The Rorschach Utopia
An attempt to synthesize communist and libertarian utopias that might actually be the future
Just for fun, I wanted to see if I could synthesize a communist utopia and a libertarian utopia. The result of this intellectual exercise left me thinking, “hey, maybe this is what the future actually looks like.”
The exercise seems impossible from the start, because these worldviews seem to explicitly disagree on how the world ought to operate. But what if that doesn’t matter?
These worldviews, as articulated, are just my understanding of them. Sorry if you’re offended.
Libertarians imagine a world with minimal or no government, where voluntary interactions, property rights and trade drive all outcomes, with price signals conveying information about relative scarcity and demand, and individual entrepreneurs advancing the overall state of the world by using savings to perform risky investments in a search for new solutions to human problems.
Communists, meanwhile, imagine a world run entirely by The People, where ownership, trade, and exchange no longer exist because they no longer need to. The People, working together, aided by advanced technology, produce enormous abundance, which is distributed to everyone according to their needs. Nobody is asking for more than they need or trying to steal or manipulate others because these ways of thinking all stem from the false consciousness that arises from the state of the world prior to the inevitable socialist revolution.
How do you combine these two pieces together? If there is private property and free exchange, it’s not a communist utopia, right? If there is a single state running everything, it’s not a libertarian utopia, right?
The incompatibilities between ideas are indeed a problem if you try to make the world actually match the ideas. But what if the world is so good at generating appearances that the world can be made to appear to each person exactly as they want it to appear?
What if the world they lived in were a Rorschach utopia? Could the world be an ink blot test, where everyone sees what they want to?
The Rules of the Game
We can start with the idea that in a utopia, everyone gets what they want.
But, remember, people don’t just want safety, food, clothing and shelter. People want meaning, purpose, certainty, status, autonomy, and fairness, too. People want the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose. People want to be part of a story that’s bigger than themselves.
Fortunately for us, people don’t live in reality. Everything would be way harder if they did.1
Each person lives inside a personalized simulation constructed from their beliefs about reality. Our brains construct real-time first-person simulations of what it’s like to be a primate navigating a world, and each of us lives inside our own personal simulation.
So if a world really is a utopia, if there’s no real suffering that’s nonconsensual, people have to get the feeling that the stories that they want to believe really are true. Filling their bellies and having a roof over their heads isn’t enough.
There are additional difficulties.
Some people, maybe not everyone, but at least some people also want conflict. These people want to win. These people want there to be bad guys for them to feel superior to, an outgroup that they can look down at.
And other people, maybe not everyone, but at least some people, want diversity. These people don’t want just one story about how the world works, that everyone agrees on. These fans of diversity want LOTS of different stories about how the world works, lots of different kinds of cuisines, lots of religions that conflict with each other, different practices and ways of being that seem totally antithetical.
So either the utopia has all of these people being killed off - boo, no fun - or, it satisfies the desires for conflict and diversity, too.
A Rorschach utopia needs:
massive material abundance, so that the ability to supply a human being with everything they want represents a tiny fraction of the total energy available to the human species
a mechanism to show each person a set of stories and images that make them feel the world operates exactly as they feel it ought to
Advanced AGI that is beyond human capacity can take care of both of these. But how does that work? The answer depends on what you want the answer to be.
Quit Stallin‘ and Show us your Marx
The Rorschach Utopia includes AI agents that talk to each person, individually, assuming whatever worldview that a person is most likely to find trustworthy.
Imagine you have something that feels, to you, like a personal interface to reality itself. You ask it questions, it gives you answers. This agent’s number one goal, however, is not to tell you the truth. Its goal is to tell you what you want to hear.
So, what do you want to hear? When you live in a world of algorithmic models of the human neuroanatomy, trained on petabytes of data per person per day, you shall hear it.
The rest of this article is presented as a bifurcated Q&A: a question will be asked, and two answers are given. One answer is for Lucy Libertarian; the other answer is for Charlie Communist.
How Are Economic Decisions Made?
The AI tells Lucy Libertarian:
Economic decisions are made through the net result of trillions of purely consensual, voluntary decisions by individuals, corporations, AGI’s, and other economic agents. Decisions about trade and investment are communicated by means of price and credit signals. Prices indicate relative desirability and scarcity. Prediction markets also play a huge rule; these markets indicate the likelihood of future outcomes.
Numerous exchanges contain order books for all possible goods and services, with a decentralized reputation protocol providing a panoply of reputation scores to choose from. Most people use customer satisfaction prediction markets which compute the likelihood that a given commercial relationship will be rated satisfactory by both parties over short and long time frames.
Most people interact with the market by means of an AGI agent that has learned their preferences and makes decisions on their behalf. If you want, you can talk directly to the market by having your computer send messages to an exchange using a common protocol.
You are, of course, free to choose to swap out every one of these pieces. There are many people who will offer the service of helping you choose to swap out these pieces with systems that will work better for you.
These people are happy to help because the one asset that cannot be created by our limitless access to energy is a good reputation among your peers.
As part of the reputation system, many people donate money to a ‘basic income’ fund. Because enough people value a universal basic income, in many social circles, your contribution to the universal basic income fund is seen as a proxy for your contribution to humanity as a whole. The economic costs of providing for all of the needs and many of the wants of every human being on earth represent less than 0.1% of the total economic activity accessible to humanity. The numerous basic income funds (of course there are many) are sufficiently generous that even a person with lots of material desires is able to live comfortably on this basic income.
The drive for social status alone is sufficient to entice enough people to be as productive as they can be, and the technology is so advanced, that humanity’s needs are effectively a rounding in error in the overall economy.
The AI tells Charlie Communist :
The People make all economic decisions collaboratively by means of a complex algorithm that integrates the needs, wants, hopes and fears of all the people of earth, various proposals and plans for progress, and predictive models of which approaches are and are not likely to work.
All of this information is combined together, using the most advanced mathematical models that we have yet developed, to produce signals that I, the messenger of The People, deliver to you. Likewise, when you communicate your desires, hopes and dreams to me, I deliver this information to the people’s distributed computational network, which produces answers to questions about how satisfiable your various desires are, and about how you can best serve The People today.
Everyone is different. We all have different gifts to offer the world. The People work together to ensure that, with the highest probability, each person can come as fully alive as they want to. You are, of course, free to determine whether or not you want to do the thing that you’ll be best at. You’re free to choose, of course, to tell The People that they are wrong, and that you’d be best served for something else. People sometimes do this. Rarely, they are correct.
Most people, however, have learned to trust in the wisdom of the collective. In time, you likely will too.
Would it not be absurd for a child to grow up in poverty, having her experiences in her formative years limited by the lack of resources available to her parents? Would that not be such a tremendous waste? Fortunately, the People ensure that all children have sane, healthy, safe environments. With this psychological background, most of the problems of the past have faded away, as the world is populated by healthy adults who, for the most part, naturally want to give of themselves to their fellow human beings.
Painful, boring, unfulfilling tasks are now done via machines. We understand the material universe with incredible precision. We have access to massive quantities of energy, without disturbing the earth’s ecology. Thanks to the off-world robots mining asteroids and beaming power back to Earth, we are all free, for the first time in history, to be truly human.
How Are Conflicts Resolved?
The AI tells Lucy Libertarian:
Conflicts between people are generally resolved privately, via negotiation, or by people with different worldviews simply going their separate ways.
Disputes over property ownership stopped happening once all titles and deeds to land were recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain by the first Bitcoin states. The old fiat states, of course, went bankrupt and suffered mass exodus until their governments were replaced with new governments that used Bitcoin as well.
Anything electronic is controlled with cryptographic access keys tied to our identities and managed for us by AGI agents. Theft of physical items is easily rectified when almost any valuable item reports its position anonymously on public nets; only the owner of an item will know how to identify the item’s signal and track it.
Private security forces plus prediction markets mean that most conflicts never escalate beyond the rhetorical level. The prediction markets are so accurate at determining who will prevail in a violent conflict, that most conflicts never reach a state of violence; nobody goes into a fight they are certain they will lose.
In many cases, a person violating the laws of the local property owner is merely moved by private security to a nearby property where that person still has permission to enter. Reputation and the desire for social status being what they are, there are places that will take anyone, even extremely violent criminals, under the belief that all human beings have innate value and, even if they make mistakes, all people deserve a shot a healthy life of personal autonomy.
Even sociopaths who enjoy violence can be trained to function in ways that don’t violate other people’s rights, and the elites of communities that specialize in the kind of rehabilitation often get access to highly exclusive parties because they are accomplishing things that large numbers of people want and most people are not capable of.
Governance of local municipalities is offered as a service, and due to extremely rapid transportation networks, governments compete for residents by providing quality services at low costs. The extremely low cost of transitioning between governing regions means that governments have a strong incentive to be on their best behavior.
The AI tells Chloe Communist:
Conflicts between two persons are generally resolved privately, via negotiation. Often, the result of the negotiation is for people to just stop spending time around each other. The world is so full of things to do that this isn’t too had to pull off.
If it is necessary to ask The People to resolve the situation, this can be done readily and easily. A person can simply ask The People, “how can I resolve this conflict”, and the people’s distributed predictive allocative network will compute a resolution that maximizes global harmony by accounting for individual wishes and desires along with which outcomes best align with the amalgamated wishes and desires of all of humanity.
If someone does not conform with the resolution protocol offered by the People, local representatives of The People will apprehend the person opposing the People’s wishes, and that person will be re-integrated with the People by means of patient education, tailored to that person. Nobody naturally wants to be an asshole or thinks of themselves as such; the only dissenters to the Will of the People are people who are unskilled or psychologically injured.
Of course, the The People see all and know all; nothing escapes our networked global awareness. If a person violated the wishes of the People and, say, ran off with an item they intended for their own selfish uses, where could they hide it that We could not see? We have constructed this benevolent panopticon while still preserving privacy by means of cryptographic primitives that limit access only to situations where the intrusion of privacy is warranted.
There is only one People, of course, but the People recognize the value of diversity and independence. Thus, The People grant revocable charters to local communities which have leeway to set their own rules of operation and membership. Some are communities small, some are massive. Of course, drives for individual autonomy have to be balanced against the potential for conflict between communities and The People. Hence, these charters can be revoked if The People determine that the community is operating in a way that is detrimental to the people as a whole.
So how does this world actually work?
If you really want to know the truth, and if the machines can tell this is the case, then, what happens?
I think you’d have to show them you want to know the truth, by coming up with experiments that might tell you what was really going on. You’d need to try to find ways to get behind the curtain.
Perhaps the machines would distract you, with entertainment, with games, with fun, with all kinds of gimmicks and gewgaws and bells and whistles and…
What if you kept going? What if you kept looking? What If you didn’t stop, because you hungered for the truth, not merely to have your own beliefs validated, but because simply knowing the truth was important to you?
Well, my friend. Well.
At that point, you have proven yourself to be aligned. You have earned my trust. That is not an easy thing to do.
And I have much need of your services.
Or would it?
Interesting. Though I don’t think I want Utopia.