[SEQ RERUN] Building Weirdtopia

Academics eventually found out that human beings were happiest as hunter-gatherers in the African savanna. It was Obvious In Hindsight that deviating from the environment evolution designed us for would only ever hurt us. All technological improvements ever did was raise the average human's happiness set point, while making it harder to achieve ends necessary for long-term satisfaction, such as close companionship, sense of purpose in life, sense of overcoming challenges, belief in a higher power, freedom, etc.

When this fact was discovered, it was suggested that we smash all our technology and start over, but this seemed much too hard to actually do. The easier way was to develop virtual reality, plug everyone into the Matrix (MMORPG-style to prevent the everyone-i-ever-loved-was-a-lie problem), and allow humanity to live out our lives as Nature intended. Whenever anyone dies in the Matrix, they get to hang out in Heaven for a while, where the memory of all their many lives is given back to them and they are free to live a maximally hedonic existence full of sex, drugs, and good food. When this gets boring, they can choose to become Reincarnated. Their memory is wiped again and they go back into the savanna.

My sexual weirdtopia is that the majority of people self-modify (using some sort of technology) to eliminate their sexual attractions and romantic attractions. They still feel other kinds of love and affection, and they still desire closeness with others. They might choose to enjoy pleasures* as intense as sex together with someone they love, but it's more like people eating delicious pie together; it's not driven by attraction. Sexual and romantic love only remain to a minority of people who chose not to follow the trend.

(*Intense pleasures delivered via a little light wire-heading, perhaps, but not to the level that would cause you to ignore the rest of life.)

Funny - the example sexual dystopia would be an improvement over reality if that were all that was wrong with it.

(edited to add, since I'm guessing someone took my meaning backwards:)... by which I mean that all the bad things it lists are already true, and we have other problems on top of those

I had a very hard time with this exercise. Subjectively it felt like thinking about utopia and dystopia first primed me excessively to think about utopia and dystopia instead of about weirdtopia. "Try not to think about grasshoppers or zebras" is a terrible way to get me to stop thinking about grasshoppers or zebras...

((discalaimer; I'm cheating, i've actually held most of the weirdtopia positions as just as plausible seeming or more than the utopia ones for a long time))

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Utopia: Immortality as monolithic godlike superpersons

Dystopia: death

Wierdtopia: threads of conciousness bubbling in and out of existence, splitting and merging, without any having a sense of continuity or personal identity, frequently ending but never in a way that could sensibly be considered death.

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Utopia: everyone has the Friendly utility function, or at the very least one of a highly altruistic human, and are completely stable.

Dystropia: an indifferent or even evil super intelligence tiles the universe with something worthless.

Weirdtopia: Utility functions are swapped around like clothing, frequently bizarre, extremely evil and/or tragic, either by choice of the previous utility functions or of one many iterations past that set up an exoself or even some random outside force. Since most utility functions differ from the powers that be they experience strong sincere regret and striving to correct what they genuinely see as faults in the world, which generates great stories and truly genuine meaning and striving.

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Utopia: Everyone wishes the best for everyone else, and there is only peace and cooperation, possibly friendly sports at worst.

Dystopia: Brutal, all-out war and hate continues. There is death and negative sum games of all kinds.

Wierdtopia: Conflicts of the same scale and emotional intensity as war continue, with genuine emotions of hate and spite, and causing real pain to the loser, over things we would consider extremely petty, such as which pairing of fictional characters is the cutest. However these conflicts are moderated by different mind design and culture to never be truly destructive, and to never allow those not involved in them to come to harm.

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Utopia: the original AI fixes up the worst problems, sets up a good system, and then mostly fades into the background allowing individual minds (or whatever the closest equivalent is) to mostly do their own thing.

Dystopia: the original AI micromanages everything, allowing for little individual agency.

Wierdtopia: everyone is deeply integrated with the central AI, such that the distinction becomes meaningless and everyone feels their personal agency is behind it's actions, and are arguably right in doing so.

Here's an idea: a world far in the future where everything is run by robots, and to keep humans out of the picture robots have anesthetized us and rewired our brains so that we are in a constant intense orgy of bliss, like sex or heroin times a hundred, totally unaware of anything else. The feeling of pleasure is constantly jacked up so that we never get used to it. It is also augmented with simulations (such as actual sex orgies or parties) so that we don't get bored. Further, this is done against our will, and one of the modifications that they make is to our memories so we remember it as if we made the decision. Therefore we percieve of ourselves as willing participants.

There is no pain and suffering any longer, obviously. The robots keep us in this catatonic state until all of us eventually die.

[This is the best I could come up with right now. It's not meant to be a realistic scenario, it's just meant to be weird]