does decide that his moral duty is to impregnate as many fertile females as possible. A space heater is exalted by its deceased owner––eventually gaining the power of speech, and also international celebrity.
In a nod to the fallen Sam Bankman-Fried, Bostrom gives his final “Saturday” lecture in the newly-opened “FTX Theatre.” As Bostrom talks, the crowd of students in the lecture hall grows, eventually spilling out the door; his talk is abruptly canceled by a fictional college Dean before he can reveal the ultimate meaning of life.
Throughout the book, Bostrom floats, and then complexifies, numerous solutions to the problem of meaning: in a plastic utopia, we humans could strive to increase the amount of “interestingness” in the universe, honor the traditions of our elders, orient ourselves towards the good, seek enchantment, and receive the “gift of purpose” from a friend who requires us, personally, to do something for them. But one of the oddities of Deep Utopia is that Bostrom never explores how anything other than humans could fare under conditions of technological maturity. A future in which homo sapiens rule over a “solved” universe, retaining our core biology and desires from the African savanna, is a fantasy. Any humans who live to see such a world change. They would want to change. A perfectly plastic utopia would be mostly home to post-evolutionary life forms, non-biological consciousnesses, and other novel forms of being. Bostrom, one of the co-founders of the World Transhumanist Organization, is well-aware that the far future is unlikely to remain recognizably “human” for long. Which makes one wonder––what world is Bostrom really writing about in Deep Utopia?
As Bostrom notes in the opening chapter, a significant percentage of the global human population, and almost all Nick Bostrom readers, now live in some version of an “abundance” utopia. After the Amazon truck dropped off my Deep Utopia (within the promised 2-3 days), I took Deep Utopia on the plane to California, where I attended a three-day music festival, spent $115 on a tennis skirt and bra set, and watched festival-goers O.D. on the floor of a combined bathroom-slash-taco stand. When I got home, I liked to read Deep Utopia on the subway, during the commute to my temporary in-person creative-class email job. I wrote most of this review in the upstairs section of the Pret A Manger on 14th street, where I would go sit during the 1 pm “lunch rush.” All of the other eaters were similarly employed, judging by the proliferation of polyester-blend workwear, dropped off from Zara or Shein like my book, but no one ever looked particularly rushed. Everyone was on their phone. We all ate healthy-ish food, like the $15.99 Salmon-and-Corn bowl, which contains many essential nutrients and also some percentage of lead. Is this heaven, or hell? I honestly have no idea.
We may one day look back at this world, our world, and remember it as a kind of dreamtime. A one-way flight to Paris costs $350. The package is coming tomorrow. Or we may recall this period, technologically-infused but still beset with human limitation, as a kind of cosmic waiting room, an uncanny transition period between now-time and then-time into which some number of beings necessarily had to be born.
I want to be a post-human when I grow up. I want to see the singularity–to know what we humans are missing out on, even if it ultimately means the end of us. And if A.G.I. really does “solve” our universe, I hope, for the sake of all of the beings that will (hopefully) live in the future, that it can build a better utopia than this one.
