Some have suggested that a bit of pain might be necessary to make all the pleasure we're supposed to get realizable.... If the only way to make people happy is to improve their lives....

Taken to a literal extreme (I don't know if that's your intent), the idea that pain is necessary for pleasure violates the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle, or something like it. If pleasure without contrast palls, there's some neurological reason for this, one that we could work around in wireheading if we really wanted to. I think the most you can plausibly say is that for humanlike architectures, memories of suffering (not necessarily true ones) are necessary to appreciate pleasures more complex than heroin.

Personally, though, I think that there are already plenty of humans who, through genetics and/or introspective self-modification, can be perfectly happy without improving conditions.

Economic Weirdtopia: FAIth determines that the love of money actually is the root of ~75% of evil, so it's back to the barter system for us.

Sexual Weirdtopia: FAIth determines that the separatist feminists were right -- CEV requires segregation by sex. Homosexual men and lesbians laugh and laugh. Research on immersive VR becomes a preoccupation among the heterosexual majority in both segregated camps.

Not very plausible, but... "That's the thing about FAIth. If you don't have it, you can't understand it. And if you do, no explanation is necessary."

Economic weirdtopia: being rich is socially unacceptable; not because the society values equality, but because it's considered decadent and, in a certain sense, cheating. Weirdtopia's system of morality is virtue-based, and one of their highest virtues is a peculiar sort of self-sufficiency. Essentially, you're expected to be able to make yourself safe and comfortable by relying only on your wits and not on material goods. Needing to consume natural resources is accepted as a fact of life, but you should be able to do as much as possible with as little as possible. There is no concept of land ownership. In a loose sense of the word "own", you own the chattels that you produce with your own hands, but accepting the products of others' labor is a vice.

Exchanging knowledge and techniques is normal and acceptable. Being knowledgable about things that others have discovered is entirely amoral. Innovating earns you respect, but equally so regardless of whether you're the first to ever discover something or whether you figured out something widely-known on your own.

I think the most you can plausibly say is that for humanlike architectures, memories of suffering (not necessarily true ones) are necessary to appreciate pleasures more complex than heroin. Probably what matters is that there's some degree of empathy with suffering, whether or not that empathy comes from memories. Even in that weakened form the statement doesn't sound plausible to me.

Anyway it seems to me that utopianly speaking the proper psychological contrast for pleasure is sobriety rather than pain.

Neil Stephenson's new book Anathem does exactly what you suggest in your public understand of science Weirdtopia. Although, he also sequesters the scientists in "monasteries."

Economic... Weirdtopia: The world has an indirect economy. People trade status for predictive power to decide which ventures get the most attention and which resources to allocate to whom/what. Businesses are considered a weird anachronism of a begone era. People are free to do whatever they want with their status, except trade real property. (They can, however, use it to make the market grant favours if they want.) Life's necessities are always freely accessible.

Governmental... Weirdtopia: Every conflict is resolved either by consensus or moving away. There are even seed spaceships moving far away from Sol for the latter option. Non-violence isn't the rule, it's the law. Every intelligence agreed to remove violent urges. Non-violence has an extremely broad definition that not only covers force, but also deception, market manipulation, even advertising, bad manners and ostracism. Honesty is not expected, it just is; the only way people find out what the word means is through history classes.

It must have been intentional that all the Dystopia examples are almost one-to-one mappings of the real world? Except for the cognitive one. That one stands out as strange, perhaps intentionally - the message is that the world is fucked, and we've only one more chance as the last Dystopian calamity looms before us.

As to the assignment:

Economic Weirdtopia: The production economy is entirely automated. Supply is near infinite due to the constellation of this automation with asteroid mining. (The weird part is that the political will was somehow mustered to a... (read more)

"Every conflict is resolved either by consensus or moving away."

I'm not moving. You move. Bastard.

"I'm not moving. You move. Bastard."

Fine, we'll both move to different Everett branches.

Weirdtopia: A deeper understanding of anthropics leads us to consider quantum immortality valid, as long as the death is instantaneous. We prepare an electron in a spin up state, and measure its angular momentum on the x axis. Left, your faction terminates, right, mine.

Economic Weirdtopia: Market is so efficient that nobody has to work, and everybody's basic needs can be sustained by just asking any charity. This prosperity hyperactivates everybody's social status chasing instincts, so people work harder and longer than ever, feeling inadequate if they don't earn more than their peers, and spending most of what they earn on making their 3d virtual avatars look better than other people's 3d virtual avatars.

Sexual Weirdtopia: Reproduction is completely separated from sex, children are taken care of by free market and government services with just token parental involvement, and all STDs all eliminated. This first leads to everybody having sex with everybody else, but people got bored with vanilla sex soon and many sexual identification based on shared sexual fetishes emerge. They replace religions, languages, citizenships and ethnicities as leading in/out-group indicators, and somehow Middle East is still in endemic state of war, now between guro and furry.

Governmental Weirdtopia: Government knows everything about everybody, but doesn't abuse it because everybody knows about everything it does. Universal transparency makes corruption impossible, so... (read more)

Sexual Weirdtopia: Double-blind Sexocracy .... you get the idea.

Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and...

Utopia: that has made all the difference. Dystopia: had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me. Wierdtopia: got to eat the bugs until the rangers threw me out.

For an example of a sexual wierdtopia, I'd recommend the movie zerophilia. Kinky, but not porn, and heck, my library has 2 copies.

Stranger in a Strange Land may have been an attempt to describe a Weirdtopia.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Babylon Lottery, 1941. Government by lottery. Living under a lottery system leads to greater expectation of random events, greater belief that life is and should be ruled by randomness, and further extension of the lottery's scope, in a feedback loop that increases until every aspect of everyone's life is controlled by the lottery.

Food Weirdtopia: We see the same type of taboos or enthusiasms that we see about sex in this world. The Catholic Church declares that artificial sweeteners are a perversion; there are pro-starvation articles at feministing; the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate weighs 300 pounds...

Sexual Weirdtopia:

The world envisioned in the strange philosophies of E. Yudkowsky, where the sentient citizens of terra-gen civilization have convinced themselves that the only noble pursuit is becoming pregnant. Sex has evolved into an elaborate emotional and intellectual ritual, combining features of philosophy, mathematics, and social activity. Emotional attachment to 'ephemeral' events does not come naturally to these beings, so sex is nearly always "for keeps," with at least one party (occasionally more) becoming impregnated with a unique... (read more)

Sexual Weirdtopia: If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? by Theodore Sturgeon

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Economic Weirdtopia: There is no economy. Everyone lives a self sufficient existence on isolated farms. Think Solaria.

Few of these weirdtopias seem strangely appealing in the same way that conspiratorial science seems strangely appealing.

It will be sad if sex disappears only because there is no need for biological reproduction.

Bah, steven is right. We have a bunch of weird dystopias. On the other hand, "strangely appealing" could be idiosyncratic. I think it was Harry Harrison's Deathworld 2 that made a neo-medieval dystopia from groups that held scientific secrets in enclaves. Miguel Antonio would be sad if sex disappeared, but I know some people who would be much more content without it, while others are really excited about Civil War re-enactments. By my count, speculations on sexual weirdtopias are well in the lead in the comments; is this just normal for our species, or are OB regulars more interested in weird sex?

Yeah, strangely appealing takes more work. I think we're looking at premature search-halts here. You don't have to go with your very first idea.

Most of these are random SF Weirdtopias, not fun-theoretical Weirdtopias and many have already been done in SF, too. Actually most of these are plain old Utopias or Dystopias.

But I would give credit to Joe's morality police, Mike Blume's Everett-splitting society, Edward's double-blind democracy, and Tomasz's "somehow Middle East is still in endemic state of war, now between guro and furry".

Utopia originally meant no-place, I have a hard time forgetting that meaning when people talk about them.

The term "utopia" was a deliberate pun on "outopia" meaning "no place" and "eutopia" meaning "good place". It seems doubtful that Thomas More actually intended to depict his personal ideal society, so one might say that Utopia is the original Weirdtopia.

I think we're looking at premature search-halts here.

I plead no contest.

Well, this may not quite fit the personal criteria for a wierdtopia, since this is quite close to what I would consider a utopia, but it stands fairly far apart from the other scenarios presented so far, so I figured I might as well post it:

Tech Everyone is forcibly uploaded, the surface of the earth is scanned in super-duper-hi-fi precision and then used for computronium to house the newly uploaded minds. An overseer AI is created that sends out a sphere of near-light speed probes to convert the rest of the stuff in our future light cone into computronium... (read more)

Zubon, from what I've read of Austrians they laugh at the claim (I think Gunnar Myrdal made it) that you can solve the knowledge/calculation problem with such a computer as a misunderstanding of the problem.

Yvain, you are groping toward one of the oldest forms of democracy.

aoeuid, that's the kind of Future I grew up in, and that I'm trying to get away from; it hasn't been discussed here because it's too obvious.

I cite Vinge here: we simply can't imagine weirdtopia. C'm on: 6 billion uploaded humans recursively self-modifying. There will be so many variations and weirdnesses that you could never list them all, and a significant subset of them would be beyond our cognitive ability to model due to intelligence smarter than us

Furthermore, I think a lot of people here might be surprised to find out how much weird shit there is in real life all around them.

I was chatting to a student at a very good UK university last night, and the topic of understanding science came u... (read more)

Perhaps I should make an implicit point explicit: if we get to a stage where humans can modify their own minds, it is highly likely that this will get rid of the psychological unity of the human race. Everyone else has been posting on how "people will (all) do this, be like this, etc". The reality is that there may well be on the order of (6*10^9)/100 ~ 10^7 separate psychological niches into which groups of co-self-modifying humans eventually splinter into, as humans with similar preferences gather together into groups of people with similar pre... (read more)

Roko, Instead of Shakespeare, perhaps resolve to get a sense of the knowledge, rationality, and general motivations and outlook of a larger set of people? Knowing who makes up our economy, governments, medical systems, and research institutions is as important as knowing how a lightbulb works for making good decisions in the world.

I'm far from perfect on this one; if anyone has suggestions for illuminating conversations to have with strangers, do share.

It's so sad that economics hasn't progressed over the last 100 years or so, beyond either "extreme central planning doesn't work" or "extreme unregulated free market doesn't work". Nothing, save Gesell and Yunus. Have you ever considered that cdo's, cds's and letters of credit were not invented for their own sake, but for a real world reason? What's going to be scarce in weirdtopia? The normal? Or, if I can have all the gadgets I want and never need a job or a place to live, talent and hard work? I think a lot of dissatisfaction comes f... (read more)

Economic weirdtopia . . .after the Ultimate Crash of 2105, the best ems got together and created a new universal atomic currency, based on not just on gold, but on reserves of quark-gluon plasma made from gold nuclei in deference to mankind's historical preferences.

Sexual weirdtopia. . .since death is over through nanotechology or uploading into perfect android bodies you can get on a 3-year-lease, there's no need for birth. If ems want to create a new being from themselves, they just copy different brain modules from the catalog and create the perfect &qu... (read more)

All-encompassing weirdtopia:

Humanity continues as it has for the last several thousand years, learning new things, changing its views, constantly refining its thoughts and actions. It makes mistakes and learns from them, or fails to learn and repeats them, repeatedly. It's splintered into many groups who hate each other for no particular reason, create wars, famine, and disease, despite wealth and cures. There is a great disparity in all things between different people in different places, including knowledge, wealth, and enjoyment of life.

Evolution turns ... (read more)

Your science weirdtopia seems a lot like how MMORPGs work now, to a large degree. There's an internally consistent set of world-rules, but they won't tell you what they are. Sure, people are happy to share their experimental results with you, but you have to go looking. Spoilers aren't left out in the open.

Why would we need the weirdtopia science to be performed on the physical world? Wouldn't new world-rules, optimized for the fun of learning them be better?

Economic: everyone owns a nanoassembler but mass production and copy operations are prohibited. Sexual: age of consent is raised to 600 years.

So, the question is "Whose utopia is it anyway?". Clearly not everyone would agree upon these utopia/dystopia definitions, so if future AIs are to be created instilled with the noblest of human values whose value system should their BIOS contain? Of course this requires you to confront the notion that humans have somewhat diverse value systems, not all of which may be friendly towards science or western libertarian thinking.

Let's say this is supposed to be a economic weirdtopia - or something like that.

Let's suppose there is more or less constant connectivity to internet equivalent so that you can 'see' whatever other people are broadcasting as information. Twitters and facebooks of the new era are widely adopted. Essentially this will also make possible to have near perfect sousveillance.

This is world where people find meaning to their lives through stories - endless damsels in distress and knights in shining armor, wise wizards, devious politicians and whatever. People lea... (read more)

Utopia: Virtual reality/mental augmentation allows for all to move into a cosmos of their own self-created imagination. All is fun and play. Economy and Politics dissolve into an order of creation, art, experience, and discovery. The exploration of the infiniteness of the Universe is the main objective. New profound ideas are generated thousands of times a second. Everyone's minds are perpetually blown. Everyone is a perpetual state of LMAO.

Dystopia: Governments ban imagination augmentation, adding it to the drug war hit list. Imaginations are condemned, ... (read more)

Economic: people assign high utility to work and negative utility to consumption: we trade by agreeing to consume each other's product in return for their using ours. Third world aid takes the form of stealing their good and then secretly burning them.

Governmental: whenever anyone utters a rhyming couplet, that couplet becomes law, taking precedence over all previous laws. However, no couplet can be repeated, so political think-tanks hire thousands of poets to craft elegant new laws. The strongest new couplets are held in reserve for decades, in a MAD scenario.

I'm not sure which category this goes under, as it has elements of a few. General Weirdtopia: A demonstrably non-sentient species of animal is created, genetically optimised for cuteness and lovableness, possibly tailored to whatever each individual finds endearing. Everybody is given one or more of these Furballs as a pet. Stuff for humans, both neccessities and luxuries, is free, but anything that is to be given to one’s Furball must be earned by working, solving puzzles, or winning competitions. People will empathize strongly with their Furballs and status will depend on how well-groomed, well-fed, well-dressed, etc. your Furball is, so people will work hard to buy them all manner of gourmet foods and toys and little sweaters. Government positions are awarded based on the performance of canditates' Furballs in competitions similar to modern dog or horse shows that measure obedience, agility, and health/happiness. Letting someone else pet your Furball is a deeply intimate act associated with sex, and the genes of children’s Furballs are drawn from their parents’ Furballs.