Last night I was back at the British Library for another Out of this World talk, this time discussing ‘Utopias and Other Worlds’, with a panel consisting of Gregory Claeys, Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the authors Francis Spufford and Iain M. Banks (with an M, as he was there with his sci-fi hat on…). Overall, it was a bit more of a generalised discussion of the topic than some of the previous Out of this World talks but overall it focused on what utopias and dystopias are, why we have them and how they’re reflected in literature, especially science fiction.
As we got round to audience questions, I posed the panel a question around the nature of utopias and dystopias, a kind of thought experiment to see which way they’d go on a given potential outcome of our society. It went a little something like this (a little less eloquently at the time, but forgive me my poetic license):
“Within the next one hundred to two hundred years, Humanity continues down its current path of environmental exploitation and destruction, leading to a catastrophic event which renders the planet largely inhospitable to human life. At the same time, we also invent a way in which to upload our conscious thought onto computers and, merging with artificial intelligences and so forth, create a digital paradise in which the “surviving” members of the human race can live on forever in total happiness, regardless of the damage done to the outside world. Would you say this was a utopia or dystopia?”
All the panel were in agreement that this scenario would be a dystopia, based on the fact that we’d caused widespread destruction to the planet and a significant proportion of humanity, mainly the poorer half, will have perished en route. Francis Spufford also argued that it would be a dystopia because humanity had lost all physical, or real, interactions with the outside world and each other and Banks, quite rightly, pointed out that those who did survive would just be total bastards. Claeys highlighted some of the gaps in my question and how it took a broad brush to a plethora of issues, about which he’s obviously correct but a) I thought this up about 30 seconds before I asked it, so give me a break and b) it’s my question, so I can assume whatever I like anyway.
Now, you’d probably agree with all of the above points (and so do I for the most part) but I think that although we may not like the circumstances in the situation’s arrival, it doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that it is a utopia. My basic justification for this is that the people who do survive get to live in a paradise and although it’s potentially a paradise for the few at the sacrifice of the many, it is still a paradise (although I didn’t actually specify in the question that we hadn’t managed to upload everyone before said disaster).
In Banks’ own utopia, the Culture, he talks about the fact that his vast civilisation made many mistakes along the journey to being the galaxy spanning wonderland that it is. Who’s to say that similar situations to the one above wasn’t one of them (apart from Banks, obviously)? You can’t make an omelette… right?
I suppose the definition of a utopia is that it’s defined by those outside that are perceiving it as such, rather than the theoretical (or otherwise) individuals who live in it. If you’re already living in one person’s idea of a utopia then the likelihood is that your idea of a utopia is somewhere else that you perceive to be better than your own situation. We currently live in a utopia by the standards of the entire of human history, however that doesn’t mean that we have to think it’s paradise. In my proposed world, those citizens of the digital paradise live in an all encompassing heaven, so by the assumptions set in the question, therefore they must live in a utopia of sorts from our perspective.
Also, I don’t think that dismissing their perception of “fake” reality as being any less true than our “real” one counts for much either way as, as is often spelled out in many science fiction novels, reality tends to be a blurry thing once you have more than one (am I a man dreaming of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of a man, for instance).
In summary, I think that I agree that all of the panellist’s main points about the situation that I laid out are totally valid and obviously the situation is a bad one, although I have trouble labelling it as either a utopia or dystopia though as I think it fails to be either. The situation is awful by nature’s standards, but humanity continues in a form (let’s not get into digital animals) so the situation isn’t a total nightmare scenario. If we assume that everyone got “copied over” at the start, then on a human scale the loss is a trade of one perception of reality for another. A dystopia for the natural world then, perhaps?
The citizens still have to live with the guilt of their actions from the previous “reality” and their circumstances are still under threat from external “real” forces, earthquakes etc, so the paradise is definitely tainted in some aspects. Mankind has a reasonably short memory for guilt though so perhaps they’ll get over it (well, I guess that goes with death, so with immortal computer people, who knows?). Maybe they’ll invent a way to get back “out” into the real world eventually and sort things out.
Ultimately, it goes without saying that I’m not suggesting we pursue the proposed course of action but I think that it’s an interesting way of showing that perhaps from some perspectives a utopia or dystopia isn’t necessarily what we might normally assume it is.
I do agree with Banks though, those digital citizens would definitely be total bastards.
No comments:
Post a Comment