Protopia

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For over a decade I have been talking about protopia, but I have never written out my description of it. What follows is my best case for this idea, which I first coined in 2011.

Protopia is a plausible, desirable future, marked by small measures of improvement. It is positioned in contrast to a utopian future at one extreme and a dystopian future at the other.

Utopia is that mythic future that has no, or at least, reduced problems. The idea is that through our collective efforts we can eliminate the fundamental causes of problems in life. Maybe through the powers of AI we can identify and correct the ailments and inadequacies of current processes, and over time overcome basic problems like scarcity, inequality, conflict, and even accidents. The scale of problems would decrease over time. The results for humans would be both levels of prosperity unknown previously, but importantly, a world crowded with benefits and diminishing new problems. Yet the prospect of utopia is both impossible, and also undesirable. Undesirable, because it would become boring fast. A utopia embeds a uniformly optimized value, but one person’s utopia will become another person’s prison. We are fickle beings, constantly changing what we think is most important.

Utopia is also impossible because it is friction which propels progress. Without the pressure of new problems, there is little reason for advancement. Some people think of utopia not as a destination but as an ideal, but even that is misleading because utopia ignores the inherent tradeoffs in every benefit. We don’t get better without also earning some new problems. Problem-free is a stagnant death zone, and nothing we should aim for.

At the other extreme, we have dystopia – a world of all problems. No sane person wants dystopia, yet when we are asked to imagine the future, the images that come most easily to us are dystopian. It’s reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black…