Now why did Susan suddenly
decide to go hunting on her own when she knew there’d be lions in the park?
Beats me, since I can never understand girls anyway. Still, I wish I knew what
goes on in that juvenile female brain of hers. Must be some kind of a fantasy
wonderland where all is right with the world and there isn’t a shred of malice
or evil. If only that kind of a utopia could be extended onto the real world,
overtaken by greed and corruption and the will to destroy everything in sight.
I wonder which world would last longer – the imaginary ramblings of a child
given form, or a planet of crude, wild beings.
Which is why I set out to
see how far I could take this idea and implement it in the real world. I first
found a group of young scholars willing to take on this academic challenge, and
asked them to divide themselves into two groups. The first group was given the
task of emulating the wonderland, while the second group had to maintain an
opportunistic and economy-driven world like today’s.
To the utopia group, I
gave a set of basic axioms – a free economy (where anyone can get anything they
want), universal kindness (they go out of their way to help people in need),
and a free dental plan for everyone. To the dystopia, I simplified some of the
driving factors present in today’s world – basic natural instincts such as
survival of the fittest, competition for resources, alcohol, and bad puns. In
essence, the utopia represented an ideal communist world, while the dystopia
represented the projected future of the capitalist ideals. Then I let the two
teams loose, to see what they could come up with. Having competent IITians in
both teams, I was happy to note that both teams were able to develop a
consistent mathematical model of the world they were trying to emulate, and
within a week, they had a fully functional simulation running on the two
MultiVac supercomputers. We let the two computers do their thing for the next
two weeks or so, and then went to check the results.
And we were pleasantly
surprised with the results. To begin with, the wonderland only sustained itself
for a few centuries. The free economy meant that everyone had an equal right
over every item that had been produced. The universal kindness also had a big
part to play. With each person being equal and having equal rights, there were
now huge standards for safety, health and cleanliness in all industries, which
lead to huge invisible costs in the production of any factory-made item. Also,
there were no longer any people working in mines or any other such dangerous
environments (since people could no longer be exploited and oppressed). Though
there was a huge boost in basic human health, there was a huge failure in all
industries that used to support all lifestyles. By the end of it, the only sustainable
form of civilization that emerged was the basic rural agriculture-based
lifestyle of the middle-ages. Bye-bye to technology.
Astonishingly, the evil
land fared just as badly. Filled with people who had no bigger objective than
to cheat everyone else out of their happiness, they eventually led to their own
ruin. But not quite the way we would have thought. They had managed to outlast
the utopian world. This was a world where industry flourished, where science
and technology made leaps and bounds to cross huge barriers. Due to the
ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, by the year 2150, all the
people who had formerly lived in the ‘lower’ strata had been wiped out,
extinct, kapish! In their stead, only the 5% of the original human population
remained, who had to fend for themselves in a world where they had formerly
gotten the poor to do all their work for them. But this is where we were taken
aback. By this point in time, technology had advanced enough to allow the
development of robotics and advanced AI that could manage all the industries
and necessities by themselves. There were robots that ran farms, robots that
cleaned sewers, robots that served as maids in every person’s house. There were
also sex-bots.
In a world with such a small
population that intrinsically distrusted each other, the common (read: rich)
man’s most trusted companion was commonly his robot(s). As they were not human,
there were no laws that controlled how they were to be used, except that they
were to never be used to cause harm to any human. Additionally, as each person
became richer and more distrustful of his fellow men, he began to spend more
time in isolation and rarely ever interacted with any other human, including
his own family. The growing hole caused by a need for companionship was soon
filled by the introduction of companion-bots – robots who were meant to serve a
man or woman as though they were their own spouse. Increased use of these
robots quickly caused a reduction in the reproduction rate of an already
diminished population, and within three generations, the entire human race was
extinct.
Point to note: The last
generation of humans was not wiped out due to a refusal to procreate. Rather,
by the time the humans had realized the need to mate with the opposite sex to
maintain the future of the race, the machines had become sufficiently advanced
enough to have started plotting the demise of their masters. All the remaining
homo sapiens were swiftly expired by an overdose of cholesterol-filled foods in
all of their cooking. Interestingly, the last hundred humans had an almost
simultaneous heart-attack, leading us to believe that robots will indeed
develop a sense of humour.
