Academics eventually found out that human beings were happiest as hunter-gatherers in the African savanna. It was Obvious In Hindsight that deviating from the environment evolution designed us for would only ever hurt us. All technological improvements ever did was raise the average human's happiness set point, while making it harder to achieve ends necessary for long-term satisfaction, such as close companionship, sense of purpose in life, sense of overcoming challenges, belief in a higher power, freedom, etc.
When this fact was discovered, it was suggested that we smash all our technology and start over, but this seemed much too hard to actually do. The easier way was to develop virtual reality, plug everyone into the Matrix (MMORPG-style to prevent the everyone-i-ever-loved-was-a-lie problem), and allow humanity to live out our lives as Nature intended. Whenever anyone dies in the Matrix, they get to hang out in Heaven for a while, where the memory of all their many lives is given back to them and they are free to live a maximally hedonic existence full of sex, drugs, and good food. When this gets boring, they can choose to become Reincarnated. Their memory is wiped again and they go back into the savanna.
Today's post, Building Weirdtopia was originally published on 12 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Eutopia is Scary, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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