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The Cartography of the Future: Recovering Utopia for the 21st Century

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How Should Humanity Steer the Future?

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Abstract

The above quote from Oscar Wilde expresses a sentiment largely alien to the early 21st century. We really don’t believe in Utopias anymore, or, if we do, associate them with the kinds of political violence found in the ideological movements that haunted the first half of the 20th century, state communism and Nazism, especially [1]. The road to Utopia, one suspects, leads to its opposite, to dystopia, visions of which are now all the rage [2].

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This, of course, is the reverse of Kevin Kelly’s focus on what technology wants.

  2. 2.

    For the role of diversity in system resilience see: Norberg [42]. In terms of the Utopian Tradition see Walzer [43].

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    Rick Searle

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  1. Rick Searle
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Correspondence to Rick Searle .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, USA

    Anthony Aguirre

  2. Foundational Questions Institute, New York, New York, USA

    Brendan Foster

  3. Foundational Questions Institute, New York, New York, USA

    Zeeya Merali

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Searle, R. (2016). The Cartography of the Future: Recovering Utopia for the 21st Century. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) How Should Humanity Steer the Future?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20717-9_7

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