Ideas - Techno-Utopia or the Billionaires’ Wet Dream

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Tech billionaires are on a mission to make the stories of science fiction a reality: space colonization, human/machine bio organisms, and living forever in a state of unhindered bliss. To most of us, this version of a far future utopia comes off as "billionaire boys and their toys" but critics say such a dismissive attitude is naïve. 

It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle

and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. So we become post-human then we spread into space colonize the universe and create this

sprawling multi-galactic civilization where there are trillions and trillions of super happy people who basically live forever. It's the techno utopia of the far future and it's just beyond our grasp. The leap to this wondrous existence, this vast and glorious future among the stars will only be possible with the creation of super intelligence. It's long been thought that the outcome of super intelligence will either be total annihilation or the superintelligence

will usher in utopia. We've read this book before and seen the movie too, except it's no longer just fantasy. Turning the idea of a far future of superintelligence, post-human life, space colonization, and never-ending pleasure into a reality has real power and money behind it. And believers want creating this utopia to be a priority. There are various reasons why I think that this promise of techno-utopia could itself be really dangerous. The perfect world had a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this. The peak of your civilization. And I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is of of course, what this is all about. Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa delves into the ideologies driving the push to make real what most of us think of as science fiction. Techno-Utopia or the billionaire's wet dream. God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden and humankind has been yearning to return to Utopia ever since. True or not, it does feel like a tidy metaphor for our collective preoccupation with creating the best of places.

Calliopolis, the island of Utopia, Shangri-La, the virtuous city Ikari, Paradise. The word Utopia is based on the Greek word topos, meaning place or where. The U comes from the prefix OU meaning no or not. Utopia was coined by the philosopher and statesman Thomas More in his book of the same name, published in 1516. He also published a poem called Utopia with an EU, meaning happy land or good place. Over time, utopias come to refer to a non-existent good place. Scan the literature and you'll find utopias of all kinds, socialist, capitalist, feminist, racist, fascist, all of them built on some notion of the good life in the right place. Utopias always throw into relief the things wrong with how we live right now.

They're a response to that eternal yearning for a place where none suffer and everyone is happy. This is also the goal of a group of techno-utopians led by billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. They see their vision of a far future utopia not just as a set of abstract ideas, but as both something necessary and achievable. My name is Dr. Emil P. Torres, and I'm a philosopher and historian whose work over the past 10 or 15 years has focused on threats to humanity and civilization. Torres is a philosopher of existential risk and a research fellow based at Case Western

Reserve University. So this is a term that actually was coined within a movement called transhumanism. And a key part of the transhumanist division is that we're going to use, develop advanced technology and then use this technology to radically re-engineer the human organism. And the result of doing this will be the creation of a new superior post-human species that will usher in a kind of post-human utopia. So the idea of existential risk is supposed to refer to any event that would prevent us from realizing this techno-utopian future.

Existential risk studies is a relatively new discipline emerging just a couple of decades ago. The field focuses on the ethical implications of calamities that could potentially lead to human extinction. Torres says the rapid development of AI technologies has amplified conversations about existential risk since advances in technology bring the techno-utopian future just that much closer. And so the conversation about existential risk,

I think, has become much more prominent, has gained a lot more visibility over the past just a couple years, really since ChatG GPT was introduced in November of 2022 by OpenAI. And that got a lot of people sort of concerned that we may be on the verge of creating AI systems that are as intelligent as us. So these systems are called artificial general intelligence. And artificial super intelligence is a special kind of artificial general intelligence. Namely, it's a system that doesn't just perform as well as humans, but performs better in every cognitive domain of interest. So scientific discovery, technological innovation, social manipulation, so politics and so on. So all of this is to say that the creation of

Chet GBT got a lot of people worried about the possibility that we're on the verge of creating artificial superintelligence. And it's long been thought that the outcome of superintelligence will either be total annihilation, superintelligence will kill everyone on earth as an unintended consequence of its value system, or the superintelligence will usher in utopia. So the first scenario would be an existential catastrophe, right? Because that would foreclose the realization of the creation of this sprawling multi-galactic civilization in the future that is full of astronomical amounts of value. And so if we are able to neutralize the existential risk of artificial super intelligence, then the most probable

outcome will be utopia. And so this is why many people in the transhumanist, or more generally, the tesquialist movement are so interested in super intelligence. And I think this is why the idea of existential risk has gained so much visibility and has become a topic of widespread discussion over the past few years. Transhumanism is a movement, philosophical and intellectual, that believes in creating better humans through technology. Conquer the need for sleep, live to 120, reverse your chronological age, connect your brain to a computer, and acquire superhuman cognition. So I should say that for many years, I was quite sympathetic with transhumanism and would

have considered myself to be a transhumanist. A lot of my work focused on thinking about the nature and potential causes of existential risk scenarios. But more recently, I've become quite critical of it. And so I think that transhumanism and the existential risk framework in general is fundamentally misguided and perhaps even really quite dangerous. Transhumanism, not to be confused with transhumans, which is a type of nomadism, is the T in Tescreel, an acronym coined by Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru. It stands for a set of overlapping ideologies that sit at the heart of the techno-utopian vision. Those ideologies are transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism,

affective altruism, and long-termism. So a lot of big clunky polysyllabic terms. But these ideologies overlap very significantly in terms of, for example, their vision of the future, their various commitments to the development of technology, their understanding of history as a kind of march of progress driven by technology and science towards increasingly better states. And if all goes as planned, this trend will continue into the future and we will create this sort of utopian world among the literal heavens. And they have become hugely influential among some of the most powerful people in the world. So Elon Musk, for example, is a transhumanist who also explicitly

refers to long-termism as, quote, a close match for my philosophy. Sam Altman is very much a part of the effective altruist and rationalist communities who is also a transhumanist. and rationalist communities who is also a transhumanist. And he's made claims that are very closely aligned with the long-termist ideology. The long-termist ideology essentially says that what we ought to do is not just re-engineer the human organism, but to colonize space as soon as possible and to build literal planet-sized computers spread throughout the universe on which to run virtual reality worlds in which you could have trillions and trillions of digital people living happy lives. So this is the ideology that Elon Musk aligns himself with. So a lot of people listening might initially find these ideologies to be

basically a non-starter, quite off-putting or just very implausibly fantastical. But these views are accepted by super powerful individuals. People who are shaping the world right now and who will continue to shape the world that we live in in the coming decades, maybe centuries. So one way to think about the Tesquerelle bundle is that transhumanism is the backbone of this bundle. So all of the other ideologies sort of emerged out of the transhumanist movement. LWT Taurus says TASCREEL is a useful acronym because it lays out the ideologies in roughly the way they appeared over the last three decades, with transhumanism being the first and long-termism being the last.

MG So really, transhumanism is the oldest idea that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century. And then extropianism was the first modern transhumanist movement that was organized. There was an institute, the Extropian Institute, that was the epicenter of the extropian community. And then it was Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism. Rationalism, which is basically this ideology that says, okay, if we're going to create utopia, we're going to need a lot of really smart people doing really smart things, quote unquote. So maybe it's worth taking a step back and trying to figure out the best way to optimize our smartness. So rationalism is about best way to optimize our smartness. So rationalism is about studying cognitive biases in order to neutralize them, trying to figure out ways to increase our rational capacities in order to be

better positioned to facilitate the realization of this technological utopia. And then really, long-termism is sort of the galaxy brain that sits atop the testicle bundle with transhumanism as the backbone, because it really binds together a lot of the themes and ideas that are found in these other ideologies. So like I said before, it is transhumanism plus. It says, yes, in order to fulfill our long-term potential in the universe over the coming millions, billions, and literally trillions of years, we will need to become post-human. And ultimately, we will very likely have to not just merge with technology, but completely replace our biological substrate with something technological, maybe

computer hardware. So one way of doing this is to upload our minds to computers. And then we could live as digital beings, either embodying an Android, a robotic kind of physical body in the physical world that we live in right now, or we can live as digital beings in a simulated world. that we live in right now, or we can live as digital beings in a simulated world. And once we become post-human, then we have this moral obligation to go out and colonize as much of the universe as possible. And by colonizing the universe and creating a larger and larger future population, then we will be able to maximize the total amount of value that could exist in the universe. So the more people there are living in these vast computer simulations,

running on planet-sized computers, the more possibility there is for happiness or pleasure or whatever else one takes value to be. So that's long-termism. It really pulls together a lot of the key themes and claims of the other ideologies. This bundle of ideologies sounds a lot like a thought experiment, but Torres, once a true believer, is truly alarmed not just by the ideas, but also by who's adhering to them. There are a number of reasons why I think the test grill worldview is problematic and could potentially be very dangerous. One has to do with its minimization and trivialization of current day problems. So if you take this grand cosmic view of humanity's

position in space and time, so you imagine here we are 13.8 billion years since the big bang, what lies ahead of us is far, far greater expanse of time than what has come before. So literally trillions and trillions of years. The universe isn't expected to become uninhabitable to beings like us for another 10 to the 100 years. So that's a one followed by 100 zeros. It's a really, really long amount of time. So what lies in the future is potentially an enormous, just completely unfathomable amount of value. If we go extinct, if there's some existential catastrophe, we lose all of that value. And

that would be absolutely catastrophic. We lose utopia, the utopia that we could otherwise build. So when you take this particular vision and you imagine, so here's one calculation for how many future digital people could exist. This is a lower bound, a very conservative estimate. So at least 10 to the 58 digital beings. That comes from a philosopher who's hugely influential within the Tesco movement named Nick Bostrom. So 10 to the 58 people. So if you imagine that maybe there's a small chance that you can make a minute difference

in terms of reducing existential risk, that may ultimately be worth much more than helping everybody who is in poverty today. Because after all, 10 to the 58 is so much larger than 1.2 billion, which is the number of people in multidimensional poverty. So basically, any current event, any catastrophe, any genocide, any war, any natural catastrophe that is not existential in nature, that doesn't threaten our vast and glorious future in the universe. That is going to be radically deprioritized. Because if you take this grand view of things, those catastrophes are just little blips. As I've said before, they're molecules in a drop in the ocean. That's it. So Nick Bostrom himself has listed some of the worst events of the 20th century. So World War II, that would include the Holocaust, of course. The First World War,

the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed, I don't know, 50 million people, something like that. Spanish flu, which killed, I don't know, 50 million people, something like that, the Bhopal disaster, Chernobyl, AIDS pandemic, and so on. He writes that while these catastrophes might have been horrific for the people directly affected by them, in the grand scheme of things, they are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life, and I'm quoting him there. Why? Because if you take this cosmic point of view, those events really haven't affected in any kind of appreciable way the total amount of value, total amount of happiness that could exist in the universe as a whole. After all, the climate change is going to

affect the habitability of Earth for about 10,000 years. So it's a longer period of time than civilization has existed so far. But if you zoom out a bit, we will recover from climate change. There will be another ice age in the future. If civilization persists, if we get to colonize Mars and then colonize the rest of the galaxy, the catastrophe of climate change just isn't going to be a big deal. And so from this sort of utopian point of view, if it's the case that some recent studies have suggested one billion people die this century as a result of climate change, yes, that's really bad. But if we fail to create 10 to the 58

future people, that would be so much worse. That would constitute such a vastly greater loss of value than the loss of value associated with 1 billion people dying, that we should absolutely prioritize ensuring that we colonize space, we become post-human and so on, over trying to save the one billion people who are going to perish this century. So that's one reason I'm worried about the Tesco worldview and its growing influence in the world today. Another reason has to do with the possibility that techno-utopian fantasies can justify in the minds of, as it were, true believers in the relevant ideology, it can justify extreme measures, including possibly

violence. So this might sound like a bit of an extreme possibility, but I don't think that's the case at all. There is a long, long history of utopian movements that became violent, and some of these movements started off as explicitly peaceful. When you have a utopian slash apocalyptic ideology, which is what test realism is, if true believers find themselves in an apocalyptic moment, you know, a sort of do or die moment, then the utopian, this idea that utopia is just looming

there, just on the temporal horizon, you could sort of see it, is so tantalizing that this can easily justify a kind of utilitarian calculus that says, okay, if we need to engage in violence, do things that we wouldn't normally do to protect and preserve utopia, then we ought to do that. LW an ordinary person, a person like me, for example, could encounter test grillist ideologies and think it's an example of billionaires trying to turn their boyhood sci-fi fantasies into reality. Who doesn't want their very own starship enterprise or a chance to dodge bullets in the matrix?

Boys and their toys after all. But Torres says such naivete would be a mistake. Many people in the test group community refer to the creation of utopia as quote-unquote paradise engineer. So that's this is why super intelligence was of such interest to the individuals who founded these companies in the first place. And once they founded these companies, they started to develop these large language models, making them bigger and bigger.

That's how we got ChatGPT. So already these ideologies have had a very significant impact on our society. Beyond that, these ideologies have had a very significant impact on our society. Beyond that, these ideologies are increasingly infiltrating governments around the world. So for example, there was a UN dispatch article published towards the end of 2022 that said, and I'm quoting the article, foreign policy circles in general, and the United Nations in particular, are beginning to embrace long-termism.

And then of course, if you fast forward to the present, we have the incoming Trump administration where J.D. Vance was funded by Peter Thiel, who's embedded in the test group movement, has been for several decades. Elon Musk, transhumanist, long-termist, and so on, who is, some would describe him, at least right now, as co-president. So he's massively influential, not just in Silicon Valley, but now increasingly in government. These ideologies are everywhere.

I've said before that they may be the most influential ideologies that most people have not heard about before. So I think it's really important for people to start paying attention to what these bizarre techno-futuristic ideologies actually are, how they're shaping the decisions of powerful individuals in the world. the reason Neuralink exists, founded by Elon Musk, is basically to accelerate the transhumanist project of merging us with machines, merging our brains with AI. When early transhumanism was being developed, by leading eugenicists such as Julian Huxley, who was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1969 to 1972, wrote a lot about the topic, also popularized the term transhumanism.

Without using that term, transhumanism, he wrote a book about the idea of transhumanism back in 1927. And he used the language of transcending humanity. Interestingly, the book was titled Religion Without Revelation. So his idea was that transhumanism could be a new kind of religion. So as Christianity retreated, there was this massive void that was left behind because all of the purpose, meaning, and hope, or one could say eschatological hope, hope about the longer term future of humanity that traditional religion gave us,

all of that was gone very suddenly. And people were reeling as a result. I mean, it was a kind of sociocultural trauma that we experienced. And so consequently, it's right around that exact same time that you see this proliferation of ideologies, kind of utopian ideologies that parallel traditional religion in all sorts of ways. So transhumanism is another example. Julian Huxley introduced it as, or at least developed it as a secular replacement for Christianity. It offers the promise of paradise in the future, perhaps the promise of immortality.

There's even the possibility of resurrection. So if you don't live long enough to live forever, as the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil says, you can always opt to have your body or just your head and neck cryogenically frozen so that at some point in the future you can be reanimated as, for example, a digital being. So there's even resurrection within this worldview. And in fact, one way to think about the race to build AGI with respect to test realism as a religion is this, if God doesn't exist, then why not just create him? So a lot of people in the community refer to AGI or super intelligence as God-like AI. Oftentimes ideologies are described derogatorily

as a religion. That's one way of sort of putting down something. Oh, that's wokeism is a religion, you know, conservatism is a religion and so on. But in some cases, certain ideologies really are very religious. And I think that is the case with test realism. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ideas. Find us on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nalalevin, and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. What is utopia for one person is a dystopia for someone else. There can be no Gilead without the Handmaid. Even in the good place, someone has to clean the toilets, wipe up the vomit, fend off the enemy. The English essayist Max Bierbaum summed it up rather tidily when he wrote,

So this is utopia, is it? Well, I beg your pardon. I thought it was hell. or the billionaire's wet dream. Homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years. If we live as long as typical mammal species, we will survive for hundreds of thousands of years. If we last until the earth is no longer habitable, we will last for hundreds of millions of years. If one day we take to the stars and have a civilization that is interstellar,

then we could survive for hundreds of trillions of years. In the past few years, I think we've built the world's best anti-aging protocol. Now the secret to our success has been data. Science begins with counting. I've become the most measured person in human history. We've measured every part of my body. We really were to survive for a very long time, maybe we'll develop more advanced technologies,

maybe our descendants will one day colonize the galaxy and beyond, maybe they can find different ways of implementing minds in computers and so forth. It's that future people matter, morally. It's that there could be enormous numbers of future people, and then finally that we can make a difference to the world they inhabit. I have been spending millions of dollars for the past three years working to slow my speed of aging. In doing this my team and I... G.I. is basically the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker and then they

could say do anything that you'd be happy with a remote co-worker doing just behind a computer, which includes you know learning how to go be a doctor, learning how to go be a very competent coder. There's a lot of stuff that a median human is capable of getting good at. Can the future belong to median people like you and me? It sounds like it'll cost a lot of money to be part of that future, one that's filled with possibly living forever in a galaxy far, far away, while some kind of super intelligence does all the hard thinking. Will our lives be filled with leisure and ease,

or does inequality go intergalactic so the great majority do the grunt work to ensure a utopia for the few? The billionaire's wet dream is the world's nightmare. I use this sentence in a story called Travelers Tales from the Ends of the World and I think it's literally true. I think that we are being kind of held hostage by this small group of deranged people who have lost touch with reality. And because they have disproportionate power to collect resources of various kinds

and actually try to bring their impossible dreams to fruition, I think we have to be on our guard and we have to do what we can to prevent the billionaire's wet dream from replacing the dreams of ordinary people on this planet. My name is Vandana Singh. I'm a professor of physics and environment at Framingham State University near Boston. I'm also a writer of speculative fiction and transdisciplinary scholar of climate change. You described yourself as a writer of speculative fiction

in response to billionaires, that the stories that you were writing are in response to what billionaires are doing. Can you talk about this framing? How did you arrive at this place where you're thinking, this is the tension within which I'm going to be writing about as opposed to some other tension that may feel possibly more tangible or more present in one's life? As a speculative fiction writer, what I want to do is to get beyond my own purview

and see what the world looks like from the perspectives of others. And in fact, famously, that's one of the ways that speculative fiction plays with the idea of the alien, right, so to relate to the other, to relate to one who is not like you. And so I hadn't really thought about billionaires other than acknowledging to myself that, you know,

obviously they kind of held the world in their grasping hands. But it was like two experiences I had where I was surrounded not by billionaires, but by millionaires, which still for someone like me is a very, very long distance away and hope that it'll always remain so. Because what I experienced, and these were two conferences, and what I experienced was so shocking to me that I determined that I had to think about it and write about it. And I guess part of that shocking experience was the kind of, well, two things really. One was the separation of the remoteness from everyday lived reality.

So these people seemed isolated in a bizarre sort of way. Like it's not as though they were literally isolated. They had hangers on and followers and friends who were like them and so on, but isolated from real connections with reality, with regular people, with the rest of nature. So they had this sort of bizarre remote perspective as though they were somehow really inherently separate and different. And the other thing was that they were delusional and everything they were trying to do

was to preserve the status quo. They were more interested in conserving the current system than actually doing something about global social environmental problems. And they believed that they could solve these problems from the very same paradigms and the very same ways of thinking and the very same systems that had caused the problems in the first place. And that's what I mean by delusional. And so when you had this encounter, I mean, you've described what the nature of the encounter was, but what do you think was so upending about it that you think it helped you think about how you frame to some

extent how you frame the work that you do, whether it's in the science space, or it's in the it's in the writing space. Well, one of them that stood out to me was the way that they thought about the rest of nature. So, there's a very, very long kind of epistemological thread here because it goes way back to the time of Newton and Descartes and all of those people, where the mechanistic perspective on the universe, and it really comes from the origins of my own field, gave rise to this shattered perspective on everything.

So in other words, thinking of the universe like a machine, in a way, what it does is it promotes a kind of separateness, a reductionism. So, and part of that, a very important part of that is separation from nature. And ultimately, because we are part of nature, separation from nature means alienation with your own self. And so people in this perspective, whether you carry it to an extreme,

like the billionaires appear to do, for them, what is real is, I guess, the stock market, their lives and their material goods, the power they have to make things happen really quickly. That's real. And they don't recognize that what's above that are, well, the physical laws of nature, for example. So there were a few moments where I realized certain things that really jerked me out of, I guess, my complacency. And one of them was where they had, for instance, invited an indigenous leader to this conference and she had not made it, although she did give a virtual speech. But one of the organizers of this conference

actually talked about how it was important to preserve the current economic structure, because it was the only successful one that the world had known, in other words, neoliberal capitalism, and that it was possible to invite indigenous people into this structure. So rather than heed what the indigenous people were actually saying, which is that this structure is destroying the earth and we need to deconstruct it and build from indigenous knowledge systems to something that is whole and viable, they were actually instead trying to co-opt those voices into their own way of thinking.

So that was one thing, but then I realized that at the root of it is this separation from nature, which comes to, if you're alienated from nature, you're alienated from yourself. you're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from your own humanity. You are alienated from your physical body. And probably because of that, you have this intense fear of death. And because you're not really have meaningful connections with other people and with non-humans, you exist in this psychological isolation that can only be shored

up by these insane artificial boosts to the ego in some sense. Because the way that it is, is that if you are, if you are alienated from your own body, then what kinds of ideas do you think of? Well, if only I could just be a mind. If only I didn't have to think about death, you know, because to accept death is to accept being part of nature and to accept being part of a process, to accept being temporary, and in fact, even to celebrate it, because when we die, we make room for others. Our bodies become part of other bodies, and it's a participatory way of being to acknowledge death.

And most modern cultures fear death. And it reminds me, in fact, of a very funny, very short science fiction story by the writer Terry Bisson, which is called something like They're Made Out of Meat. And it's about these aliens who come to Earth to study humans, and they're utterly horrified and disgusted that we are made out of meat. And the funny thing about it is that the billionaires seem to have alienated themselves and are horrified that we are wetware, essentially. And so how do we get away from that? How do we live forever? You know, it's an incredibly pathologically solipsistic view of humankind. I want to read to you a short excerpt from one of your essays,

Utopias of the Third Kind. And what you write is, and this is a part of an excerpt, utopias of the third kind, as I conceive them, are visions that are grounded in the local, in its geography and social-cultural ecological surround, but locate themselves in a planetary context where local and planetary are not mutually exclusive categories, but are connected in space and time. So can you elaborate, you know, first, what is a utopia of the third kind? And how do they bridge, as you call it, the local and planetary? Well, my conception of utopias of the third kind is actually based on real experiments that are happening as we speak, and real attempts to actually network experiments at the grassroots in location from one

location to another and that's where the planetary part of it kind of comes in. So for example probably the most well-known example for me is the Vikalp Sangam project in India which has collected the stories of hundreds of grassroots movements and experiments and alternatives, often by marginalized communities. And not just that, but connected them to each other. So that, for instance, the Adivasi, the indigenous peoples of one region, who have been very successful in regenerating their ecosystems and getting back in touch with some key aspects of their culture, have actually traveled to another place in India, to where they are pastoralists, for instance,

camel herders, and helped them and advised them as to how to resist the kinds of pressures that are being put on them. So that's one small example of the kind of networking that I'm talking about. So here are people who have figured out through a combination of taking their own wisdom, their traditional knowledge, as well as insights from modernity, and resurrected the systems that sustain them because these are ecosystem people. These are people who depend on their ecosystem for survival and regenerated those ecosystems. And at the same time, they have also resisted. They have resisted the takeover of their lands by corporations or governments and so on. or governments and so on. And what they are trying to do is to show us, I guess, through what they do for themselves, to show the rest of the world that there are other ways to

live than what we take for granted. And so one of the most powerful things they do is to break the paradigms in which we are trapped. So most of us modern urban humans have not seen alternatives. We don't know what it's like to be connected to other people in the profound ways that they know. And we definitely mostly don't know what it's like to be intimately connected to the non-humans around. to be intimately connected to the non-human surround. And so many of the people who are doing these experiments have valuable things to teach us. And one of the most valuable is simply this, to recognize that there are other ways to be.

And to go back to the ultimate revolutionary question of speculative fiction, which is what if things were not the way that they are now? During COVID, we did see glimpses of a very different world. And in India, for example, there were a lot of mutual aid groups that sprung up in the absence of government action in the first several months. You know, when people were left high and dry and the most horrible thing was the long march of the informal workers, the daily wage workers across India, because they were just let go without any financial or other consideration. And so in the midst of that indifference and that great hardship, we saw the intelligence and the compassion of ordinary people come up.

So some friends of mine, for instance, compiled a five volume report on mutual aid efforts during COVID. So we saw that. And we also saw really amazing things, like a friend in the city of Chandigarh reporting that the streets are empty and there's a herd of deer outside my house. And in the small towns in the foothills of the Himalayas, wild elephants came walking through the towns. And it's like there was so much possibility there, you know, and as somebody who has always

thought in this speculative fiction mode, it was, well, simultaneously terrifying and horrifying because of what was happening with the pandemic, but also so exhilarating to see these glimpses of possible other worlds within that crisis. I think that is a very scary thing for people who want to maintain the status quo. That's why there was this push to bring things back to so-called normal. But the problem is that it's the normal that had led to the crisis in the first place. Now we don't know as yet the causes of the COVID outbreak, but it is the case that, and research indicates this, that many of the new zoonotic diseases are connected with deforestation and with the destruction of natural resources. And, you know, even in the COVID year, deforestation

did not significantly decrease. In fact, it increased. So that is why the system is the problem, a system that is so separate from nature that it can only see nature as something to devour. And the thing is that we are nature. So you devour nature, you destroy us. And it is just such an insane perspective. It's not how we're gonna survive. And it's this small group of very powerful people

and their systems that are holding the planet hostage for their, you know, fevered dreams that are really based on fear. Do you think it's possible for us to escape the billionaire's wet dream? Well, let's put it this way. We don't have a choice. Too much is at stake. So I don't think so much in terms of whether it's possible or not, because then you get caught into, oh, you know, the stakes

are so high, and look at how powerful they are, and so on. One of the things I've been doing is reading about social movements, because, you know, that's not part of my education as a physical scientist. So and you know And that's part of this Newtonian broken view of the world, the way I've mentioned earlier how it infiltrates education, how it informs education. In the physical sciences, we don't learn about what social movements do. And so I've been reading about them, trying to understand how they work, and having had some modest exposure to some of them in my life, but not really got a good analysis of that.

And one of the things that we know is that change can happen rather suddenly, in fact, in any complex system, and certainly human systems are complex systems. And so things that we thought were impossible yesterday are the norm today. So that's one thing that gives me hope. The fact that the future, even though it's co-opted and colonized already, the future is a country that has been already colonized, but still it is indetermined. It's not fully determined. And that uncertainty gives me hope because we can occupy that space. So we have to simultaneously occupy the present

and the future. And one of the disturbing tendencies I'm seeing in the United States in anticipation of the Trump presidency is that people kind of shrinking their spaces in advance. Instead of trying to occupy the space that we already have and then pushing out the walls, they are in anticipation kind of shrinking their spaces. And that's just capitulating to the system.

That's just, and there's so much at stake. We know that climate change is accelerating to an extent that is not fully captured by the climate models. And that by itself is bringing so much hell on earth, just by itself. But it's intimately related to all the other crises that I've mentioned, including the crisis of social inequality,

including war, conflict, genocide, all of which is part of our current reality. They're all interrelated. And so we have to get away from this linear thinking into a more complex way of thinking and acting. It's not as though that change has to be like, oh, we don't have time to change the way we think, we don't have time to shift our paradigms, as some people have been saying, we have to act now. Well, the thing is, that is falling into the trap of the linear time conception. Time is more complicated than linear time

and time is relational and time is slippery. So we have to occupy chronology in one sense. So I would say it this way, that possible or not, we just have to take back the planet from these maniacs. And we have to work with both similarity and difference across different groups, across different contexts and philosophies. And come up with a tapestry of viable alternatives.

No one size fits all, but some kind of a tapestry that is grounded in place as well as connected at a planetary scale. And that's what I dream about. And I'm going to go ahead and start. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being

whoever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, a vision of the human future in space. The You've been listening to Techno Utopia or The Billionaire's Wet Dream from ideas producer Nahid Mustafa. Thank you to philosopher and historian Emil Torres. They are also a postdoctoral researcher at Case Western Reserve University. And to Vandana Singh, professor of physics and environment at Framingham State University. She's also a writer of speculative fiction, including her most recent book, Utopias of the Third Kind. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Technical production, Danielle Duval and Arande Williams. The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.