88-word prècis

Superhuman AIs called the AMIs (advanced machine intelligences) run a fully-automated luxury communist economy for humans on 15% of the globe (mostly in dense megacities). The rest is a wildlife preserve.

Immortality is achieved by brain-computer interfaces that create a cloud-backup of your connectome. Disease and aging ended by biotech.

Fusion creates abundant energy.

You have a brain-computer interface that controls 2-3 helper-robots.

This creates a leisure society. It’s like living in a luxury hotel with room service and maid service.

Advanced transport including pods-in-tubes, vactrains, and flying-cars.

Hexbear will hate some stuff about this –

  • Techno-optimism. AI optimism
  • Individualistic, alienated culture
  • A hierarchy. AIs are superior to people in many ways

And things Hexbear will like –

  • Centralised means of production. AI Gosplan. Fully-automated luxury communism. There’s no money, no markets.
  • There’s no class hierarchy within humanity. Everybody lives in roughly equal luxury as a passive recipient of the fruits of the means of production (the Marxist definition of ‘class’ is ‘a person’s relationship to the means-of-production’)
  • Profit has become zero so capitalism can’t exist. Marx said profit is exploited human labour. Full automation = no profit.
  • Environmentalism. 85% of Earth is given to Nature. No animal agriculture.

If I create a world that you can’t decide if it’s utopia or dystopia, then that’s better art.

Brave New World illustrates how a world where abundance, pleasure, and luxury make life meaningless and holllow. Same here. But there’s a lot of perks too. Like Huxley, I’m leaning into the alienation. My tech-stack is very different; Brave New World has low-caste workers doing menial work whereas this world has inanimate machines.

This is the opposite of the solarpunk world (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in two ways –

  • The solarpunk world was heavy on decentralised unalienated labour. Things there were made by hand, and production has a lot of positive externalities like community-building and Right Livelihood. Here all the work is automated and humans are useless but materially wealthy.

  • The solarpunk world was frugal on energy. A watt saved is a watt earned. This world is the opposite: create energy abundance and just let 'er rip. There’s a theory that development happens by maximising energy throughput and not worrying much about efficiency. However, I will make some mentions of energy efficiency coz I couldn’t help myself.

Immortality in 250 words

Firstly, there’s biological immortality. Like a vampire, you don’t age or get sick. This is due to medical interventions that mop up senescent cells and the other hallmarks of aging.

But even youthful people can be killed in a violent accident. (This is rare because of good transport, strong architecture, good emergency services etc. Also, the skull is reinforced with titanium or carbon fibre or something.)

In those cases, your mindstream is kept going by putting it in a new cloned body. A cloned body is grown in a lab (this takes months), and the cloned brain is stimulated to replicate your connectome. Your connectome has been mapped by a neural lace.

I want people being people, unlike some post-Singularity visions. I don’t want them merging their minds into something digital. And there’s a scientific justification for this: digital information can be transferred between machines seamlessly (I typed these words on my machine and now they’re appearing on yours) (Claude E. Shannon’s 1948 paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ proved this), but the brain is an analogue computer. In analogue machines, the information is inseperable from the hardware. Only a cloned brain that is physically identical to yours can be you. You can’t sublimate into a VR world. You can’t directly transfer thoughts or skills or memories to another brain. This is explained here.

The experience of dying is: your flying car blows up. You wake up in a lab six months later, with memories intact as far as your latest cloud-backup.

Fully-automated luxury communism in 250 words

The AMIs (advanced machine intelligences) have designed a fully-automated means-of-production. Humans don’t have to work, either physical or mental work.

Cities are built by huge and small robots, giant 3-D printers, biomimetic self-assembly. Architecture by generative A.I.

Want some new clothes? Order it on your personal computer (described below) and it shows up at your door. Fashion design by generative A.I. You could even input a bunch of outfits you like and the generative A.I. would give you more of the same.

Hungry? Your auto-kitchen can cook for you at home, you can order delivery (from automated kitchens) or the cities are packed with restaurants and buffets. Culinary arts by generative A.I. The world feels a lot like a fancy hotel or resort.

Want a new gadget, toy, or product? Just order it on your computer. The software that runs the economy fulfills most requests. A request for a personal flying car or a mega-robot will likely be denied. No money changes hands; the request is either accepted or denied. (This suggests a plotline: what if one human finds her requests for 100-tonne megarobots, personal airships etc. are all fulfilled? Why her? The reasons of the AMIs are inscrutable.)

Want a tropical beach holiday? Those are a bit scarce; not even the AMIs can put 100s of millions of people on the Bahamas at the same time. But request it. You are free to request an apartment on the other side of the world, and things will be shuffled around if possible. Or you can request two weeks in a holiday resort –

A future post will describe one kind of robotic factory.

Transport

90% of people live in high-density cities. Everywhere the AMIs have built their cities, they have built tube-transport like in ‘Logan’s Run’

In that film you can’t see what type of track it is; let’s say it’s maglev as energy isn’t a priority, and a smooth, silent, luxurious ride is.

Electric micromobility to compliment that (all good cities have several ways of getting around):

Flying cars are used occasionally, especially in rural. They are generally not privately owned, more like robotaxis. They ionise air and expel it to generate thrust using technology developed by scientists in Wuhan in 2020. This is very energy-hungry (400 watts per kg) but exploring application of energy abundance is the point. This gives you an ion-drive or magnetoplasmadynamic flying car like I was trying to think about here. Here they are portrayed on screen –

This same tech could be used in a jetpack. I’ll try to download a picture from the multiversal interwebs for a future post.

For international travel, there is a global vactrain network. This will have its own post. It goes at 6000km/h around the world, replacing airports.

Hypersonic planes and futuristic cars are leisure-vehicles, there mostly for æsthetics.

Exoskeleton

Why use a vehicle at all? You’re in superb shape from bio-engineering, you can just run.

In fact, let’s go further… A top athlete can generate like 1500W from their body (1, 2).

If you could output 4000W you’d run like a superhero. Strap on an exoskeleton with tiny powerful motors, strong ceramics, advanced algorithms for smooth motion and intuitive control (it just reads what you’re doing and amplifies it), and hydrogen fuel (hydrogen’s an inefficient supply-chain but we don’t care about that, and is a superb weight-saver over batteries) –

There are exoskeleton-sports and non-exoskeleton-sports. It’s a leisure society so sport is important.

Nanotechnology

I could’ve gone the alternative route of drexlerian nano assemblers where everything is made with decentralized desktop fabs, but I chose not to. It would probably have been more realistic, because a civilisation with enough technological sophistication will understand how to manipulate atoms. This would make factories obsolete: production would be very decentralised.

Really pushing nano gets into weird territory and I wanted a more understandable world (same reason I don’t have digitised/uploaded minds). “One of the most remarkable figures calculated in Nanosystems is the power-to-weight ratio of the electric motor described in section 11.7. For comparison, a typical automobile engine might produce 100kW power. Drexler motors producing the same power would occupy a volume of a tenth of a cubic millimeter, about the same as a single hair from one of my eyebrows.” – A world where something barely visible can produce enough mechanical force to punch a hole right through me is weird to think about and scares me as an animal. Utility fog is weird to think about and changes everything.

Geography and Nature Preserves

The human population is nothing unusual; it’s between 8 billion and 11 billion.

Hugely increased population density, and most of the world left to wild nature.

90% live in dense cities. The general historical trend of urbanisation justifies this.

City population density = 25,000/km² (Comparable to Manhattan’s 28,873.0/km²)

  • 9 billion city-boys at that density = 360,000km² = the size of Germany is built up (spread around the world)
  • 1 billion rurals @ 130 per km² = 7.7 million km² = the size of Australia lives is rural human habitation (spread around the world)
  • Everything minus a Germany and an Australia is a nature preserve!

The Nature Preserves aren’t off-limits. You can camp there with permission and there are some lodges. Enter without permission and the AMIs will throw you out.

The cities are 90% park, 10% tall buildings averaging 24 floors in height. That gives the city a floor-to-area ratio of 2.4 to 1. It means each person has 96m² of floor space (and 36m² of park). Rather than being just vertical towers, they also have a lot of spaghetti-like tunnels and horizontal corridors in the sky.

No reason a city can’t be floating in the sea.

Personal computing and helper-robots (231 words)

You can draft commands using a simple brain-computer interface. These exist in Terra; people with locked-in syndrome can transcribe to computers at 78 wpm as of 2022. You confirm the command with a wave of your hand. (I might do a future post focusing on brain-computer interfaces; this is the simplest kind; the mind-state-backup is much more complex.)

You can use these commands to interact with a computer like you’re doing now. It’s simply a more advanced keyboard. You can text a friend, search for information, talk to a chatbot. You can also issue commands like ‘clean my room’ to your helper-robots. The robots have enough onboard smarts to take care of the details, though they are still well below human-level intelligence.

Different people have different robots. A typical example: one hexapod robot the size of a terrier, one 40kg humanoid robot, and a swarm of removedroach-sized robots too (useful for cleaning small spaces). Overall you have 50-80kg of robots under your exclusive command, wired to your brain, commanded by a thought + a wave of the hand. The effect is like an extension of your power to influence the physical environment.

Computer output consists mostly of a speaker embedded in your ear plus a contact-lens display. You can think messages, send them to your friend on the other side of the world, and she will hear them in her ear.

Culture

It’s an individualistic culture. The base (in the Marxist sense) doesn’t make you depend on other people. It promotes indulging your whims. If you want to flex your inner Calvinist, you can work hard at self-improvement. There’s no work to do, you could create art but A.I can do it better – as for science forget about it. A lot of people devote their lives to practicing Buddhism.

Does the luxury make you lazy and despondent? Maybe, but a counterpoint is that you’re biologically hearty, have a strong constitution.

You can choose to have children in the normal way (not pod-people like in Brave New World). But many people simply don’t. A low death rate often statistically corresponds to a low birth rate. Childrearing would be easy because you have loads of time and helper-robots.

There are reasons to expect loneliness and reasons not to. Bowling Alone attributes some to urban sprawl (solved), some to time-pressure (solved), and a lot to technology (exacerbated).

James C. Scott in his book on Zomia has a section about ‘The Advantage of Not Having a History’. What political forces shaped this world? How did we get from 2025 to here? Was there a resistance, and a massacre? Ask a citizen of the world and they won’t know; they don’t think about things like that.

Agriculture

Although there are a billion people living rurally, they don’t farm (except as a hobby). The food is made by the automated system. A lot of food (not all) is unicellular. GM yeasts can be programmed to produce any protein (that’s a scientific fact, not worldbuilding). Microalgae.

That might make it sound like you’re eating gruel without texture, but the robots know how to transform those base materials into excellent food. Every meal is fine dining, plus maybe one bowl of spiced flavoured porridge a day. This is nutritionally-optimised by advanced bio-medico-nutritional insights. Everyone is in superb health.

There are also greenhouses where vegetables etc. are grown under LED lights (energy is abundant, remember). This has the effect of saving land for the Nature Preserves. Cultured meat.

Energy

It’s mostly deuterium-deuterium fusion from seawater.

  • Fusing six deuterium atoms yields 43.225 MeV
  • Converting this to moles and megawatt-hours, each mole yields 193.05 megawatt hours
  • There are 33 grams of deuterium in every m³ of seawater
  • Number of m³ of seawater to use daily – There are 1.3 quadrillion m³ of seawater on earth = we can use 35 million m³ a day without running out of seawater for 100,000 years
  • Deuterium is extracted from seawater by graphene 1, 2
  • Number of megawatt-hours per m³ of seawater – 33×193 = about 6369, but lets call it 5600 after inefficiciencies.
  • 5600 × 35 million = 196 billion megawatt-hours per day. Divide that by the hours in a day = 8 billion megawatts

That’s not even counting other sources, like boron-fusion, solar, and geothermal.

So if the world population is 8 billion, you can use up to a megawatt per day. That’s where I got the personal megawatt idea. (Personal Megawatt also happens to be the name of my prog-rock band.)