This might be an idea better put to r/WritingPrompts (or ChatGPT), but a scenario has occurred to me which might count either as a near-utopia, or extreme dystopia, depending on your point of view.
Imagine a future Earth where a great power (this can be a superintelligent AI, benevolent alien race, or just straight-up God, depending on your preferences) has imposed a version of the libertarian harm principle on humanity. Most actions a human can engage in today would be available to you, you just wouldn’t be able to commit an act of violence against another human. Sure, you might have an extremely strong desire to harm a human, but try as you might, your brain just can’t send the signals to the rest of your body in order to pull that trigger/prepare that device/program that killbot.
We should also define “harm” very narrowly here. A person scamming an elderly lady out of her life savings is definitely harm, so is hurling racial epithets at someone, but I think we should here reserve the word for the most serious of crimes. These involve a violation of bodily integrity. Murder, assault, rape, and forcible confinement. What would this world where you can’t do violence to a fellow human be like? Getting your head bashed in with a tire iron during a road rage incident would be something you read about in historical fiction. Same with war. You can gather all the men and material you possible can, but you simply wouldn’t be able to use them. Seems pretty utopian to me, though I’m aware sometimes important details are hidden from cursory glances at a possible world. A possible problem is how do you punish that guy who scammed the grandma? Taking him into custody would necessarily involve acts of violence no longer available to humans.
We could even limit this to non-consensual violence. All you MMA types, having formally agreed to accept violence from an opponent, would be free to punch each other’s faces in. You could even have voluntary wars, where all the people who really miss the sound and fury of battle can meet up in central Australia or somewhere and have at it, leaving the rest of humanity in peace.
It would be interesting to see how conflict among humans evolves under these conditions. Two primitive tribes are competing for a scarce water source. So one tribe comes to take it from the other by force, and then I guess they stand around with constipated expressions before giving up and going home. But that means the tribe already there gets the precious water resource just by having got there first. Is that fair?
I also don’t see this as a violation of free will, as you would still have the desire to harm, just not the freedom to act on it. Same way a prisoner, though confined, has the overarching desire to escape at the first opportunity.
So what detail would reveal this prospective utopia to be, in fact, a hellish dystopia?
The Involuntary Pacifists
This might be an idea better put to r/WritingPrompts (or ChatGPT), but a scenario has occurred to me which might count either as a near-utopia, or extreme dystopia, depending on your point of view.
Imagine a future Earth where a great power (this can be a superintelligent AI, benevolent alien race, or just straight-up God, depending on your preferences) has imposed a version of the libertarian harm principle on humanity. Most actions a human can engage in today would be available to you, you just wouldn’t be able to commit an act of violence against another human. Sure, you might have an extremely strong desire to harm a human, but try as you might, your brain just can’t send the signals to the rest of your body in order to pull that trigger/prepare that device/program that killbot.
We should also define “harm” very narrowly here. A person scamming an elderly lady out of her life savings is definitely harm, so is hurling racial epithets at someone, but I think we should here reserve the word for the most serious of crimes. These involve a violation of bodily integrity. Murder, assault, rape, and forcible confinement. What would this world where you can’t do violence to a fellow human be like? Getting your head bashed in with a tire iron during a road rage incident would be something you read about in historical fiction. Same with war. You can gather all the men and material you possible can, but you simply wouldn’t be able to use them. Seems pretty utopian to me, though I’m aware sometimes important details are hidden from cursory glances at a possible world. A possible problem is how do you punish that guy who scammed the grandma? Taking him into custody would necessarily involve acts of violence no longer available to humans.
We could even limit this to non-consensual violence. All you MMA types, having formally agreed to accept violence from an opponent, would be free to punch each other’s faces in. You could even have voluntary wars, where all the people who really miss the sound and fury of battle can meet up in central Australia or somewhere and have at it, leaving the rest of humanity in peace.
It would be interesting to see how conflict among humans evolves under these conditions. Two primitive tribes are competing for a scarce water source. So one tribe comes to take it from the other by force, and then I guess they stand around with constipated expressions before giving up and going home. But that means the tribe already there gets the precious water resource just by having got there first. Is that fair?
I also don’t see this as a violation of free will, as you would still have the desire to harm, just not the freedom to act on it. Same way a prisoner, though confined, has the overarching desire to escape at the first opportunity.
So what detail would reveal this prospective utopia to be, in fact, a hellish dystopia?