Where is utopia country

Utopia can refer either to the detailed, concrete picture of a flawless community [which was what Thomas More had in mind when he coined this neologism], or to the systematic exposition of the underlying principles of such a community. Under whatever guise they appear, they have to be defined, then assessed. Utopias can be defined in several ways: by the place this [etymologically] no-place occupiesa small, remote island found by accident, or the author's own country several centuries later, or the whole world; by the people that are allowed to live in utopia. Some biological and/or social cleansing seem required, as well as a certain amount of selective breeding; by the rules that are enforced in utopia. They combine, in unlikely proportions, many ingredients including equality of conditions, a low degree of state coercion and economic affluence, against a backdrop of unlimited development of individual potentialities. Assessing utopias can be achieved by looking at their origins or their outcomes. Their origin is not by far the best conceived part of utopian constructs. Apart from a few references to the odd destabilizing shock [war, revolution, even a comet], the main explanation is the Darwinian one that in the long run the best societal arrangements [should] always win. The outcomes to be expected from utopias have long been appraised quite favorably. Yet from Aristophanes on, they have also been made a laughing-stock. Then after the mid-twentieth century, they ceased to be a solution to become a problem, a shift which is conveyed by the emergence of the word dystopia: the utopian dream taken upside down to become a nightmare. A word about the future: utopias as social arrangements where consensual equality generates happiness seem to be definitely passé; utopian mindsets which see the world as a confrontation Armageddon-like between the forces of evil and the true believers will be with us for a long time; expect dystopias to have a future as long as well-intended social action is likely to generate unintended dismal effects.

Attempted Utopias and Intentional Communities

Utopia [pronounced/uːˈtoʊpiə/] can be defined as a proposal for harmonious society governed by a reinvented politicolegal system. No known society has achieved this ideal state, but scores of innovative communities have been organized around central principles meant to systematically address members' needs and ameliorate social problems. Because of the inherent impossibility of actualizing a perfect society, intentional community rather than utopia is a more precise term for such projects undertaken in the real world.

An intentional community is a residential group that defines and consents to a philosophy of how to live and work with a high degree of mutual benefit derived from cooperation, camaraderie, and shared values and responsibilities. An intentional community can be as small as an extended family or as large as a nation-state. The word intentional reflects the attempt to consciously base the community on a set of principles consensually shared by participants who enter into membership voluntarily. Some scholars, such as the author of California's Utopian Colonies, add the criterion that a utopian community withdraws from mainstream society [Hine, 1953]. However, for the purpose of this historical survey, we will also consider revolutionary movements whose intent was to be transformative for society overall. Examples include the Russian and Iranian revolutions. In his definition of utopia Hicks adds that [U]topian[s]seek, by their example, to convince the world of the superiority of the new social institutions they have built [Hicks, 1987].

Medical Cultures

The Utopia for which citizens of Planet Earth have searched since the dawn of intelligent life may exist only as an ideal. Attempts to materialize the concept are influenced by the culture of those who attempt its expression, and, in a sense, can be extrapolated to the concept of Global Hospital 2050. The moral and cultural issues that influence the delivery of health care can be identified in the United States, Central Europe, the Nordic countries, Russian, and Japan. Each has different priorities. As global communication advances, and as storehouses of human knowledge become standardized with methods of cataloging and retrieving information, the benefits and shortcomings of techniques and therapies will be understood more universally. Such understanding will reduce cultural differences in the delivery of health care. For example, what is considered to be Chinese medicine today will be integrated into western medicine. Anecdotal medicine based on valid experience will become increasingly more evidenced-based in the future.

Problems are different in the Third World, where resources are limited by economic and technological constraints. Beyond these obvious facts, one also must consider that technological development takes place in a stepwise fashion. Initial heavy monetary investment in the form of capital and manpower gives way to economic implementation and cost-effective utilization. Through all of these steps, medical personnel become educated as to methods that will affect the most cost-effective and satisfactory outcomes. What is known as state-of-the-art technology or medical practice today in developed countries could become the basis for best practices in 2050 in countries that are considered to be the Third World today. This seems to be a logical progression such that the time may come when worldwide communication and dissemination of knowledge will eliminate what we know as the Third World.

By 2050, we could see technology dividing itself into two culturesone of developed countries, and one of developing countries. The former would be based on communication networks linking imaging technology, laboratory information, and tasks performed by robots in laboratories, operating and recovery rooms, and intensive care units. Wireless technology will reduce the expenses of hardwire connection of devices. For the latter, labor costs could be relatively inexpensive, and economic development in what we know today as the Third World could be possible by making health care in and of itself a component of each country's gross domestic product. In 2050, medical technology in these countries might be only at a 2001 level. However, as the communication networks of developed countries mature, they will reach worldwide acceptance, permitting linkages and dissemination of knowledge to the point where a universal health care system is available to all, regardless of the maturity of a country's economy.

As communication improves and medical knowledge becomes more universal, global efforts to improve the health status of entire populations will increase. Hospitals will form co-operative nets over state boundaries, allowing medical knowledge and skill to diffuse worldwide. This trend will accelerate the development of universal practice patterns, technology development, and, perhaps, hospital and health care facility architecture.

4.1 Utopia vs Dystopia

Scenarios of utopia or dystopia are easy to describe. If we all share robo-taxis, we experience traffic utopia. If we all own personal AVs, we end in urban dystopia. This or its opposite is how the two narratives go. Neither will be the end case, of course, but the struggle to maximize one or the other scenario, and the view regarding which way we are actually heading, and what should be done to plan for one or the other, will drive an ongoing and vociferous debate. This debate will contribute to delayed infrastructure decisions, and this in turn will both tarnish utopia and exaggerate dystopia. The most important attribute of these opposing narratives is that both are believable and feasible. What each calls for may be so different in its implications for physical configuration of roads and parking that particular infrastructure investments carry higher than usual risks. Some choices of what to build now would be unworkable or unnecessary a decade or two later.

Just as retail commerce is moving from bricks-and-mortar to e-commerce, so too mobility is moving from steel-and-oil to e-mobility. This does not mean vehicles disappearassuredly they will notbut it means that steel-and-oil vehicles or even newer battery powered, 3-D printed plastic or graphene-battery vehicles may no longer be center stage in defining mobility. Vehicle ownership could become second best to what can be demanded from the cloud. Such a shift in focus would take a few decades, as the abandonment of literal horsepower did. So too will growth of e-commerce into the dominant retail mode take decades. If you want to preview the future of fixed mobility systems in 2030, review the failure rate of American shopping malls in 2017 [Close, 2016], but draw analogies carefully, because disruption strikes selectively at the service points that are least effective for its customers.

And do not be fooled by the assertion: Yes, but there will still be vehicles. That is certainly true, and many of them will still be privately ownedespecially in the early decadesjust as there will still be bricks-and-mortar retail stores. In the same way that the viability of storefronts is challenged in some retail sectors more than others, it is fixed-route transit and multiple-vehicle ownership business models that are initially threatened in the emerging revolution of vehicles and mobility.

III.H.2.c. Blissful Utopia

No full-blown AI Utopia based on the creation of superintelligent machines has been written to date. Yet authors like Dyson, Kurzweil, and Crevier offer arguments claiming that the move toward superintelligent machines is an integral part of the natural processes of evolution and that, all things considered, it is a good and probably inevitable thing. The ethics of natural evolution support it. According to this scenario this phase of evolution represents the next stage in the perfectibility of humankind. With the guidance of machines, people are able to conquer every kind of disorder and conflict in their lives and souls.

Just as the invention of writing and subsequendy printing improved the quality of human life despite some dislocations, superintelligent computer robots will create an even better worlda Utopia. The first two scenarios above depict dystopias. In this scenario Al-driven machines, it is often implicitly assumed, will create a new society based on rationality, harmony, utility, simplicity, and order. Conflicts between people and their environment will be largely eliminated. This new regime will be a better one because the people living in it will become morally better people. They will be happier, more self-fulfilled, more autonomous, and freer. H. G. Wells, in The Outline of History and some of his earlier works, suggests that Darwinian evolution moves in this optimistic direction.

This scenario also reinforces Robert Owen's 1836 idea that with the aid of technology and the right social system humankind is capable of endless progressive improvement, physical, intellectual, and moral, and of happiness, without the possibility of retrogression or of assignable limit. The Romano-British monk Pelagius believed that humans could perfect themselves by exercising their own free will. Saint Augustine believed that only God could perfect humankind. In Emile Rousseau suggests that by carefully selecting a tutor [i.e., programmer] and purifying a person's environment one can be educated to become a perfect person. Like these thinkers who went before them, AI Utopians believe that carefully constructed intelligent machines will allow humankind to reach the same goal of perfectibility. A related possibility is that humans can also achieve immortality by means of downloading their contemporary and finite minds into infinite, self-reproducible silicon memories. For example, in Hans Moravec's view, human brain cells will eventually be replaced by an ANN composed of electronic circuits with virtually identical input and output functions. In such an ideal world moral issues are minimal.

Crevier believes that during the first two decades of the 21st century the blissful Utopia scenarioone he calls Lift-Offwill prevail. AI will gradually seep into all human activities, with mostly beneficial effects, he writes in AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. Since during that period machines will remain less intelligent than people, we should keep the upper hand on them without too much difficulty. But following this brief golden age he foresees the possibilities of scenarios 1 or 2 coming into play. The machines will eventually excel us in intelligence, and it will become impossible for us to pull the plug on them. [It is already almost impossible: powering off the computers controlling our electric transmission networks, for instance, would cause statewide blackouts.] Competitive pressures on the businesses making ever more intensive use of AI will compel them to entrust the machines with even more power. E-commerce and E-government are major factors in this trend. Such pressures will extend to our entire social and legal framework. For instance, proposals already exist for legally recognizing artificial intelligence programs as persons in order to solve the issues of responsibility posed by the use of expert systems.

In any of these three scenarios AI-based machines qualify for a high degree of personhood. They will have moral status and likely will become the arbiters of morality. Moreover, their display of intelligence will have qualified them for a level of respect similar to that accorded a human person. In a 1964 article, philosopher Hilary Putham laid out the criterion: [I]f a machine satisfied the same psychological theory as a human, then there is no good reason not to regard it as a conscious being in exactly the same way that the human is regarded as a conscious being.

2 Libertarianism, Freedom as the Unrestricted Right to Own Private Property: Nozick

Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia [1974] was a polemical response to Rawls' A Theory of Justice. At the time of its publication, there was a backlash against welfarism and state intervention in the economy. That backlash was driven by the economic theory that managed markets are inefficient, since redistribution through taxation takes away incentives. But although Nozick's book was congenial to that theory, his philosophical position is independent of it. Nozick would defend his position on the grounds that it was the correct one, even if it were inefficient. He would in fact reject appeals to economic efficiency as improperly utilitarian.

Though labeled a libertarian, Nozick's starting point is not the idea of liberty or freedom, but rather the Lockean one of self-ownership. This has polemical value because it allows Nozick to proceed against Rawls' [and other welfarists'] programs of redistribution by appealing to a hatred of slavery shared by all across the political spectrum since the bourgeois revolutions, and suggesting, by a rhetorical sleight of hand, that taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. The slide has some source in Locke's labour theory of property, the idea that you have a property right to something if you have mixed your labour with it. But Locke did not suggest that that right is absolute in the same sense that your right to your bodily integrity is.

The sleight of hand at the heart of libertarianism is this. We all agree that if A has the right to make use of B's body, of which B is the rightful owner, without B's consent, then B is A's slave. By parity of reason, it is suggested, if A has the right to make use of B's property, of which B is the rightful owner, without B's consent, by taxing B, then B is A's slave. The sleight of hand depends on accepting the extension of self-ownership from ownership of one's own body to ownership of whatever one has acquired legally, an extension which is not evidently justified. Nonetheless, libertarians may be able to deploy a slippery slope argument against welfarism without making this particular sleight of hand. Rawls's Two Principles of justice are intended to balance the twin demands of [a] respecting choices and [b] rectifying circumstances. Rawls intends [a] to be applied to individuals, [b] to groups. But, according to the libertarian, there is nothing within Rawls's theory to prevent the radical welfarist from extending rectificatory treatment to individuals too. How is one to define what intervention is legitimate in order to rectify circumstances? If the line is to be drawn around the body, it would seem to mean that any nonbodily interference is at least in principle legitimate in order to rectify circumstances. And that sounds sinister even to those who are not extreme libertarians.

Beyond Utopias of Place and Process

Debord and the Situationists did not envisage utopia as an endpoint that would harmoniously resolve all social and spatial conflicts, but as an ongoing process of journeying toward an aspired set of social relations. They championed a form of utopianism that moved beyond building cities on a hill, in which fixed social and spatial order were imposed at the exclusion of any forms of spontaneity or disorder that might get in the way of the achievement of that [singular] plan. An appeal to the subversive meanings and practices of everyday life in urban space can refocus the attention of utopian thinking away from prescribed visions of future spaces in favor of a more embodied and process-oriented approach to changing urban space, architecture, and urbanity.

This highlights the question of closure in utopian projects. For many thinkers, such as Sennett, inspired by anarchist ideas and heterodox Marxism, plannings obsession with imposing order and closure debilitates the potential for urban communities to make their own decisions about their lives and negates the generative potential of encounters with strangers and other cultures. In contrast, Harvey stresses that utopianism must be a dialectical spatiotemporal project rooted in a critique of existing capitalism [and the possibilities it leaves open for alternatives] at the same time that it advocates different trajectories for society. He has critiqued the openness of utopias of process on two levels: first for failing to recognize that some form of closure [however temporary] must take place in order for utopian spaces to be realized; and second, for overlooking the traditions and institutions that utopian projects [will] accumulate over time. This situation demands that the advocates of new utopian spaces must confront issues of power and authority in the realization of those spaces. Harvey poses the challenge that the Left must confront the issue of what is legitimate [and, by implication, progressive] authority. He argues that to materialize any one sociospatial design shuts down the possibility of materializing others. The dialectical utopianism Harvey advocates operates with an either/or, rather than a both/and, dialectic and he challenges progressive thinkers both inside and outside the academy to confront the choices available to them.

Baeten suggests that an alternative dialectic is at work in which the construction of utopian futures has fuelled dystopian critiques and vice versa. A feminist utopia is likely to be dystopian for a moral conservative and vice versa, but both reactions can inspire new utopian aspirations for the other group. Feminist critiques of classic utopianism, and their own alternative utopias, recognize that all utopian visions are partial and partisan. In this respect, utopias help expose the major divisions of interest and ambition within a given society. Kraftl has proposed that this utopian/dystopian dualism needs deconstructing. He argues that the process of building utopias involves both disruption and creation; and that despair and hope come together in providing inspiration for many utopian ambitions. As one possible solution to the partiality of utopian claims, Sandercock has proposed a vision of participatory planning as an open-ended process that could never be fully finished. Her hope was that the participatory process could mobilize the visionary desires of all sections of the population inevitably, incommensurate desires that would need to be constantly negotiated in their realization.

Those who promote open processes of utopian experimentation can fall into the trap, in articulating understandable and justified critiques of the enclosure and privatization of public space in the contemporary city, of nostalgically yearning for a lost urban public realm, without paying attention to multiple exclusions from traditional public space around axes of gender, ethnicity, or religion. Equally, they overlook the experience of encountering difference in public space, which can be experienced as uncomfortable, risky, and painful for many, even though it remains at the core of many [recent] utopian visions of better cities. Those who advocate open, nomadic urban life potentially overlook the desire for fixity and simplicity held by many [possibly most] people in societies marked by rapid change and increasing speed. Indeed, for Harvey, the increasing speed of contemporary life actually precludes the time to imagine alternatives. This article concludes by charting recent approaches to utopianism that rely on modest practices of hope as a means of anticipating potential utopias.

Openness

Finland is a type of democratic library utopia, where the principle that underpins libraries and democracy openness is not just an ideal, but a citizens reality. Everyone has access to every library, regardless of their status or position in society or what memberships they hold. For example, all citizens can access academic libraries or the parliamentary library. Library access is a citizens right. The rest of the world can learn from the Finnish example and can model it as best practice. The outcomes of this openness and the value placed on information, which extends to a right written in the Finnish constitution, have been a highly literate, happy populace. Finland consistently scores among the highest literacy rates in the world. According to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], roughly every fifth Finn reads at high levels. These levels mean that that they can perform multiple-step operations to integrate, interpret or synthesise information from complex or lengthy texts that involve conditional and/or competing information. In addition, they can make complex inferences and appropriately apply background knowledge as well as interpret or evaluate subtle truth claims or arguments [OECD, 2013]. Finland ranked sixth in the world as the happiest country in 2015 according to the World Happiness Report [Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2015]. They too have fallen on hard economic times, resulting in re-structuring and downsizing, but the Finnish answer has been a human one, with a focus on helping each other through collaboration and networking [Tuominen & Saarti, 2012].

Libertarianism, Freedom as the Unrestricted RighttoOwn Private Property: Nozick

Nozicks Anarchy, State and Utopia [1974] was a polemical response to Rawls ATheory of Justice. At the time of its publication, there was a backlash against welfarism and state intervention in the economy. That backlash was driven by the economic theory that managed markets are inefficient, since redistribution through taxation takes away incentives. However, although Nozicks book was congenial to that theory, his philosophical position is independent of it. Nozick would defend his position on the grounds that it was the correct one, even if it were inefficient. He would in fact reject appeals to economic efficiency as improperly utilitarian.

Although labeled a libertarian, Nozicks starting point is not the idea of liberty or freedom, but rather the Lockean one of self-ownership. This has polemical value because it allows Nozick to proceed against Rawls [and other welfarists] programs of redistribution by appealing to a hatred of slavery shared by all across the political spectrum since the bourgeois revolutions, and suggesting, by a rhetorical sleight of hand, that taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. The slide has some source in Lockes labor theory of property, the idea that one has a property right to something if one has mixed ones labor with it. However, Locke did not suggest that that right is absolute in the same sense that ones right to bodily integrity is.

The sleight of hand at the heart of libertarianism is this. We all agree that if A has the right to make use of Bs body, of which B is the rightful owner, without Bs consent, then B is As slave. By parity of reason, it is suggested, if A has the right to make use of Bs property, of which B is the rightful owner, without Bs consent, by taxing B, then B is As slave. The sleight of hand depends on accepting the extension of self-ownership from ownership of ones own body to ownership of whatever one has acquired legally, an extension that is not evidently justified. Nonetheless, libertarians may be able to deploy a slippery slope argument against welfarism without making this particular sleight of hand. Rawlss two principles of justice are intended to balance the twin demands of [1] respecting choices and [2] rectifying circumstances. Rawls intends [1] to be applied to individuals, [2] to groups. However, according tothe libertarian, there is nothing within Rawlss theory to prevent the radical welfarist from extending rectificatory treatment to individuals too. How is one to define what intervention is legitimate in order to rectify circumstances? If the line is to be drawn around the body, it would seem to mean that any nonbodily interference is at least in principle legitimate in order to rectify circumstances. That sounds sinister even to those who are not extreme libertarians.