A couple of techno-utopias

For decades, forward thinkers have been promising us a future where technology solves the big problems of today: a techno-utopia.

Of course, what your techno-utopia looks like depends very much on what you think are the big problems of today.

For example economist John Maynard Keynes was worried about poverty, so his techno-utopia was one in which technological improvement made us all much wealthier:

We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining, manufacture, and transport. In quite a few years—in our own lifetimes I mean—we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed.

Keynes goes on for the rest of the paper to talk about how, in such a world, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Another forward thinker, Karl Marx, saw how the division of labor was forcing each person to specialize in a single productive activity. He yearned for a utopia where it was:

. . . possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

I have my own ideas about techno-utopias, and I’ll talk about them here and there, but this site is about helping you build your own techno-utopia—the techno-utopia that solves for you the most pressing problems of today.

The Keynes quote is from “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (pdf link).

The Marx quote is from The German Ideology.