[folkrav]

> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...

Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.

[patcon]

I don't find it to be utopian, but in trying to imagine how, it occurred to me that maybe the idea that we even survive to be entangled in the wider universal future, maybe that is utopian? To matter.

I think there are a lot of paths where we just rock ourselves back to a regressed agency societal state, and just never have the capacity to have any affect on the wider universe. Which is maybe good for the universe, as we are certainly not a role-model for certain forms of balance. But maybe the balanced view doesn't seek to dominate and influence and become ubiquitous, after all

[meheleventyone]

> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.

There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

[AndrewDucker]

Pretty much everyone in Brave New World is happy.

You might not like the society they've built, but there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian.

(It's very debatable, of course, but it's not instantly dismissable)

[magicalist]

> there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian

Sure, like a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics...and an AI life companion in their ear. What I can't understand is why they're still on a forum with humans when they can go have that today.

[AndrewDucker]

Not antibiotics? Surely nobody could be happy with that! Truly they are a terror.

[ben_w]

> There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

I think that's likely to be all the sex and drugs? Though I'm basing that on the Wikipedia plot summary. I have no interest in darkening my day by actually reading any work that can be rightly described as "dystopian".

[jrm4]

I'm almost 50, but I absolutely could see how someone younger could view it that way -- precisely because the present is much more similar to than novel than it used to be?

Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."

[tialaramex]

Misreading SF is super popular in the techbro milieu.