Finance & economics | Free exchange

What will humans do if technology solves everything?

Welcome to a high-tech utopia

Illustration of a man sitting in an armchair resting his legs on a robot head
Illustration: Álvaro Bernis

In “Permutation City”, a novel by Greg Egan, the character Peer, having achieved immortality within a virtual reality over which he has total control, finds himself terribly bored. So he engineers himself to have new passions. One moment he is pushing the boundaries of higher mathematics; the next he is writing operas. “He’d even been interested in the Elysians [the afterlife], once. No longer. He preferred to think about table legs.” Peer’s fickleness relates to a deeper point. When technology has solved humanity’s deepest problems, what is left to do?

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Utopian dystopia”

From the April 13th 2024 edition

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