Branch Three: The Lotus-Eaters and the Brain–Computer Virtual Matrix
In Homer’s Odyssey, the sailors who ate the lotus forgot their way home and their ambitions, finding perfect bliss in sweet slumber. In the age of superintelligence, hundreds of millions of humans choose to become Lotus-Eaters (Homo hedonicus): their bodies steeped in minimal-energy biochemical life-support pods, their nervous systems wired straight into infinitely detailed virtual-reality matrices, they live out lives nourished purely by dopamine and endorphins in bespoke universes without pain.
In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick asked: “If a machine could give you every wonderful experience you desired, and you could not tell it from reality, would you plug in for good?” Nozick believed most people would refuse, because people long to ‘actually do things.’
In the age of superintelligence, however, faced with the cruel complexity of the real world and the collapse of the value of work, millions vote with their bodies to show that the subjective reality of experience outweighs objective, ontological reality. For them, better to be a king in a virtual temple than an ant in a world of pain.
From the standpoint of resource allocation, superintelligence is most tolerant of—even encouraging toward—the Lotus-Eater class.
Compared with the Cyber-Ascendants, who compete for the fission energy of the whole planet and the radiation pressure of stars, the Lotus-Eaters consume almost nothing of the physical world. They are the most harmless, most law-abiding specimens of civilization in the physical world, sweetly embracing voluntary sterility and their final curtain call.
“Don’t wake me. If reality means cold, growing old and pointless toil, then an illusory embrace is the greatest mercy this universe can offer me.”