Introduction

I have had some fun imagining a perfect world but, following HG's methods, I have constrained my imagination to a world containing real people living in a real physical world. Also following HG, I have imagined myself living in that world (ignoring the practical problems of living for another 200 years). Such constraints have a way of making things far more interesting.

As it turns out, this exercise in imagination has been so much fun I've decided to give it its own blog, which you are reading now.

First, I need to skip over a few current problems which will take (I imagine) perhaps 200 years. Following HG's methods, I allow one slightly implausible assumption and then see how things go. I must, therefore, picture myself to somehow live that long to see it all.

So, here's a quick summary of the world in 2220:

• I assume that climate change will have a severe impact over the next 200 years but that we will rise to the challenge. For example, as the ocean swallows up major cities, we will rebuild with the new climate in mind. I want to avoid the temptation of making my Utopia nothing more than a climate change dystopia.
• The population will peak and decline. We know that women will opt for small families if given a choice. I assume that having children, or even menstrual cycles, will be an active, positive choice for all women long before 2220. It's also pretty evident that there will be a horrendous loss of life due to climate change in the 22nd century. But this has happened before in history. I assume that we will "rise from the ashes".
• Given the current trend for human labor to be automated away, I assume that society will be afforded most of the necessities of life (food, water, shelter) are provided with little or no human "work." We assume that something like UBI -universal basic income - has been accepted for a century or more. In making this assumption, we are assuming that humanity has taken a "socialist" choice - the other option being to turn humans into industrial machines with zero-hour contracts, as we see happening in 2019.
• Many professions will always be with us. These include the big three (priests, politicians, and prostitutes) as well as the callings that never seem to go away (bankers, lawyers, criminals, police ...). One notable flaw in many "Utopias" is the fantasy that somehow everyone will accept the morality of the author. That is hopelessly unrealistic. We need to populate Utopia with real people on planet Earth.

THE CITY

Two centuries of an unpredictable climate, along with the struggles inherent in totally re-tooling technology to get away from fossil fuels to convert to new technologies have made compact cities more attractive. While solar options may support detached homes, the underlying transportation structure of today's cities is energy intensive. Our current homes and supporting infrastructure are also vulnerable to extreme weather. While the "suburbs" may not have died off entirely, the 2220 city is a cluster of huge towers surrounded by a lot of parklands. Living in the city core is pleasant and "social." I picture Calgary's "plus 15" rather than New York's projects-vertical slums.

People like crowds but they also like comfortable privacy. The 2220 city provides both along with isolation from the weather, that can be brutal at times. Hurricanes, heat waves and multi-year cold snaps make huddling in the city core very attractive. Weather is fundamentally unpredictable. We don't imagine that physics or the basic math of chaos theory has been abolished by 2220, nor do we expect that 23rd-century Utopians will escape the consequences of 21st-century stupidity.

TRANSPORT

Cities are linked by high-speed rail. Hydrogen-powered jet transports are available but expensive. Extreme weather makes all long-range transport subject to unpredictable delays and shut-downs. Even in 2220, there are "jobs" for people who work on more sophisticated and reliable transport. Many do it mainly for the love of it but are handsomely compensated nonetheless.

THE SINGULARITY

In 2019, many are convinced that "Artificial Intelligence" will soon produce machines that are "smarter" than humans - effectively turning the human race into slaves of a super-intelligence beyond our understanding, or turn humans into some kind of software living in a computer.

I reject this picture, but I do recognize the need to counter it with a world that has both super intelligent computers and hot, wet, fleshy humans. On the other hand, it seems inevitable to me that we can automate away all the "sweatshop jobs". These jobs already treat humans as machines subject to impersonal algorithms. This is not new. For example, the goal of Amazon seems to be to totally automate the distribution of goods. At present, Amazon employs thousands of "human robots" under shocking conditions. What is shocking is the relentless repetitiveness of these jobs under unhealthy conditions. Those jobs are perfect for robots.

I see the phenomenon of sweatshop jobs as the last hurrah of slavery, relentlessly eliminated not by moral choice but by automation.

ECONOMICS

MONEY

A modern society without markets and money is impossible. It's one thing to imagine that poverty is eliminated, but human society consists of individuals with a wide variety of skills, priorities, and tastes. Even if we imagine everyone on the planet is enjoying UBI, people will make a vast variety of choices about how to spend their income. More than that, we assume that many of our citizens actually will "work," creating at least a minimum range of income and a population that makes consumption choices not available on UBI. In fact, I assume that some individuals will be quite wealthy - having enough to support a lifestyle wildly beyond the UBI city dweller. We need to be cautious about imagining how these individuals became wealthy. The old Utopias don't picture computers, let alone our current era of IT Moguls.

One question I have is whether banking and the current relationship between money and debt will be maintained. At present, money is created by the banks through the willing assumption of debt - mainly for purposes that I imagine will no longer exist in my Utopia - mortgages, car loans, and education loans. Shelter, transportation, and education are all assumed to be "free" in my Utopia (part of the UBI package), within certain sensible limits. For example, I don't assume that everyone lives in a mansion and flies around in personal helicopters. Perhaps in the worst case IPCC world of climate change, the priority will be on physical survival rather than luxury.

I'm not sure about how to imagine large capital projects without banking. Perhaps bankers, along with prostitutes, priests, and politicians, are a necessary evil. In fact, it's possible that a story set in my Utopia will involve all four.

WORK

In 2019, there is an assumption that money is somehow "earned" by people with "jobs" and that people who get money without working are taking advantage of "entitlements" which rob the rich of their money through taxes. In 2019, my assumption that we can simply hand out UBI goes against the grain. However, I'm quite convinced that this job/money connection is a choice rather than some inevitable fact of nature. It's interesting to read some of the classic Utopias (like More's) that point out that the great majority of "working" people produce nothing of real value and the richest people hardly "work", but produce demand for useless luxury items. I won't spend much time on this issue since I assume that my readers (if any) are familiar with the way things work in 2019. Hopefully, I will be able to paint a convincing alternative.

SPACE

I've been a huge space geek since I was a kid. The first book I read (age 7) was Heinlein's Red Planet. Over the years, as we have actually explored off-earth, the scary facts about space travel have emerged.
My Utopian assumptions and time frame add some additional limits. Even if we were able to launch a tiny unmanned probe to the nearest star, we would not get information back for centuries. What's more, it is not likely that this information will have more impact than, say, the discovery of 60 moons around Jupiter. Even if we discover "life", I think it will take thousands of years to find it. It will not have the imagined impact that NASA's PR claims to justify its budget. Even if our we manage to crawl under NASA's everylowering bar (by finding that microscopic life once existed on Mars), the discover will have zero on day-to-day life back on Earth.
There is an additional problem with economics, technology, and manpower. The old Science Fiction stories often imagined somebody building a man moon rocket in their back yard. We now know that it takes the resources of an industrial nation to to send a chosen few to the moon for a short visit. Under my Utopian assumptions, manpower and capital will be in dwindling supply, especially for "pie on the sky" projects with no conceivable payout. People wanting to challenge frontiers of science will be doing it basically for the fun of it. My guess is that we will find more promising frontiers within our minds and bodies than off hundreds of light years in cold space.
For these reasons, my Utopia is Earth-bound. I expect lots of machinery in near-Earth orbit and perhaps some activity on the Moon, but nothing that has an impact on the basic picture on the ground.
Asteroid mining may be an exception - something that requires massive capital investment, huge risk and literally astronomical returns. It's an open question whether the way we fund "megaprojects" will still be a thing in 2220. I'm not sure I can confidently predict what kinds of mineral shortages there will be in 2220 that could justify mining in the sky. Our recent experience with "Peak Oil" has shown how clever we can be in pushing the limits of resource availability and finding substitutes for materials once regarded as finite and essential.

POLITICS

Many utopias seem to have a vaguely socialist totalitarian government in the background. HG's was, of course, a socialist world government. He was, at the time, a card-carrying Fabian - author of the famous phrase "war to end all wars". In 2019, must of us are skeptical of socialism, world government and the dystopian idea of the two together. In my Utopia, the form of government is left more open with lots of room for politics and chaos. Sweeping changes brought about by technology do not bring about fundamental changes in human nature.

Politics is about power - who has it, how to hold on to it, how to get it. Politics is fundamentally a zero-sum game, making it nasty by nature. I don't expect the politicians of 2220 to have somehow become more honest or less corrupt.  I expect the political debate to be anything more than the "bullshit theater" that it is in 2019. In fact, assuming widespread contentment and the absence of many of the life-and-death issues that confront us today, along with a significant population "zoned out", we may see that very few Utopians are interested in politics at all (not far from 2019). This may open Utopia to capture by corrupt elements. In fact, one may see the political history of the planet in terms of the rich attempting to turn everybody else into robots or cannon fodder and the rest of us fighting back.

In 2019, politics is a tension between "conservatives", who see society as an economy and "socialists" who see "society" as worth saving. At present, the semi-religious mythology behind conservative economics is dissolving for want of factual basis in human behavior.  This is quite like the politics of 1500, which were dominated by differences in theology, which seem strange now that we know that the entire debate was about nothing that actually exists.

Likewise, socialists are having trouble applying 19th-century ideas to the 21st century. "Labor" issues make no sense in a world where labor is no longer necessary. For this reason, I have a definite feeling that I'm skating out on thin ice when I guess about 2220 politics. The fact is that none of the Utopias we find in the literature of today (going all the way back to Plato's Republic) posit any kind of plausible political environment. Mine may do no better.

But ...

It's interesting to speculate on how politics will be affected by extreme longevity. Perhaps old men will wonder if their own personal power, wealth and comfort depend on the long-term survival of society. Who knows? I expect some will and some won't.

Political discourse these days is a lot about "jobs," "growing the economy," "the income gap" and economic "incentives." Both the "left" and "right" see to be playing on the same field or at least expecting the voter to see things in these terms.

By 2220, history will have firmly established that there are things more important than the "economy". The 22nd century will be about struggling to survive in the IPCC's "worst case" climate scenario. Crawling out of this mess with technology still intact (and improved as it was during World War II), perhaps we will see that we only need "jobs" that actually create value for society. Better yet, a vast amount of "value" can be created automatically by our machines. The idea that a person needs a "job" (even in a weapons factory) to grab a bit of value from the economy will (perhaps) seem as silly as the American idea that a job and perfect health are necessary to obtain health care insurance.

22nd-century politics (a century before my Utopia) will be concerned with bare survival as 21st-century infrastructure is swept away. My guess is that this will focus our attention and allow us to come up with some new assumptions about what is important.

In my Utopia, the idea of Universal Basic Income will have been "baked in" to our political assumptions for a century. Challenging this would be like running in a Canadian election on a platform of abolishing the health care system.

I also think that the conservative terror of "entitlements" crushing the "will to work" will be a thing of the past - overcome by the evidence that human beings, freed of economic slavery, find useful things to do. 

Of course, I don't assume that all people will react this way, but I'm mindful of the fact that today's idle rich (and their groupies) have the same problem finding useful things to do. Idleness and conspicuous consumption are a political issue.

We are already seeing the problem of recruiting the best and brightest to work on projects that do no more than making the rich richer, sell more junk and kill off poor foreigners. Current thinking about UBI tends to imagine the impact on the desperately poor in 2019. However, as one who currently enjoys the kind of UBI afforded to Canadian seniors, I can say that I am quite unmotivated to join any project for purely financial reasons. In my Utopia, the best and brightest follow their own inspiration. I'm thinking that few of us will abandon our dreams to help invent a better cluster bomb.

The youngest are even more likely to follow idealistic projects and turn their back on "big bucks". Of course, there will be exceptions. But remember those sprawling mansions, fast cars, and private jets will have gone the way of the dodo, being blown away by rising sea levels, super hurricanes and heat waves making vast swaths of the Earth uninhabitable.

In this world, I fully expect that there will be all the ways we currently know to "zone out" and abandon real life, plus a few we have not invented so far. Interesting echoes of 2019 may exist in 2220 when such "zone out" options turn out to be more expensive than what you can afford on UBI. We will have criminals and cops in 2220. So, one political question will concern "law and order" as well as what we do with criminals. Will our already impressive means of tracking individuals become a system where we are all guilty until proven innocent? Such questions have been dealt with in anti-Utopian writings (dystopia), most famously in Orwell's 1984.

I cannot bring myself to imagine a Utopia where our current ideas of privacy make any kind of sense. 2220 crime, if any, must be imagined to take place under the unblinking eye of AI-assisted police. Crime, if any, will need to be public, which brings us back to politics. Even in 2019, our biggest criminals are CEO's, bankers and politicians who are protected by walls of secrecy that are not enjoyed by ordinary citizens. In my Utopia, these walls come down for all of us. In my Utopia at least, this is a fair price to pay. Lets see how that works out ...