Huxley publishes Brave New World in 1932. He imagines a planet where nobody suffers because nobody remembers what suffering was. Soma to erase discomfort. Hedonic sex on schedule. Vacations distributed like medication. Castes biologically engineered so that the Epsilons feel grateful for scrubbing floors.
People are happy because they no longer know they could want anything else.
You read it in high school and it sounded like science fiction.
Look around.
Nobody in the West starves anymore. The “average poor” in any European capital carries in his pocket a smartphone with more compute than the Pentagon had in 1995. He flies to Cancún financed in installments. He has Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Uber Eats, and a consumer loan approved in thirty seconds straight from his screen. He lives better (materially) than a nineteenth-century noble.
And the system tells him every day that he is free.
We’re heading toward abundance. Toward a world where everyone will have everything. Artificial intelligen…
