Every Utopia ever constructed—in philosophy, fiction, or religion—has been, to one degree or another, a place where you wouldn't actually want to live. I am not alone in this important observation: George Orwell said much the same thing in "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun", and I expect that many others said it earlier.

If you read books on How To Write—and there are a lot of books out there on How To Write, because amazingly a lot of book-writers think they know something about writing—these books will tell you that stories must contain "conflict".

That is, the more lukewarm sort of instructional book will tell you that stories contain "conflict". But some authors speak more plainly.

"Stories are about people's pain." Orson Scott Card.

"Every scene must end in disaster." Jack Bickham.

In the age of my youthful folly, I took for granted that authors were excused from the search for true Eutopia, because if you constructed a Utopia that wasn't flawed... what stories could you write, set there? "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after." What use would it be for a science-fiction author to try to depict a positive Singularity, when a positive Singularity would be...

...the end of all stories?

It seemed like a reasonable framework with which to examine the literary problem of Utopia, but something about that final conclusion produced a quiet, nagging doubt.

At that time I was thinking of an AI as being something like a safe wish-granting genie for the use of individuals. So the conclusion did make a kind of sense. If there was a problem, you would just wish it away, right? Ergo—no stories. So I ignored the quiet, nagging doubt.

Much later, after I concluded that even a safe genie wasn't such a good idea, it also seemed in retrospect that "no stories" could have been a productive indicator. On this particular occasion, "I can't think of a single story I'd want to read about this scenario", might indeed have pointed me toward the reason "I wouldn't want to actually live in this scenario".

So I swallowed my trained-in revulsion of Luddism and theodicy, and at least tried to contemplate the argument:

A world in which nothing ever goes wrong, or no one ever experiences any pain or sorrow, is a world containing no stories worth reading about.
A world that you wouldn

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