For almost 200 years, a spectre stalked Europe: utopianism. Fired in the embers of the French Revolution, then fanned by socialists and communists, the idea of a man-made paradise reached its apotheosis in the Sixties when the hippies promised a blissful new world — one filled with free love and strong pot.
By the Nineties, the project slumped into embarrassing failure, from the end of modernist town planning to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The results of the 20th-century experiments were stagnation, famine, gulags, censorship, and eugenics.
Unfortunately, the Californian counter-culturists who fled the collapse of the Sixties dream and found refuge in Silicon Valley didn’t get the memo. Locked in their rooms, with their rudimentary computers, they set about creating a non-earthly utopia. They dreamed about other worlds and other intelligences, fusing anarchism with New Ageism and libertarianism with science fiction.
So began the tragi-comic rebirth of utopianism. Since then, the ideology has evolved with the growth of AI and cybernetics. It is now mainstream right across the tech world, with adherents including tech guru Ray Kurzweil, and billionaires Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Today’s pioneers of repeating-the-past predict a future of unbounded technological and economic growth.
The “Tech Utopians” have two main projects. The first is abundance: an end to poverty, hunger, sickness, and back-breaking labour. This will supposedly be achieved through vast social engineering projects, masterminded by an elite class, and with the aid of genius machines.
The second is the improvement of humans through scientific progress. A perfect “blank slate” human will be created for utopia 2.0, and they will be morally, intellectually, and physically enhanced. Humans won’t just be cured of illness. They’ll be cured of mortality itself.
These ideas, however, are hardly new. They appeared in nascent form as far back as Plato. Then, during the Enlightenment, they grew stronger, with the promise of a blank-slate society built upon rationalism and science, in which a better type of human would emerge. Today’s Tech Utopians, though mostly claiming to be libertarians, are attempting the same projects — only this time they plan to use AI and biotech to achieve their goals. Elon Musk, for one, envisages a “future of abundance” once AI reaches human-level intelligence (so-called AGI).
“Humans won’t just be cured of illness. They’ll be cured of mortality itself.”
At the moment, there is a split between so-called libertarian accelerationists (like Musk and Peter Thiel), the technocrats (like the late Klaus Schwab) and the Left-accelerationists (like Aaron Bastani) over the question of how exactly abundance will be brought about. At one extreme, you have Bastani’s Left-accelerationist “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, with its vision of a robotics-enhanced society, with Universal Basic Income and free housing, food, education, electricity and healthcare for all. On the other you have Thiel and the Effective Accelerationism plan to destroy all bureaucracies and to replace democracy with a “cognitive elite” of tech specialists who will rule autocratically over newly formed city states.
Uniting the two sides is the idea that the abundance problem will be solved by complex-systems analysis, powered by exponentially growing AI superintelligence.
Is this progress? Alas, no. Even in 1810, French socialist Charles Fourier envisioned a vast “calculating machine” that could solve all human problems. This machine would organise labour, reward undesirable work with tokens, and even assign optimal sexual partners for better offspring and enhanced pleasure. In this way, the “machine calculante” would ensure universal happiness. Perhaps not incidentally, Fourier also believed that his perfect society could turn the sea into lemonade by using gigantic parabolic mirrors to focus moonlight on the waves.
Fourier’s ideas may have been insane, but they were part of a growing faith in the ability of “systems” to deliver harmony and abundance. These ideas were tested in the many agrarian socialist collectives of the 1880s, and then later in the planned economies of communism. Within the USSR, for instance, there were repeated attempts to link military computers with civilian ones, to make a totalising “Automated System for State Planning”.
The National Socialists also hoped to realise their dream of an abundant New Germania through calculation. Hitler himself envisaged a Crimea rich with fruit and cotton, and a Black Sea inexhaustibly full of fish. Yet Hitler’s fantasies had darker echoes too: according to one historian, the Nazis worked with IBM to devise a computer system that organised the transport of millions of people to the gas chambers.
When Tech Utopians tell us that AI will guarantee abundance, then, they are unwittingly pushing us back into the dangerous utopian delusions that emerged from the 19th century — and that failed so catastrophically in the 20th century.
Some might argue that the reason utopia failed in the past was that we didn’t have a super-intelligent computer. Now that we’re close to creating one, all our problems will soon be solved. But such an argument is built on the fallacy that humans are no more than rational beings in cages of flesh. Therefore, all interactions can be planned, all diseases cured. This couldn’t be more wrong.
Then there’s the question of improved humans. If you’re going to create a perfect society, you need to enhance people, or else they will bring with them all of the flaws of biology and history — suffering, jealousy, hatred, genetic sickness. As American transhumanist Zoltan Istvan said: “Death is the first major challenge for the species to overcome to truly transcend our biology. There’s nothing in the way out there saying we must continue to die.” Meanwhile entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, who is working on a technology called “Mindcloning”, says: “We’re able to put into computer form people’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs attitudes and values and keep them alive in a cyber form, looking forward to the future when their minds might be able to be downloaded back into a regenerated human body.”
In a similar spirit, Tech Utopians are now pushing for CRISPR DNA improvements in babies to prevent genetically inheritable diseases, such as sickle cell disease. The next step, for some, is “designer babies” — which, while legally controversial, is now technically possible.
Meanwhile, the transhumanists intend to use AI, genetic engineering, bio-tech, and cybernetics to create a post-human species which will overcome ageing and disease. Transhumanist leaders such as Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, co-founder of Humanity+, now form a powerful belief-core inside Silicon Valley.
And then there is Musk, whose company, Neuralink, is experimenting with new technologies like Brain Chip Interface (BCI), which enables direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and computers. Musk hopes to implant surgically installed brain chips into millions of people within a decade. He and his acolytes believe these enhanced human subjects will soon be able to communicate telepathically and download knowledge in an instant. Eventually, they insist, we will see a merger of human consciousness with superintelligent AI, allowing us to achieve digital immortality.
Are these utopian technologies leading us forward? Once again: no. Rather, they are regressing back to dogma found in Plato’s Republic, where selective breeding is proposed to create the “guardian class” of philosopher-kings to run the ideal society.
There are even echoes of Stalin’s scientists, who sought to achieve a breakthrough in human evolution in the form of the “New Soviet Man”. To this end, Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a super-strong human-chimpanzee hybrid, while Alexander Bogdanov sought immortality through blood-transfusion experiments. It’s an experiment that we’ve recently seen repeated by “longevity biohacker” and transhumanist guru Bryan Johnson, who took blood from his teenage son in the attempt to stay young.
This is not the only poignant parallel. Nikolai Koltsov, a Soviet-era biologist, developed eugenic “sperm banks for geniuses”. Nowadays, one of the goals of transhumanist organisation Humanity + this decade is to use technology “to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”.
Such connections are arguably not coincidental but causal. According to tech historians and activists Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, leaders of the AGI movement “subscribe to [a] set of ideologies which have emerged from the modern eugenics movement and therefore have inherited similar ideals”. They say that the Tech Utopians are guilty of discriminatory attitudes around racial differences in IQ, and that the Tech Utopian goal is “to create a superior being akin to a machine-god”, a process which is resulting in experimental technological “systems that are unscoped and thus unsafe”.
There is evidence for this in the degree of suffering caused in the Brain Chip Interface experiments. Neuralink is currently under federal investigation for the claim that 1,500 animals died during surgical BCI experiments, with the company accused of “causing needless suffering”, related to “Musk’s need for speed research”.
The transhumanist mission will inevitably require a large number of human test subjects. After all, Tech Utopians, with their belief in “long termism”, tend to view short-term sacrifices as essential to the attainment of their transcendent future goals.
Yet as history shows, utopianism always demands its blood sacrifices in the name of the distant paradise. It excludes those deemed unworthy, or it uses them as its lab rats in the name of “improvement”. In other words, today’s Tech Utopian visions aren’t about progress. They are a regressive repeat of history, born out of a wilful blindness to the past. We are accelerating backwards into preventable disasters we thought we had left behind.
