I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the other day. It was pretty good, better than most ‘classics’ I’ve read. I probably liked it better than Nineteen Eighty-four as well, which it’s often compared to.
I found out later that Nick Bostrom explicitly used it as an example in some of his Existential Risk related writings, like this one, specifically, to illustrate what the ‘singleton’ or stable oppressive world government kind of existential risk may look like. If you aren’t too worried that you might generalize from fictional evidence, I’d say it’s worth a read if you somehow haven’t already.
Writing quality aside, I wouldn’t say Brave New World is more or less accurate than 1984. The former is an accurate first-world dystopia, the latter is an accurate second-world dystopia. (While Huxley was living in Hollywood, Orwell was fighting in the Spanish civil war for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.) It’s a nice coincidence that both are set in London.
I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the other day. It was pretty good, better than most ‘classics’ I’ve read. I probably liked it better than Nineteen Eighty-four as well, which it’s often compared to.
I found out later that Nick Bostrom explicitly used it as an example in some of his Existential Risk related writings, like this one, specifically, to illustrate what the ‘singleton’ or stable oppressive world government kind of existential risk may look like. If you aren’t too worried that you might generalize from fictional evidence, I’d say it’s worth a read if you somehow haven’t already.
I’ve previously pointed out that the BNW scenario is similar to many “eutopia” descriptions I’ve seen proposed by LWers.
Writing quality aside, I wouldn’t say Brave New World is more or less accurate than 1984. The former is an accurate first-world dystopia, the latter is an accurate second-world dystopia. (While Huxley was living in Hollywood, Orwell was fighting in the Spanish civil war for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.) It’s a nice coincidence that both are set in London.