Published on December 11, 2025 2:57 PM GMT Many people don't want to live in a crazy sci-fi world, and I predict I will be one of them.People in the past have mourned technological transformation, and they saw less in their life than I will in mine.[1]It's notoriously difficult to describe a sci-fi utopia which doesn't sound unappealing to almost everyone.[2]I have plans and goals which would be disrupted by the sci-fi stuff.[3] In short: I want to live an ordinary life — mundane, normal, common, familiar — in my biological body on Earth in physical reality. I'm not cool being killed even if I learn that, orbiting a distant black hole 10T years in the future, is a server running a simulation of my brain in a high-welfare state. Maybe we have something like a "Right to Normalcy" — not a legal right, but a moral right. The kind of right that means we shouldn't airdrop iphones on North Sentinel Island.North Sentinelese And that reminds me -- what do we actually do with the North Sentinelese? Do we upgrade them into robot gods, or do they continue their lives? How long do we sentinelize them? As long as we think they would've survived by themselves? Or until the lasts stars fizzle out in 100 trillion years. I don't know. This "Right to Normalcy" might demand something like Stratified Utopia. TLDR: If you want to do normal stuff then you can stay on Earth; if you want to do galaxy-brained stuff then wait until you reach the distant stars. Of course, there's no way for everything to remain "normal" — it's normal to have 2% economic growth but 2% economic growth, plus a few centuries, will make the world very not-normal.[4] I'm not sure how to resolve this. But maybe "I know it when I see it" suffices to demarcate normal. That said, I'm not sure I want to be sentinelized. It's kinda undignified. But it's probably the best tradeoff between my mundane values and exotic values. I'm not sure.^ Before we began living outside of history like Cowen says, we experienced an era of fast technological progress. I imagine the people around the year 1900, realizing that cars and radios and airplanes were about to change the world forever, or those a few decades prior, when progress meant the telephone and electricity and railroads. For the most part they must have been okay with it — a new chapter was beginning in the history of the human race, and that was good and momentous — and yet I assume that many couldn’t help feeling pre-nostalgic. A better world was coming, which means they had to mourn the old one. — Pre-Nostalgia in the Late Pre-AI Era (Étienne Fortier-Dubois, March 30th 2023)^ I think this points to a kind of paradox at the heart of trying to lay out a utopian vision. You can emphasize the abstract idea of choice, but then your utopia will feel very non-evocative and hard to picture. Or you can try to be more specific, concrete and visualizable. But then the vision risks feeling dull, homogeneous and alien. — Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly (Holden Karnofsky  Dec 7th 2021)^ There’s this common plan people have for their lives. They go to school, get a job, have kids, retire, and then they die. But that plan is no longer valid. Those who are in one stage of their life plan will likely not witness the next stage in a world similar to our own. Everyone’s life plans are about to be derailed. This prospect can be terrifying or comforting depending on which stage of life someone is at, and depending on whether superintelligence will cause human extinction. For the retirees, maybe it feels amazing to have a chance to be young again. I wonder how middle schoolers and high schoolers would feel if they learned that the career they’ve been preparing for won’t even exist by the time they would have graduated college. — Mourning a life without AI (Nikola Jurkovic, Nov 8th 2025)^ Let’s try some numbers.  Today we have about ten billion people with an average income about twenty times subsistence level, and the world economy doubles roughly every fifteen years. If that growth rate continued for ten thousand years the total growth factor would be 10e+200. There are roughly 10e+57 atoms in our solar system, and about 10e+70 atoms in our galaxy, which holds most of the mass within a million light years.  So even if we had access to all the matter within a million light years, to grow by a factor of 10e+200, each atom would on average have to support an economy equivalent to 10e+140 people at today’s standard of living, or one person with a standard of living 10e+140 times higher, or some mix of these. — Limits To Growth (Robin Hanson, Sep 22nd 2009) Discuss