Some tough questions for you about utopia (along with my very tentative and very likely wrong guesses for answers):
If you were attempting to design a true utopia for ten million people on an obscure island deep out in the ocean, and you had total control over institutions and unlimited money, but you could NOT change human nature or human psychology then:
(a) what would you hope people would spend their time doing in this utopia?
(b) how would you incentivize people to actually spend their time in these ways? (or would you just hope they would do these behaviors without actually incentivizing them)
(c) how would you prevent or reduce undesirable behaviors or feelings (e.g., extreme social hierarchy, people destroying the social status of others for amusement, infidelity, feelings of purposelessness or worthlessness, manipulation), or would you not try to prevent things like this?
(d) how would you allocate resources or determine who gets what?
(e) how confident are you that people would actually end up happy and fulfilled in the utopia you described, and that it wouldn’t leave people unhappy or rapidly implode?
My extremely tentative, very partial and probably quite wrong current best guesses for answers to these questions (for a near-term technology utopia) are:
I would hope that people in this utopia would spend their time forming and developing meaningful relationships with each other, helping each other be even happier, shaping themselves into the people they want to be, engaging in creative pursuits they find meaningful, having tons of fun, experiencing a great deal of pleasure and very little suffering, discovering new things, and persistently pursuing numerous projects that are designed to make society at large even better.
Basic needs and goods that are considered nearly universally valuable would be all provided free to everyone (e.g., clean water, comfortable clothes, healthy basic food, effective health care, psychological counseling, pleasant, spacious housing, internet, free education, a computer, access to information, enough income to buy a reasonable but not large amount of stuff, and free training on what is known about how psychology works and what makes humans happy).
On top of that, one possibility is for there to be an (only lightly) regulated market economy for people who desire to buy more than the basics.
There could also be a prize system offering hundreds of thousands of different prizes to give fame, prestige, credentialing, and extra money (at many different levels of prestigiousness and money award sizes) to people who made important contributions to the betterment of all, and a selection committee (with very carefully designed incentives and very strict selection criteria and an evidence-based approach) who would choose the recipients of the prizes based on their contributions. Basically, offering rewards in proportion to how much value people added to society. Other than these numerous prizes to reward behaviors that benefit society, and laws against hurting others, people could largely do what they want.
I have very low confidence, however, that this proposal would actually lead to a stable society. I’d need to spend hundreds of more hours thinking about this and discussing it with others to flesh it out and gain more confidence that it’s on the right track.
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