The traditional and relatively superficial version of the purpose problem … [is] shallow redundancy … human occupational labor may become obsolete … The more fundamental version of the purpose problem [is] deep redundancy … much leisure activity is also at risk of losing its purpose. It might even come to appear as though there would be no point in us doing anything—not working long hours for money, of course; but there would also be no point in putting effort into raising children, no point in going out shopping, no point in studying, no point in going to the gym or practicing the piano… et cetera.Nick Bostrom, “Deep utopia“
1. Introduction
This is Part 3 of my series, Deep Utopia, discussing Nick Bostrom’s book of the same name. The book is structured around a series of six hypothetical lectures delivered by Bostrom himself on six successive days.
Part 1 discussed the first lecture, Monday. Monday’s lecture explored two inter-linked sets of questions: whether humans might work and earn incomes in the future; and what shape future human population dynamics will take.
Part 2 discussed the second lecture, Tuesday. Tuesday’s lecture discussed our cosmic resource endowment and barriers to reaping the full endowment.
Today’s post discusses the third lecture, Wednesday. Wednesday’s lecture is structured around two versions of the purpose problem of how we might find purpose in a solved world.
2. Shallow redundancy
The first threat posed by a solved world is shallow redundancy: human labor may become redundant and economically unnecessary. This would deprive us of an important source of meaning in many, though far from all current people’s lives.
What would we do when freed from the need to work? We might live out our basest instincts and spend our days brawling, stealing, overeating, drinking and sleeping late. And perhaps, Bostrom suggests, that would not be as bad as you think.
But we might also remodel society to find new goals. For example, instead of structuring education to train useful workers and docile citizens, we might structure education around the goal of developing flourishing human beings who make art, connect meaningfully with others, and study topics that bring them satisfaction. And more broadly, Bostrom suggests, we could reorient societal institutions away from their previous focus on efficiency and towards goals such as appreciation, gratitude, self-directed activity and play.
In particular, Bostrom suggests, we could set ourselves cultural goals such as promoting a society in which people care about one another, convene large and meaningful public happenings, and share a deeper public discourse about art, politics and other topics.
3. From shallow to deep redundancy
However, Bostrom suggests, a solved world threatens to make many activities beyond human labor redundant. Bostrom considers four case studies.
Shopping, an activity many enjoy, might be done automatically by robots or at least nearly so, with superhumanly good purchases being shown for our rubber stamping.
Exercising, a meaningful part of the day, could be replaced by pharmaceutical interventions or direct stimulation by nanobots.
Learning about subjects as diverse as philosophy, music and martial arts might be done by direct modification of the brain, rather than activities such as practice and reading.
Parenting might be done primarily by robots who are much better parents than us, and to the extent that we insisted on doing it ourselves, we might be harming our children.
Here the problem is that humans could become deeply redundant in many areas of life, so that not only meaningful work but also meaningful non-work activities could be threatened. What would be the point of learning or physical exercise when the same functions could be performed by a once-daily pill? Who would force their children to spend time with them when their children clearly preferred the company of the robot nanny, and learned more from the nanny to boot?
The threat of deep redundancy seems to present a paradox of progress. On the one hand, it seems clear that we should try to develop technologies that give us more of what we want. On the other hand, once we do this it seems that we will become terribly bored, or else passive recipients of narcotically delivered pleasures.
4. Solving deep redundancy
Bostrom thinks that five defenses could protect residents of a solved society against the threat of deep redundancy and thereby reduce or resolve the paradox of progress.
First, Bostrom argues, hedonic valence is important. You might think it would be terrible to be given everything you wanted, but if you really stopped to think about what this experience would feel like from the inside, you might change your mind.
Second and relatedly, Bostrom argues, we might retain experiential texture. Getting everything you want need not involve sitting on a couch watching television all day while connected to a chemical drip. It might involve experiences even more rich and varied than those possible today. And we would also have the freedom to spend most of our days having these experiences, instead of being chained to our desks and other encumbrances.
Third, we could seek autotelic activities that are pursued for their own sakes. For example, perhaps running a marathon just feels different from the inside, or is something we value more than being placed in a realistic marathon simulation.
Fourth, we could create artificial purposes. If Kant taught us anything, it is that humans have the ability to set our own ends, and that this act of taking something as an end can make it important for ourselves to reach, and for others to help us to reach.
Fifth, some activities might be socioculturally entangled in a way that prevents AI from fully displacing us from them. For example, perhaps we want gifts to be produced by the giver, or value handmade works of art.
5. Remaining matters
The chapter closes with three extended discussions of different matters.
The first is a handout on Nozick’s famous experience machine thought experiment. In this thought experiment, we are meant to imagine that someone is plugged into a machine and fed many hedonically rich experiences. We are meant to intuit that this would not be a good life, and thus that hedonism must not be the full story about human welfare.
Bostrom suggests that we should think carefully about what the experience machine really entails. It would not be enough to merely feed us streams of images, and probably not quite enough to trap us in lucid dreams. Many types of experience might require additional components, such as actual physical movement or interaction with others. Once we see this, Bostrom suggests, life in the experience machine may no longer seem so terrible.
The second discussion is a dialogue on the possibility that we are fictional characters in a book someone else is reading. It is discussed whether this would be possible, and if it were possible, whether we would be more likely to be fictional characters or real people. Moral implications of this possibility are also considered. This discussion is probably best read as a novel presentation of something in the vicinity of Bostrom’s simulation argument.
The final discussion is a series of two epistles by our friend Feodor the Fox, who returns to the question of how we could structure society to ensure a stable resource surplus. Feodor suggests in the first epistle that we could ensure a surplus if we limited the population and preferentially encouraged reproduction by individuals disposed towards cooperative behavior. The second epistle adds the suggestion that we might encourage altruism by finding an altruism-promoting mushroom and distilling it into a drug.
6. Valuable insights
Many parts of this chapter are quite philosophically strong. The distinction between shallow and deep redundancy is not always appreciated in discussions of meaning in a technological future. Indeed, these discussions are often phrased in terms of how we could find meaning in a world without work, which is just another way of posing the question of shallow redundancy. Turning our attention to deep redundancy is an important shift, and Bostrom’s case studies of how deep redundancy could creep into our lives are useful.
Bostrom also displays a surprisingly nuanced picture of what a flourishing human life might consist in and how it might be achieved. Set off as “Handout 9” are a rich variety of things that humans might do in a solved world:
Building sand castles, going to the gym, reading in bed, taking a walk with your spouse or a friend, doing some gardening, participating in folk dance, resting in the sun, practicing an instrument, playing a game of bridge, climbing a rock wall, playing beach volleyball, golfing, bird watching, watching a TV series, cooking dinner for friends, going out on the town partying, redecorating the house, building a treehouse with children, knitting, painting a landscape, learning mathematics, traveling, participating in historical reenactments, writing a diary, gossiping about acquaintances, looking at famous people, windsurfing, taking a bath, praying, playing computer games, visiting the grave of an ancestor, taking a dog for a walk, sipping a cup of tea, running a marathon, engaging in witty banter, watching a football match, shopping, going to a concert, protesting an injustice, having a picnic, going on a camping trip, eating ice cream, organizing a murder mystery game, playing with LEGOs, wine tasting, having a massage, learning about history, doing a silent retreat, taking drugs, getting your nails done, attending a religious ritual, keeping up with current events, interacting on social media, exploring virtual reality environments, kayaking, learning to fly a sports plane, gambling, pouring a martini, celebrating a holiday, researching your family tree, participating in a neighborhood clean-up, singing in a choir, meditating, carving pumpkins, swimming, solving a crossword puzzle, visiting friends, making love, driving in a demolition derby, biohacking yourself to optimize physical and mental performance, attending an amateur astronomy meeting, creating a time capsule, teaching a young person something you know, watching a sunset, going to a costume party, arguing about moral philosophy, judging a koi fish competition (“living jewels”), collecting antiques, attending a lecture… The list goes on.
Theorists of Bostrom’s ilk are often accused of having a relatively shallow conception of human flourishing, and some of those accusations will resurface when we take a look at Bostrom’s solution to deep redundancy. But this list shows an admirable richness, and that is to be commended.
7. A lackluster solution to deep redundancy
Although Bostrom does a good job motivating and posing the problem of deep redundancy, I don’t think he is as successful at solving it.
The first two defenses, which appeal to hedonic valence and experiential texture, are fairly classic ways of plunking for the old hedonist line that life in the experience machine would not be so bad. The extended discussion of what life in the experience machine might be like adds some new color to this discussion, but is still in a familiar vein, and one that many would like to go beyond.
The discussions of autotelic activities and artificial purposes are a good start. What is striking is just how short these discussions are. We can of course enjoy activities for their own sakes, and endow things in the universe with meaning and purpose, but it would be good to see a bit more wrestling with the obstacles to doing so in a solved world and then to hear a lot more about how we are to overcome those obstacles.
On the subject of autotelic activities, Bostrom is remarkably hesitant to commit to any examples and indeed holds that “finding clearcut examples of activities that are autotelic is … not quite as easy as one might initially think.” Bostrom does raise some familiar examples, such as playing games, but these are familiar, and Bostrom himself is not overly enthusiastic about their quality as examples of autotelic activites in a solved world.
On artificial purpose, Bostrom begins with a paragraph essentially repeating the point made about autotelic activities: that achieving a goal (like winning) within an activity (like football) can be adopted as a purpose. Beyond this, Bostrom does add some other ways to induce purposes, but they are rather unorthodox. We could, Bostrom suggests, use neurotechnology or other artificial means to induce purposes in ourselves. Or we could trap ourselves in situations, such as climbing a mountain with limited gear, where we had no choice but to adopt a purpose such as survival.
These are not paradigmatic ways of inducing meaningful purposes, and they are likely to be met with extended concerns about what it is to adopt something as a purpose in a way that gives you reason to pursue it and makes its attainment valuable. Kant, for example, thought that this could be done through the will, but certainly did not argue that reasons and value could be attached to goals by brain manipulation or by forcing someone to adopt a goal. If these are to be the routes to meaningful purpose, we need to hear a lot more about how they work and why we should accept them. For my own part, I would not like to live a life structured by purposes of this sort.
I am not sure what to say about the discussion of sociocultural entanglement. It is a bit short and largely repeats points from the previous day’s lecture. There is probably something to the idea that socioculturally entangled activities could retain meaning and importance in a solved world. Would they add meaning only at the margins of our lives, as for example when we had occasion to prepare a gift for a friend? Or would they suffuse meaning through most aspects of our lives, as we found ourselves spending many hours ever day engaged in socioculturally entangled activities? Bostrom’s solution needs something closer to the latter scenario, but he does not say anything that I can detect to motivate it.
8. Feodor and the dark side of transhumanism
Readers of this blog will be familiar with the tendency of some transhumanists to endorse uncomfortable solutions to society’s problems. In particular, many suggest that humanity’s fate could be improved if certain groups were encouraged to reproduce and others discouraged from reproducing. And they suggest that desired behaviors could be promoted through technological or pharmacological means, such as by manufacturing pills to promote socially desirable traits.
At the time of writing, Bostrom himself was suspended from his job at Oxford University pending an investigation into some similar views. The book itself is haunted by appearances of an unnamed Dean who clearly wishes Bostrom no good.
Wednesday’s epistles by Feodor come close to voicing some uncomfortable transhumanist opinions in the character of Feodor the Fox. Epistle 23 suggests that society’s problems could be solved by selective breeding for cooperativeness coupled with population control.
Feodor’s proposed way of implementing this program is coercive:
If somebody is cheating, they wouldn’t be allowed to have offspring, but the individuals who are more helpful and cooperative than average, they could have more offspring. Since we’ve assumed that we have a high degree of cooperation to begin with, people would mostly adhere to this agreement, and they would volunteer to help enforce it if there were any defectors. Each generation would be better at cooperating than the preceding one, and so there would be hope that the arrangement would stick.
This type of coercive eugenics is often viewed in a poor light.
The next epistle then suggests that those changes which eugenics cannot bring might be produced by pharmacological means. We could, Feodor muses, discover an altruism-promoting mushroom and refine it:
If we can develop a nontoxic cultivar that retains the pleasurable and empathogenic qualities of the indigen, preferably in a strengthened and enhanced form, then we could make the mushroom itself, or some extract from it, freely available to all the animals in the forest. Many would choose to use it, because of its euphoric potency, and they would then become more altruistic because of its empathogenic effect. While they are altruistic, they would be willing to make certain efforts and sacrifices for the common good, including helping with the implementation of the longer-term breeding program that is required to make our own natures more cooperative, and to prevent the evolution of drug resistance to the fungal compounds.
This is certainly not so shocking as Feodor’s previous proposal to implement a program of coercive eugenics. But it does suggest a continued enthusiasm for the kinds of wide-scale pharmacological efforts at promoting altruism and other traits which are often associated with some elements of the transhumanist movement.
Again, Bostrom did not directly say any of these things. But if Bostrom wanted to distance himself from these views, these epistles certainly would not be the way to do that.
9. Taking stock
Today’s post looked at the third lecture from Bostrom’s book Deep utopia. The lecture focused primarily on two threats to meaning and purpose in a solved world. Humans could be made shallowly redundant by becoming redundant in the labor market, or deeply redundant by becoming redundant in many activities, such as shopping and exercise, that previously brought purpose and meaning.
This is, as I have said, one of Bostrom’s philosophically strongest chapters, and the distinction between shallow and deep redundancy is an important contribution. We also saw that this chapter faces some challenges.
One problem is that Bostrom’s solution to deep redundancy is a bit lackluster. Bostrom begins by deepening standard hedonist solutions. Bostrom then introduces two promising solutions, but does not explore them in much detail. And Bostrom briefly offers a fifth solution that reads like an under-developed repeat of previous chapters.
Another problem is that Bostrom uses epistles by Feodor the Fox to allow Feodor to voice some uncomfortable views associated with transhumanism, including precisely the sort of views that Bostrom was under investigation for at the time of writing. The words of a fox are not proof of authorial intent, but allowing Feodor to voice these views is not an especially good way for Bostrom to distance himself from them.
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