Jeroen Verbraak's Reviews > Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

I was intrigued by the subtitle of this book: ‘Life and Meaning in a Solved World.’ With the pace of change and technological maturation, we might, at some point, reach a state where there is little to no work for human beings. How would we still find meaning in life, since we derive a large part of our meaning from work and solving problems? An interesting research question, poorly executed. Too complex, too many pages, and still in the dark about why Nick embedded a fairytale in his book. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

Back to the book…

A quote from Keynes continues to echo in many books – he predicted that our workweek would decrease to just 15 hours a week. Mind you, he made this prediction back in 1930. We are still far off, and this is mainly because we are using our wealth for consumerism; however, with the pace of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, it could happen quickly. If this becomes cheap enough, it will push humans out of the labor market.

In his extensive writing, Nick posits that if we want to sustainably improve the living standards of all humans, we need to control populations – also known as the ‘Malthusian State.’ Simply put: the mouths to feed will outnumber what we can produce. Technology can only help us so far; it still comes down to the scarcity of land. I wonder how big of a problem this is, assuming that affluent people will have fewer children (there is some scientific evidence for this).

In his book, he also outlines some of the limitations of ‘technological maturity’ – which is described as ‘a condition in which a set of capabilities exists that afford a level of control over nature that is close to the maximum achievable in the fullness of time.’ Some of the limitations are cosmological in nature (what is within our reach is finite), prudential barriers (perhaps some technologies are too dangerous), and/or axiological (simply not aligned with our values).

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop’, so in a solved world, how will we respond to an abundance of leisure and wealth? We don’t really know. We could extrapolate how kids behave, aristocrats, or retirees, for instance. However, they are all part of a wider system where human beings work. Like Nick stated, maybe freedom is a void depleted of purpose. But this could be solved with artificial purpose – we could engineer any experience (power over nature). To me, this would mean the end of being human.