Utopia Is Creepy

Some more on the subject in a few Less Wrong articles:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/xl/eutopia_is_scary/ argues that any much better society -- including any utopia worthy of the name -- is going to be different in ways to counterintuitive that they would sound scary. The present would seem the same way to someone from a hundred years ago; why would the future seem normal?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ Has some attempts to come up with "weirdtopias", bizarre visions of the future that sound oddly compelling. It's a fun exercise.

And from a completely different web site, I have seen one work of fiction that bucks the trend by being set in a utopia so good that you might actually want to live there:

http://cityofreality.com/

So, you know, not all utopias are creepy and sinister.

Couple notes.

* This is a straight conceptual extrapolation of current technology and designs. The only thing that I don't see coming from today's tech is the holographic projects. Oddly, most of the design seems to look like Apple-inspired tech. Does Apple consciously design to look like a sci-fi future? Or do their views of the future become shaped like Apple?

* In the cubes, there are no walls. The cube-dweller did not have headphones. Major, major "graaah"

* There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time.

* I didn't see any "stupid" activities like reading Failbook, watching MTV, any of those very popular mental cheetos activities. The future has "stupid" entertainment.

* Transparent fridge door = win. Where do I get one? I like that future!

* Also, one curious thing about this is that this is a presentation of rich people (that's not an indictment). The wealthy people whose houses I've visited who are rich in the US seem to have large amounts of space and everything seems to be insanely tidy (maid service? I don't know). Most less wealthy people have less space and things are a bit more jumbled up and around. This seems to be a conceptualization of a junior executive and her family.

It looks pretty lonely and soul crushingly transactional. A world where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services?

Wouldn't it be much more fun for the mother and child to spend time together baking something, than sliding recipes around the world? They've created a vision of the future that allows a father to manage his daughters homework like an employee in a cube farm, simply to avoid interacting with her and spend more time with Excel. Congratulations, but it's far more important to destroy work than relationships.

The medium is the message and this medium says it's far more important to have some slick glass thing 'interacting' with people than to just spend time with them. This ideal takes us so far away from being present in the moment. I could care less about the productivity of the future, I care far more about the personalization of the future.

I agree with this completely. In a sense, the dystopian presentation of a movie like Blade Runner or Akira feels oddly more comforting. Street venders, gangs of kids doing nothing in particular, smokers, etc. Even the cleanest, most polite scandinavian social democracy still has all these things, but they're conveniently left out of these "utopian" visions.

I think, if anything triggers our discomfort, it's the subconscious question of what happened to them.

One of the main problems about technological visions of utopia is that they so often assume that perfection is the absence of problems. Perhaps, but the more a world approaches that perfection, the more limited it becomes by necessity. Hence, the glimpse of Microsoft's world of optimal productivity is a glimpse of an intellectual and spiritual desert: meetings without purposes, productivity with nothing to produce. Human ingenuity exists to solve problems, so it's extremely ironic what emerges when we project to a world where technological ingenuity has vanquished the problems we deal with today.

Utopia as its often depicted does suck, but the video shown by Microsoft is in no way utopian - it looks like the present, only with more displays (and invisible batteries).

Also, it's 6 minutes of software perfection - I have that sometimes... before Windows throws me an error, my Bluetooth stack fails and disconnects my headphones, my virtual machine hangs up, my phone's browser freezes and I can't close it (damn you Android) and my virtual desktops all meddle with each other since Windows (sigh) can't handle them natively and Dexpot just crashed :-).

So we have a bunch of screens to look forward to? Yay, looking at screens of various sizes and sitting at desks. Wow, what an improvement in the quality of life? Wouldn't you say?

This is absurd I mean in an uninspired way. It is absurdly uninspired. Why is technology today so concerned with what can be displayed? The people in these videos are basically holding iPhones and wearing 3d glasses. Carrying a brick around with me was never appealing no matter how far the screen extends to the edge.

The phone (brick) is NOT the best form factor for mobile technology. It is not attached to your body and only complicates the business of living day to day living... "Where did I put my brick and my keys?" All of these ideas of carrying around screens and sitting at office desks looking at screens are only visions of Utopia to people waiting to die.

You never see anyone actually /create content/ in one of these things -- they're just sliding stuff around, or examining that already exist.

Are keyboards dead in the future? Are we doomed to cut-and-paste only the dead bits of the past?

The only things possessing motion are vehicles and clocks. Everything seems so pointless and sterile; even the beggars.

This reminds me of something I saw in high school:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXuXBROyV-g

It's good to see the tone of "utopia videos" hasn't changed in 8 years. Also interesting to see that slate type devices have been people's minds far longer than the iPhone has existed.

Also interesting is how the vast majority of predictions in the video have come true - phones as transaction devices, front/back cameras/video calling, mobile music via phones, etc.

I happen to be re-reading Aldous Huxley's Island now. It's a utopia, and it isn't creepy at all: it's warm, tropical, physical, intentionally low-tech, productivity isn't a priority and technology (where it's accepted) actually serves to increase the time people spend living their lives. And it's very sexual, not "post-sexual".

I don't know how something imagined by a major corporation like Microsoft could ever be seen as a utopia. Yes, the streets are clean, but who the hell wants to live in a Microsoft future. Plastic generic people, a world so standardized that it doesn't matter where you are, human relations reduced to business transactions all under the watchful eye of omnipresent computers... it's classical dystopia, a world gone even worse than the "Blade Runner" world.

Did anyone else notice that the taxi at the beginning was very pointedly not a driverless robot car?

My problem with the video is that it's the kind of depiction you get when there is nobody able or willing to say "this is impossible to do". Every display seems capable to project 3D images in the air, some of them translucent, others opaque. At the same time, there are screens hung on walls (or on fridge doors). There is also a translucent touchscreen that seems to project different images on each side. Technically, it's about as plausible as http://pomegranatephone.com/

I love, however, the use of type.

One thing i think a lot of futuristic guesses miss but that got pretty well illustrated in the movie Minority Report, is that the future will include a VAST amount of advertising. All this technology wont be invented to make our lives better, it'll be invented to make money.

I think the iPhone would be the best current day example of it. A product of excellence that was created to make money (and boy did it) but has a secondary application of making our lives better.

It's the same reason why 'heaven' has a problem. If heaven is what you want, you can just install yourself now on a morfine or heroin drip, wait till you die and hope it exists (not that you will care at that point). As a child Jehova witnesses rang my doorbell to explain heaven;

"Heaven is like a growing garden, with all the fruit you want!"

"I hate fruit"

"For you it's a garden with what you want!"

"MSX computers?"

"If that's what you want! And there is no pain and suffering; it's only great!"

"If I die now, I won't miss my parents?"

"It will be only great!"

"But how? My parents and sister and friends are not there?"

"You won't remember them!"

"Eh...."

"It will be only good for eternity!"

etc.

Heaven makes no sense at all, nor does utopia. We need pain and suffering to be alive. Hopefully not too much, but too little is so dull, you can just sniff dope 24/7. He is right about that; all scifi has crap; Voyager is kind of utopian (no need for money in the federation, enough food etc), but they still need conflict.

And the MS world is not utopia; that's MS utopia (maybe) (making tons of money because people sitting in front of screens). BillG went for the cool aid to talk to computers many years ago, SIRI makes it happen now, not by MS. We are in utopia now (in the western world) by many past definitions.

It's not Utopia that's creepy in that video. It's the combination of bad acting and advanced technology.

For instance, there's nothing creepy about the use of an advanced UI in Minority Report, because there's good acting and a compelling plot.

Ha. In this "future" of theirs people still go on business meetings with planes, stay in hotels and get there with a taxi.

No they won't they will get eaten by leaner companies who waste a lot less time with the occasional 30 min Skype meeting.

But of course they can't fathom it because it is so far from the world they live in that it would never occour to them.

I suspect a large part of the creepiness comes from the lack of any audible speech in the video.

what does "post-sexual" mean?

This brings up the concept of "Kool-Aid". I'm not talking about the Jonestown suicide, but about social groups that think too highly of themselves to accept criticism. Such communities tend to be viciously intolerant of outsiders, hostile to internal dissent, and deeply hypocritical, especially among the leadership.

These false utopias are so unpleasant to deal with and the people who reach high positions in them are so hideous that one develops a reflexive dislike of anything that looks "utopian".

Afghanistan, under the Taliban, was a utopia. So was the Soviet Union. So is corporate capitalism, if a relatively bland one.

Looks like Microsoft thinks that in the future we will all live inside Apple stores.

On the title, YMMV. Enough people find Disneyland non-creepy enough and even attractive that it stays in business.

On the second half of the article, these are ads. They're going to show people happily doing productive things with their futuristic devices, not gritty mobsters calling in hits from across the continent or terrorists using GPS and Google Images to make sure they're blowing up the right building or all the people left unemployed by the advance of technology standing in a bread line. They want you to feel happy about their corporate branding. If they leave you feeling creepy, they might be overdoing it.