Welcome back to Geek Time Advanced. Hello, Lulu. How are you doing?

Hi, Brad. I'm doing OK. I'm rather to have a more in-depth conversation with you about utopia and dystopia.

Alright. Where do you want to start?

Brad, you're a geek, and you watch or read a lot of Sci-Fi, right?

Mhm.

Why do you think so many Sci-Fi works tend to create these utopian/dystopian world?

I think when you think about science and technology, these people are creating science or using science and creating technology as a way to create a better world, which lends itself into creating a utopia, right? We want to make our lives easier.

So when you think of science, Sci-Fi and the future, that's where we want to be, we want to be going to this utopian world. However, a lot of the times technology has some bad effects which actually brings us into a dystopian world.

I mean, you see all of these Sci-Fi works. They have their own …obviously their own view or their own perspective. Some are definitely darker than others. You have the more sort of like darker, for example, like Terminator that sort of view where humans are going to be just wiped out.

Definitely like, yeah, when you look at Sci-Fi the… you have those worlds where people are on the brink of annihilation, you want like …the creator, the writer of these stories is trying to warn us about the possibility of all these bad things.

Occasionally, you have someone with a more optimistic view. There's Tomorrowland which is a… it's a more recent film, but they have an older like TV series about it, but like Tomorrowland is kind of like this future utopia where we don't really have politicians so much as the leaders are scientists.

So there are kind of more optimistic views of the future as well. They’re are just few and far between.

I mean, you come from more of a STEM background. Do you believe that if scientists were to rule the world rather than politicians, you think that will make it a better world or the other way around?

I think it would be a little bit better. I don't necessarily think that it will be a utopian society. I just think that if the people who are in charge of science, education were scientists, there's going to be a lot better society overall. I don't really think that politicians necessarily should be in charge of everything. I think that there needs to be people who understand the science in charge of that.

But there are many mad scientists as well.

There's the whole mad scientist idea, but like not all scientists are mad scientists; and so you're not going to have one person controlling everything. You'd want a coalition of scientists in that way.

They can prevent there are rogue scientists here and there. And even with politicians being in control of everything, there are still going to be mad scientists.

That's true. But I guess then that's why you have the ethics committee. Scientists are not just talking about can we do it. It's also talking about should we do it.

Of course, we should.

I don't think you should be in power because that sounds scary. By the way, all of these like Terminator or last time you mentioned Logan's Run, those are relatively old or classic works of dystopian world. What are some the recent Sci-Fi dystopian stories that you have read or watched?

I think some of them were… recent ones can almost be worse, like you've got Hunger Games which is kind of like it's in the future and that you have all these districts and the kids…they choose kids from every district to go and…

In a Battle Royale situation.

Yeah, exactly you had the Battle Royale movie probably was like 20 years ago or so. Now you have a Hunger Games which is a similar but it’s its own story.

Then The Handmaid's Tale, of course, which I think is probably one of the most scariest things. I can see this actually happening in the world in the future. You have these many women in the world who can't have babies. And so the ones who can are being in slave to basically be used by rich people so they can still have kids.

Yeah. I mean, I'm actually… normally I'm not into Sci-Fi, as a genre. I'm more into horror.

But now I have to say in the past maybe 10 years or so, the most bone chilling things that I've watched are tow Sci-Fi things. One is Handmaid's Tale, the other is Westworld, both about dystopian, really bleak, dystopian future.

Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting ones that I have watched in recent years has to be Altered Carbon.

Don't think I've heard of that.

It was on Netflix, it was cancelled several years ago; but that the whole idea is that can put your consciousness everything about you into a device, and then you can move your consciousness from body to body.

Then you never die.

If your body dies, then you just move. Now there is ways to kill people. You just have to destroy the device that is holding your consciousness. And so that does happen from time to time.

But, you have the really rich people who are living hundreds of years now, but like there is death and there are a lot of people who were in the series at least who were against putting their consciousness into one of those devices.

And so it kind of had this two layers of society, the people who altered carbon and the people who were still like just regular humans.

This is the whole thing that you hear in like Big Bang Theory as well. They were talking about how Sheldon wants to… live forever as a machine, and then that's something to be excited about. But for other people, this might be unthinkable because they wouldn't think of themselves as human any more.

Which kind of… when we look at all these dystopian societies, it kind of bring us into this whole idea of eutopia. And that's not the typical utopia that we think of. It's eutopia with an e in the front of it.

Of eutopia, because the original utopia is with a u.

Yeah. Now the whole idea between eutopias it's a misspelling, right? So it's a misspelling of the original utopia, which is by itself trying to say that there is this misunderstanding or misconception of utopian ideas. So it's a postmodern kind of thinking.

Now eutopia should be a place of supreme happiness of course. But when we look at like the two schools of thought, there's the utopians who believe people will make the world better. On the other side, you have the eutopians with an e who believe that people will eventually ruin the world with their to make it better.

But these are actually still very, very close, like this brings us back to the original definition of utopia. When we said in Greek, it can be… it's like a word play. It can be both, it can be no place or good place. That's sort of idea.

By the way, I've also heard of a word protopia. What is that about?

So protopia is basically, it's a new idea that's coined because there's this whole idea that we will never really attain a utopia, like utopia is impossible.

Yeah.

So what the protopian idea is that since any attempt to create a utopia will fail, because people always want to struggle in life, whether or not we really want it. It's something that's ingrained in us.

So without struggle, people will feel unhappy. And so the whole idea of protopia is that people are going to continue to slowly but surely build into a better world.

The main facet is that when we create a protopian society is that when you do something, you should avoid doing something that betters society for one group of people.

What you want to do… if something makes life better for one group, but at the cost of another group, we shouldn't do that. We should do something that makes life better, but just avoid doing something that would….

At the cost of another…

Impact other people. Right.

This really is… in another way, it's more to talk about whether you think progress is… a world progress, is a zero-sum game or positive sum game.

If you believe it's zero sum game, then between me and if I represent a group of people, you represent a group of people. If I progress, that means I have to progress stepping on you, making you people suffer. But if we believe in positive sum game, then we can collaborate. And then we can jointly make the world a better place.

Yeah, I believe in this idea that it's a positive sum game, so long as we avoid doing the things that are going to hurt other people. Like… I think a lot of times people kind of ignore the ways that we can do something to better society just because maybe they're not going to get any benefit from it.

Good example, recently has been like the Student Loan Forgiveness in the US. There are people who are against it simply because they're not going to benefit from it.

That's about waving the student loans or?

Yes, it's kind of… it’s waving the student loans. In a sense like there have been a lot of waving or forgiving of debts over the last few years, lots of companies had debt waved. People were giving stimulus. It's basically it's that, but some people are against it because they had to pay their student loans and some people are against it because they are not going to benefit from it.

So like when you have something that's going to benefit a group of people, and it doesn't really hurt anyone else. You see that people are against it, right? And so sometimes it's kind of difficult.

That...it really is a flaw of humanity. I think it's the flaws of humanity that turns utopian ideas into dystopia.

By the way, before we wrap up, I really want to ask you personally, Brad. So with all these interest in technology, obviously, do you believe that with AI rising so to speak, are you worried about the possibility of a Westworld kind of dystopia?

I'm not necessarily so worried about it. I'd have to see where AI really goes to, but I really think that it's not something we necessarily have to worry about, but it's something that we should try to avoid.

Alright. Alright. On that note, we're going to wrap up here, share with us in the comment section. What do you think about utopia, dystopia, protopia, and your ideas of how we can better the world and make more progress as humans.

Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem. All right, thank you everyone.

See you next time. Bye.

Bye bye.