Absent Transhumanism and Transformative Technologies, Which Utopia is Left?

1. Leave stuff like ratios of reproductive sex alone; I don't think this is a direct obstacle to something people'd recognize as a utopia.

2. Divide the Earth up by ecoregions. Extensive surveys of natural resources, landforms, biomes, economically-significant species, ecosystem-provided services, existing human use and infrastructure, so on. "Urban" counts as a biome here.

3. Priority technologies to research, develop and deploy as universally-accessible things:

-Passive or solar-charged night-vision glasses. This is to reduce the need for artificial electric lighting at night; its creation was a real game-changer, but the energy consumption is extreme.

-A reversible, safe, efficient oral contraceptive for folks with danglybits. This is to be paired with widespread distribution of existing birth-control methods.

-Dump tons of money into research for efficient hydrogen-fuelled and electric transport; also kick off a nuclear renaissance with an emphasis on modern design and organizing/management principles without the neglect incentives currently possessed by private industrial NPOs. Expand supplemental renewables production. Every continent gets an elevated high-speed rail network.

1. Relocalize culture. Start with food. Create new or revived forms of cuisine and food culture that are specific to an area; identify candidate wild foods and likely yields, promote them vigorously, and incorporate them into the diet; initially as supplemental or occasional foods, but with an eye towards transition to primarily-local resources. This model is not even vaguely allergic to agriculture, but it is focused on providing food for local people in a sustainable manner rather than engaging in high-volume agricultural trade. Over-bred domestic animal stocks designed for factory-farming will be phased out. More robust, mixed-trait varietals will be emphasized, as will best practices for handling (some of Temple Grandin's work is useful to this idea). Wild stock in general will be promoted, though the development of sustainable populations and management programs for harvesting may take a bit. One sort of long-distance agribusiness trade that may be a good idea is crops and livestock from similar biomes, in an effort to maximize productivity. Focus on more microlivestock as well, up to and including bugs. Then take all of it and that have each bioregion figure out a pretty good diet that balances nutrient needs and caloric abundance during the critical phases of childhood, design a local cuisine, and go.

2. Some areas simply won't be compatible with settled habitation, even after all that. So create some technologies to facilitate a sort of moden nomadism -- the modern Inuit would probably be a lot better off if, like their ancestors, they were legally allowed to do mobile living with the kids and, as a consequence, get a diet rich in organ meats from local wildlife. Portable, clean electric generators, high-end durable vehicles of appropriate sorts, long-range communication technologies for areas off the beaten path, ubiquitous first-aid kits and training -- emphasis of state services in such areas should be on medical and emergency fast-response. Other important stuff: Rural communications and education.

3. Economics: Automate the hell out of whatever is amenable to having the hell automated out of it and still capable of producing a decent product. We don't get nanotech, but 3D printing is fair game -- subsidize it for startups.

I'm still chewing on to what degree the actual ownership vs management structures look like here, and have been writing this since I woke up. Will come back and poke it more in a bit...

EDIT: S'more thoughts on economics:

I'm envisioning a lot of production being done in a massively-automated fashion enabled by dedicated, highly-trained staff, who work for...well, call them concerns. They're kinda hard for me to pin down as purely state or private. It seems like a lot of frameworks could fit in here -- Jamais Cascio's "Robonomics" scenario, in which private companies who pay a flat income tax and obey regulatory restrictions but no payroll taxes could probably be slotted in as readily as an idealized "the state owns the means, cooperatives license them" sorta Marxist-like scenario. However you want to construct it, the goal is "productive economy to enable a measure of global trade and undergird a social support system" -- basically, I want to see free medical care (in terms of the end-user's experience of it), a basic income guaruntee, and support for other things that may not be immediately profitable in and of themselves but produce significant social value.

I've thought in a lot of situations about a two-tiered currency system: essentially, basic income guarantee, necessities, most manufactured goods and social services are payed for with one kind of currency; bespoke items, luxury goods, non-necessities and so on are payed for with another. Basically representing automated versus direct human labor.

1. Law enforcement: I don't see it disappearing given the constraints here, alas. Some remedies off the top of my head include an emphasis on beat cops who patrol their own living areas, and neighborhood police booths like in Japan (remove the social distance); backup in the form of general support for an area, but ultimately answerable to the local side of things. This is coupled with eliminating victimless crimes (drugs and sex work are immediate examples), and a prison system that looks a lot more like Norway's rehabilitation approach to things.

2. Ecology: no single unifying strategy here, but I don't think we have to consume everything; moreover, it's ecologically and economically beneficial not to. Rewilding is good for some areas and ecosystems, but sometimes we improve on them.

The net picture looks sorta like this, at least in my head:

-People are born into relatively healthy, prosperous communities that have no explicit need to travel, but travel is easy and affordable. Work is not the same thing as employment; the choice between starvation and an exploitative economic arrangement is absent. Basic needs are meet. Personal and cultural autonomy are both significant. Most people have enjoyable lives; people who don't fit where they are have some ability to get out of there and find a niche that suits them better. The economy chugs along pretty steadily most of the time, with few fantastic booms but few real crises. But it's not stagnant either -- this is a terrific climate for science and intellectual inquiry, as free time abounds for many and there is not so much pressure to choose between that and starving to death. People who like it competitive are free to try and get into a concern, but work and employment are not synonyms -- lots of people do socially-useful work without being employed. People who just don't like other people and want to bog off into the wilderness or something and rough it can do that -- and if they decide to come back later society is still there for them. There's still incentive to find something socially-, commercially- or academically-relevant to people because human labor is incentivized seperately from the production that drives the core economy; even if you just write poetry, someone might conceivably pay you a few human-dollars now and again for it -- human labor currency can sometimes behave like a reputation economy.

Less harm, less disutiility, higher average wellbeing, a rich and stimulating life for most people, good health, less basis for direct conflict...

(Oh, I can see issues. What about climate change? Reorganizing ecoregions is bound to upset more than a few applecarts -- it's very well and good to talk about a Northern Forager-styled society in the Great Lakes area, but what happens when winters become warm enough that maple syrup can't be produced? What kind of economic and social shakedowns result? This definitely needs to be explored in more depth than I can managed right now...)

If I can't rewire animals brains to stop suffering, screw it. Pave over every forest and jungle and other natural habitat on the Earth. Drive every animal species extinct but us (save pets people want to keep). Find a plant species that can generate oxygen and food without being pollinated by insects. (algae, maybe?) Also, save dolphins and great apes, who I would probably count as people, rather than "pseudo-people," like other animals, construct luxurious habitats for them. Find some way to limit their population besides Malthusian scarcity (sterilization of most adults, probably).

Get rid of religions, try and make everyone as wealthy as possible, try and invent drugs that don't screw up your brain that much but still feel awesome, make sure they are (obviously legal) and widely available. Eliminate every communicable disease, including STDs. Invent some kind of male-usable birth control. Eliminate nudity and sex taboos, and hold enormous public orgies every day, convince Eliezer Yudkowsky that the singularity is not gonna happen and he should spend all day writing HPMOR.

Absent Transhumanism and Transformative Technologies, Which Utopia is Left?

This one.

Depending on the extent of my god mode, I'd either reorganize the planet into a planetary transportation government and regional city-states - the planetary transportation government runs an intercontinental rail system that connects every city-state and enforces with overwhelming military might (provided by feudal grants from city states) only one right, that of emigration (not immigration; city states can refuse to permit people to stay within their borders, they're simply forbidden from preventing people from leaving).

Or, if I'm playing full god mode, I'd dismantle the local planets, turn them into a reorientable Dyson sphere around the sun, and use a combination of solar sails and selective reflection to turn our entire solar system into a fusion-powered galactic spaceship, and cruise the galaxy looking for something more interesting. (By absorbing solar emissions on one hemisphere of the sun, and on the other hemisphere reflecting half back into the sun and letting half escape, the energy of the sun can be used to accelerate it, albeit very slowly. If this still sounds ridiculous, imagine shoving the sun into a rocket; that's kind of what would be happening, only with ridiculously low thrust.)

Your initial request doesn't exactly limit the scope of powers in any foreseeable way, except to limit the means.

Well, within the constraints of human nature, some societies seem to have much higher levels of trust than others; in some communities you can leave your doors unlocked while you leave your home for a vacation, in others people take practically feudal levels of fortification to feel safe from their neighbors. Crank up the levels of trust and transparency and bring as much of the world as is sustainable to a first world standard of living and you may have the best we could do with present day technology.

Lack of transformative technologies pretty much precludes bringing the whole world to an industrial standard of living in the long term (or even keeping the current first world population living at that standard indefinitely,) but we might be able to stay within sustainable levels if in general our goods were designed to be as enduring as possible and geared towards reuse rather than recycling. Goods production would be lower, so the economy would have to be much more service oriented. This isn't the sort of thing I generally bother with even back of the envelope feasibility calculations for though, since even if it turned out to be totally feasible in principle to build a sustainable global society at first world standards with present day technology, getting society to adopt the necessary changes would be practically impossible, so transformative technologies are a safer bet.

Just don't forget if you slide something too far away from what our evolved brains were designed to accept

What is the evidence that we have any idea at all about the contents of the social / normative limits our brains are able to accept?

When I first started thinking about politics, what struck me most is that idealists all had the same goal. People living in tight-knit communities, though free to leave; spontaneously sharing and cooperating in everyday life; working lightly to meet their needs, then devoting themselves to fulfilling, usually collective projects in their copious leisure time; swords hammered into plows, yadda yadda. The obvious flaw is that anyone slightly more selfish immediately ruins the system. There's also coordination problems, where you can collect five of your friends to go build a house but never a large enough group to run a hospital.

The first step is to solve scarcity. We get behavior a lot like that Norman Rockwell utopia on various Internet communities, where information is copied at near-zero cost and time and skill are the only limited resources.

Well, that, and status. Here it's harder; the small communities make egalitarian pressure possible, but that also creates conformity pressure which is not cool. Maybe take another leaf from the Internet and encourage people to self-sort into small ponds where they can be big fish.

If changing human nature or building AGI is impossible, we could still explore how close we can get to this. Research the most efficient form of education and group cooperation. Research the most powerful forms of non-general artificial intelligence, design better expert systems, etc. These things could still be enough meta to influence many other aspects of human life.

Instead of nanotech, we could improve other forms of automated technology. Even without the ability to manipulate atoms, building things automatically from very small (but greater than nano-) pieces could be awesome. Instead of bio-immortality, we could still invent better medicine, construct artificial limbs, extend life.

I did not want to ruin your thought experiment, just to say that in given areas less than perfect could still be great. Now let's assume that we already did what we could there, and that there is no artificial intelligence smart enough to give us advice about the strategy the humankind should choose. What is next?

I vaguely object to the common practice of soliciting responses, and implying that the results will/may be meaningful, without simultaneously precommitting to a particular mapping of raw results to inferred meaning. (The precommitment can be done while keeping the mapping secret, by using a hash algorithm.)

Okay, I'll bite:

0) I'm not sure it's best that anyone exist at all, but for the sake of a post let's assume they should.

1) Assuming the resources (which seem to be implied in the ability to change the gender ratio in the first place) nix men entirely. I'm probably more skeptical than the average LWer that traditionally male pathologies are inherent to my sex, but there's a decent chance I'm wrong about that, so there's that. More importantly this gives public institutions veto power over the creation of new people in a way that isn't bodily intrusive.

2) People own their bodies; the state owns the means of production, which are rented out by cooperatives. Investment decisions are guided by prediction markets. Public goods are provided by the state on a universalistic basis. (This is assuming we still have to deal with scarcity.)

3) Raising children is a compensated service to the state, in principle not separate from other forms of market production. (More tightly regulated, obviously.) Reiterating my caveat that I'm more of a constructionist than the typical LWer, eugenic opportunities present themselves, as do opportunities for speeding up the destruction of ascribed ethnic status.

4) Legislators chosen by sortition, either from the general public or some sort of ascetic public service corps.

5) If we have the resources, Destroy Nature (but keep public gardens large enough to hike in.) If we can't get rid of most other animal life, at least get rid of factory animal farming.

I don't think this would be fully stable (I don't think I could endorse anything that would) and I don't doubt it would horrify plenty of people, but if I could press a button this is what I'd press it for.

Douglas Adams mouses

Mice.

We have probably barely tapped human potential in terms of education, dissemination of best practices, physical training, mental training, rationality training, diet, and drugs. These could make huge inroads into mental illness, motivation, learning, and thereby mental health and productivity.

I love it when someone asks the community for creative ideas. They're always interesting.

Without the possibility of technologic advancement, I don't really feel that utopia is a worthwhile goal. Every version just feels like stagnation, which bothers me. I don't see much point in life if everything's all planned out.

And any plan we could propose would eventually fall out of fashion unless measures were taken to prevent societal change. Some configurations are more preferable than others, sure, but in the end the deal is radical, unprecedented change, cyclical rise and fall of civilizations, or stasis. The last is boring, the middle is boring but commonly accepted, and the last is scary. Take out the scary and you have boring and more boring.

If we're going for stasis, I vote for some kind of enforced anarchy or nuking the world. Those are at least somewhat interesting.

Many of the utopias from the golden age of science fiction (long before nanotech) had recognisable humans, who were not immortal and whose robots were good butlers, at best. While for the sake of plot they generally had faster than light travel, that isn't actually a requirement for the human species to spread out to the stars.

If you'll grant sub-light interstellar travel, then all these become possible. Let groups bid on planets, set a pre-requisite that the group survive in a bio-sphere for 3 generations, as a test to see if their proposed society is sufficient stable to avoid shooting each other, then ship them off.

That then transforms the question into what sort of meta-Utopian society would support investing the time and effort required to mine the asteroids, set up massive solar powered anti-matter production factories, and keep seeding the universe generation after generation?

Given said technologies would also offer plenty of ways for individuals or small groups to blow up the Earth, it would need to be either a very tightly controlled one, or a very sane one. Or possibly both. Heavy investment into improving education, parenting (and possibly designer babies). And getting people used to lack of privacy and the goldfish bowl surveillance society.

Can that be done without changing human nature beyond existing parameters? Well, the boundaries of the current parameters are actually pretty wide: they include sealed nuclear subs, monastic communities, military academies with no privacy, and life-logging 24/7 facebook-blogging twitter-addicted web-cam-dorm residents.

*Reads limitations closely*

So super-MRI's and super-computers are fair game? That is fairly mundane tech. Then it only takes some fairly mundane tinkering with micro-neuro-anatomy to make uploads.

Otherwise...

Make humans more able to do stuff. More true to what humans want, for better or for worse. This ranges from more convenient biology to more convenient epistemological and motivational psychology.

Everybody is a bayesian genius with a perfect body who lives to be 200+ years old.

1. Take apart the earth, use it to build a fleet of smaller habitats that make use of the materials to generate maximum sustainable habitat space.

2. Distribute these habitats into combinations of nature preserve biomes, agricultural systems and urban centers.

3. All habitats should be given sufficient technological infrastructure to power all their life support with some extra. All habitats should have internet capabilities and backup stores of all human knowledge.

4. Redistribute the population of earth into their preferred habitat with the kinds of people they would prefer to be around, pole them if needed.This includes isolating ideologies that cannot abide any other ideologies away from other habitats.

5. Dedicate a small portion of habitats to ferry services that take regular routes between other habitats. Arrange routes so that individuals with ideological incompatibility are separated from those they cannot tolerate by longer routes.

6. Sit back and let the chips fall where they may. Live in a habitat with people of like mind, eventually die but know that humanity has been given a head start to interstellar colonization and the biospheres of earth have been preserved as redundantly as possible without dismantling any worlds beyond earth.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5dl/is_kiryas_joel_an_unhappy_place/

A possibility worth investigating.

Of course, the idea that there could ever be one utopia is an absurdity. People have different values and preferences and thrive under different circumstances. It is clear that Less Wrongers do not understand this, and therefore they should not be in the Utopia-business in the first place.

The people's nature will evolve anyway. As everything else. Having many billion people alive means, our genome acquires new bits every day. A fast biological evolution from now on, would just happen anyway.

During this time, I see no utopias possible. At least not for a longer time.

Human life, as life on Earth, is boring/pointless without the Singularity, from my point of view.

Sometimes I ask my postmodernist friend, who rejects and is horrified by the techno rapture of any kind, what is HIS utopia?

A better care for the nature, a lot of (Slovenian) culture ... then I am horrified!

Yes. No SAI, no nanotech, no Galaxy transformation .. makes me sick.

In this scenario I turn omnicidal. Human lives without hope in general are not worth living.

Diego, anything that improves the human condition is 'transhuman.' Cooking, Jethro Tull's seed drill, vaccination, education, human rights as a social convention.... We'll do the best we can within the constraints we face.

The point of this exercise is: The vast majority of folk not related to this community that I know, when asked about an ideal world, will not change human nature, or animal suffering, or things like that, they'll think about changing whatever the newspaper editors have been writing about last few weeks.

Or the number of posts per week by a certain overeager LWer from South America.