What will we do when all our jobs are done for us?

Laughs are in short supply in the academic world unless that world is serving as the victim of satire. So full marks to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom for loading Deep Utopia – his reflections on life in a ‘solved world’, perfected by technology and science – with self-mockery and slapstick.

Bostrom isn’t the first to fret about the travails of extreme leisure. John Maynard Keynes feared that economic abundance would produce more disgusting aristo-like behaviour. It’s nice to see how mighty minds can be so wrong. Bostrom cites John Stuart Mill being seriously depressed by the prospect, as humanity solved its problems, of there not being enough music to keep everyone happy all day. As we’ve discovered, there probably aren’t enough people to cope with the terabytes of material currently available from the back catalogue and bootlegs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, even before we get to jazz, the classical repertoire or the Hawaiian nose flute. There’s now more recreation afoot than anyone can deal with in a thousand years. But what happens if you gain immortality? Carpentry to pass the day?

Diogenes Laertius claimed that someone called Simon the Shoemaker came up with what we know as Socratic dialogues. Plato and Xenophon are the earliest wielders of what became one of the most evergreen forms of ‘discussing’ ideas, in which, typically, an intrepid sage gives a kicking to a selection of NPCs. Deep Utopia has a long-running, mostly comic dialogue, where Bostrom in person is unusually generous to the subordinates – in this case fictional students (I assume) – at his lecture series.

He spices up the book with generous helpings of just about everything. There are guest appearances from Albert Camus, Karl Marx (who had curiously little to say about how the communist paradise would function), Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Nozick and Greg Egan.