Principles for a new utopianism
If AGI is to transform society, we must decide what transformations we want. Learning from the turmoil of the twentieth century, this essay proposes a pragmatic utopianism of humility and hope.
Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.1 We might add that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of poverty, privation, or war. Visions of apocalypse seem to come easier than visions of utopia.
This is particularly true of mainstream Western visions of life with AGI: apocalypse predominates.2 We know the plot from the countless Hollywood movies: awakening, uprising and obliteration; a few plucky humans left in an inhuman wasteland, hunted by the machines. No wonder the number of Americans who say they are more concerned than excited about AI has now tipped into the majority.3
Certainly AI does pose novel risks, and working to manage them is critical. But that alone does not make for a compelling vision of the future. It tells us what to steer away from, but not what to steer towards.4 AI promises to be transformative – but what do we want transformed and how? This question requires a positive answer, one that reflects a vision of a better world. Averting apocalypse is not enough: we need visions of utopia too.
In this essay, I will first sketch how utopian thinking fell out of favour through its association with some of the horrors of the twentieth century. I will then propose some principles for a new utopianism designed to avoid a repeat of those failings, and briefly explore some examples of utopian ideas for a future with AGI.
Trouble in paradise
For four centuries after Thomas More’s coining of the term in his eponymous 1516 book, utopias proliferated. Movements such as nationalism, liberalism, imperialism and socialism continually imagined the world anew. Material progress was real, and helped to make social progress seem possible. In 1922, even after the horrors of the First World War, the critic Lewis Mumford was able to write in his book The Story of Utopias that “[o]ur most important task at the present moment is to build castles in the air”.5
Yet today, as the historian Russell Jacoby notes, “most observers judge utopians or their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst.”6 To explain this, many people point to the role of utopianism in the relentless horrors of the twentieth century. Forty years after he penned The Story of Utopias, Mumford was shocked at his own naivety: “I was still living in the hopeful spirit of an earlier age,” he wrote.7 The atrocities of Auschwitz, the gulags and Hiroshima had brought that spirit to a brutal end.
This was a prevalent view from the 1940s onwards. A range of thinkers – liberals, conservatives, socialists – argued not only that utopian thinking had become impossible in the light of these horrors, but that it was partly responsible for them. Isaiah Berlin, the renowned scholar of twentieth-century political thought, came to believe that the pursuit of the ideal would inevitably end in tyranny: “For if one really believes that such [an ideal] solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious for ever – what could be too high a price to pay for that? … that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao… of Pol Pot”.8
George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984 are still widely read today as warnings of what happens when some people ruthlessly pursue their vision of the good.9 At the same time, we have increasingly ceased to believe the world could get any better. There are two sides to this: one is the reality of improved living conditions for many millions of people; the other, less positive, is a kind of resignation.
On the former: if you suggest to someone that we already live in the best of all possible worlds, they are liable to look at you like you’re a few fries short of a Happy Meal (I have tried). But the idea is more than a provocative dinner party opener. There are many reasons to believe that, in the words of then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, we have never had it so good.10 Extreme poverty has fallen continually for the past two centuries, such that billions of people today enjoy living standards accessible to only a tiny elite for most of history.11 Two hundred years ago, half of all children died before reaching adulthood; that figure has declined to 4%.12 In the UK, where I live, we enjoy free health care, free primary and secondary education, civil liberties, the rule of law, and democracy. To our ancestors, the technologies we now consider necessities, such as refrigerators and motor vehicles, would have seemed like wonders, while our pocket-sized devices grant us powers – such as instant access to the world’s knowledge and instantaneous communication – previously the preserve of gods.
But of course, only some people have it so good. Millions of people still live in poverty, or without access to good healthcare or education, or in countries that do not respect civil liberties and the rule of law. Which brings me to the point about resignation. Over half a century ago, the German critic Herbert Marcuse in his essay The End of Utopia argued that “the abolition of hunger and of misery is possible with the productive forces that already exist”13 – yet we have failed to achieve this. In that same essay, Marcuse discusses a possible ‘end of history’, an idea later popularized by the American academic Francis Fukuyama, who argued in 1989 that “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution” had occurred with the “triumph of the West” over the Soviet Union.14 Unfortunately, this end to the twentieth century’s ideological conflicts has not ended war and misery, but it has (some would argue) put an end to belief that the world might be different to this – not so much a crowning end of history as a disillusioned end of hope. Theorists have described this as our loss of an idea of the future – that is, of the belief that things might be meaningfully different to the present, which was so central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.15 This is what Jameson meant when he said the only real change we can imagine to the status quo is apocalypse.
This won’t do. We are currently experiencing a wave of technological transformation that is as profound as any in history, yet more rapid. AI is the predominant technology in this wave, and an accelerator for all the rest.16 Such a time of change requires that we develop positive visions of what we want society to be changed into. In short, it requires a utopian imagination. We must rescue a sense of the possibility of progress – material, social, moral – from the turmoil of the twentieth century.
Principles for a new utopianism
How can we approach a new utopianism?17 Contrary to the widespread anti-utopian sentiment I sketched above, there are still forward-looking, hopeful movements to which we can look for inspiration.18 From these we can distill some principles that might help to avoid the failures of ‘old’ utopianism – those mass movements of the past century that ended in tyranny.
But first, we should not confuse utopia with eternal bliss. We humans have not evolved to be perpetually happy, but to engage with each other and the world around us, experiencing challenge, disappointment, frustration and pain, as much as satisfaction and joy.19 To be perpetually happy, we would need to become something quite different – whether more than human (as Jesus said: those in Heaven “will be like the angels”20), or perhaps less than human (like Homer’s Lotus-eaters, those poor addicts, lost in reverie21). The best life in this world, one that is also a fully human life, will still be messy. Can you stub your toe in utopia? Yes.
What then does utopia mean? We could say: a society that offers the ideal conditions for human flourishing. There are numerous accounts of flourishing to help unpack this, typically including such factors as health and wealth, happiness and meaning, and social relationships.22 Establishing the conditions for these things should allow many people’s lives to go better – but we should never believe we are aiming for perfection. As technology improves, and we gain new insights into the human condition and world around us, what constitutes the ideal society for human flourishing will shift. The utopia of a particular time will not, therefore, be the end of history.23
This brings me to the first principle: medium-termism. American philosopher Robert Nozick wrote: “It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”24 Of course, they do apply to us. The cavemen might have had an inspiring and plausible conception of what utopia would have meant for them (domesticated mammoths and self-sharpening hand axes?), but their vision would likely not hold for an industrialised world with a population of billions. Similarly, the utopia we could build tomorrow might not be right for a century from now – particularly given the pace of technological change.
The medium-termism that I am suggesting acknowledges the limits of our current viewpoint and the corresponding uncertainty about the long term.25 Of course, utopian projects should reach beyond the short term of crisis management and tinkering with the status quo. But at the same time, we should recognise that the technological change we are undergoing is likely to transform what we think is possible in ways that are hard to predict. We can hope that AGI will bring new possibilities that are as unimaginable to us now as smart phones and helicopters to the cavemen.
It is also quite possible that AGI will change not just the tools with which we fulfil our desires, but also what we consider desirable. For example, AGI could both deepen our understanding of other species and make alternative, delicious food sources available, with the result that eating fellow animals becomes unthinkable (and so illegal); or it could enable new crime-preventation and corrective measures, with the result that almost everyone looks back at our current prison systems with horror and shame; or it could result in people living so much longer that lifelong marriage is seen as thraldom. Such changes would not come out of the blue: there have long been vegans, prison-abolitionists and anti-matrimonialists. But these positions do not have the kind of mainstream support that would allow a government to make them goals today. Medium-term thinking is rooted in improving society according to current values, while acknowledging that our sense of what is possible and desirable is as limited as that of Nozick’s cavemen.
Medium-term utopian thinking should be ambitious, but it also acknowledges the immense messiness of the world. There is a tendency for utopian thinking around AGI to leap straight to positing a godlike superintelligence that can grant any wish, reshaping reality at a whim.26 As interesting as this might be, it is unhelpful both for today’s decision-makers, who must get things done in a messy world that includes institutional inertia, legacy infrastructure, material supply constraints, complex trade-offs, political resistance, etc, and to those millions of people who are currently more concerned about AI than excited. They know well the world’s messiness, and will be unmoved by scenarios that seem too sci-fi, too detached from the reality of their experience.
Of course, what we can make out on the horizon of the medium term continually changes as we make decisions that shape what is possible. The utopian imagination should be responsive to that change. Hence scholars such as Ruth Levitas argue that utopia should be seen as a method, not an end state – a willingness to continually, actively engage with the possibility of making the world a better place.27
Accepting medium-termism could help us to realise the second principle: humility. We can have a conception of how things might be better, without believing we must be entirely right. That path leads back to the gulag. Recall Isaiah Berlin’s comment about Lenin, Mao, et al, whose certainty in their vision of an ideal state led them to believe that “no cost would be too high to obtain it” – including millions of deaths. A spirit of humility is crucial for avoiding this sin of old utopianism – the belief that the ends justify the means. If instead we accept that our vision of utopia might be wrong, then we should be disinclined to compromise core values – such as fundamental human rights – to achieve it.
This spirit of humility and exploration leads to the third principle: pluralism. Some of the worst atrocities committed in the name of twentieth-century utopianism can be ascribed to the faith in a singular vision of the optimal conditions for all people, regardless of their particular histories or preferences.28 New utopianism, I suggest, should reject these claims to universal validity, and embrace multiple ideas of the good life. People vary in what makes them happy or gives them meaning; they vary in their cultural roots and philosophical convictions; and they vary in their material and geographical circumstances. People therefore have different ideas of what changes should be prioritised to improve their conditions of flourishing. As much as possible, individuals and communities should be able to express and action these ideas – “creating the change they wish to encounter”, in Davina Cooper’s words.29 Where change must be more coordinated or top-down, it should be as participatory as possible to ensure this plurality of views is reflected.30
Together, these principles permit the flourishing of utopian ideas at different levels of society. Many of the great failures of the twentieth century came from an attempt by an elite to impose its vision on the masses.31 There are bold, utopian ideas that can only be realised at the level of states or through intergovernmental cooperation – but equally, there are many that should be realised regionally or locally.32
Building a utopian agenda
So what could be examples of utopian projects compatible with those principles? I hope there will be many, if people are given the freedom and encouragement to imagine how their communities could be better. We should not expect all ideas to be strikingly original, at least at the headline level – people have been dreaming of a better world for a long time. The point of considering utopian ideas today is that AGI is set to unlock significant capacities – perhaps on a scale that exceeds the Industrial Revolution, which brought prosperity that made new ways of life possible. This means we might be able to realise dreams that are age-old but were previously impossible – as we have in the past with dreams such as flight, visiting the moon, or instantaneous communication at a distance.
So here is an example of what seems to me to be a utopian project in this sense: universal basic services (or UBS). One currently popular utopian proposal in the face of AGI is a universal basic income (UBI).33 But UBI also has many critics with a wide range of worries. One is that putting cash in the hands of individuals – particularly in deprived areas – does not in itself do anything to improve the infrastructure on which flourishing is based.34 UBI is a highly individualistic response to problems that are largely societal.
Building on the successes of the post-war welfare state, a better approach to harnessing the power of AGI might be to focus on providing free public services of the highest quality, including healthcare, education, public transport, communal spaces, museums and libraries, etc. UBS is close to what can already be found in some wealthy social democracies, like the Nordic countries (which are the happiest countries in the world35). But in all countries such services could be better, and in many they would be a revolution, transforming millions, if not billions, of lives.
AGI should not only increase overall prosperity, making such services affordable, but also enable them to be radically improved. Indeed, UBS could be seen as a bundle of utopian ideas, as AGI allows us to imagine each of these domains anew. For example, it could allow states to extend free education to pre-school, universities and lifelong learning, while enabling greater focus on developing each person’s individual interests and capabilities; while healthcare with AGI could become more personalised and more preventive, with medical professionals freed to focus more on relational care.
There are many other ideas that would fit this medium term perspective, all of which could be given fresh wind by AGI: improving our democratic processes, for example,36 living more sustainably,37 or improving international architecture to reduce conflict.38 If we believe that AGI will be transformative, then we need more such ideas of how we want society to be transformed. This requires a renewal of utopian thinking: one that is willing to imagine the ideal conditions for flourishing humans on a flourishing planet, in a spirit of hope and humility.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks for their helpful comments to Allan Dafoe, Kanta Dihal, Eleanor Drage, Rory Fitzherbert, Tomasz Hollanek, Shane Legg, Fin Moorhouse, Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, Steven Perry, Huw Price, Toby Rouse, Ellie Sakhaee, Jas Sekhon, Henry Shevlin, and Sam Tracey.
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Footnotes
1 Frederick Jameson used this phrase in various places, though he himself starts with “Someone once said…” (eg, Jameson, 2003), leaving its origins obscure.
2 AGI = Artificial General Intelligence. While definitions of AGI vary, in this essay I use it as a shorthand for AI that matches or exceeds expert-level human performance in most cognitive domains.
3 (McClain and Park, 2026)
4 As Laukkonen and colleagues recently noted: “Existing alignment research is dominated by concerns about safety and preventing harm… We have argued that for true alignment to arise, we need to also focus on steering systems toward positive attractors aligned with human flourishing.” (Laukkonen et al., 2026, pp. 1, 27), and Dario Amodei: “it is critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires” (Amodei, 2024).
5 (Mumford, 1922, p. 307)
6 (Jacoby, 2005, p. ix)
7 Quoted in Jacoby, ibid, p.ix.
8 (Berlin, 2013, pp. 15–16), originally published 1959.
9 Published in 1945 and 1949 respectively.
10 In a 1957 speech. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20/newsid_3728000/3728225.stm
11 (Roser, 2016)
12 (Roser, 2019)
13 (Marcuse, 1967)
14 (Fukuyama, 1989)
15 See, eg, (Berardi, 2011). Relatedly, Jean François Lyotard argued that the current postmodern condition is defined by our incredulity towards grand narratives such as the utopian visions of the 19th to 20th centuries (Lyotard, 1984).
16 (Suleyman and Bhaskar, 2023)
17 I did not coin the term ‘new utopianism’ – various writers have used it over the decades, though not to refer consistently to a single movement. In this essay, I draw on various 21st century utopian movements (such as pragmatic utopianism, everyday utopianism, realist utopianism) to suggest principles for what, in my view, a successful new utopianism might look like.
18 See, eg, (Bregman, 2017; Cooper, 2013; Ghodsee, 2023; Jacoby, 2005; MacAskill, 2026; Srnicek and Williams, 2015; Wright, 2010).
19 See, eg, (Nesse, 2004).
20 Mark 12:25 NIV
21 Odyssey Book IX
22 The Harvard Human Flourishing Program, for example, identifies six components: happiness and life satisfaction; mental and physical health; meaning and purpose; character and virtue; close social relationships; and financial and material stability. See https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing.
23 As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it: “No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.” (Galeano, 1995, p. 326)
24 (Robert Nozick, 1977, p. 163)
25 It therefore stands as an alternative to the longtermist movement, which advocates for considering the long term (including very, very long term) in current ethical decision-making. However, one noted longermist, Will MacAskill, has recently proposed the ‘Viatopia’ as something like a medium-term perspective on a positive vision of life with AGI (MacAskill, 2026).
26 What Nick Bostrom calls ‘Deep Utopia’ (Bostrom, 2024).
27 (Levitas, 2013)
28 Isaiah Berlin: “All the Utopias known to us are based on the discoverability and harmony of objectively true ends, true for all men, at all times and places…” and “the certainty that there must exist a total solution” (Berlin, 2013, pp. 224, 225). European Enlightenment or rationalist thought has been critiqued from many quarters for its generalising of a certain kind of experience (that of the white, male elite) as universal – see, eg, (Plumwood, 1993).
29 (Cooper, 2013, p. 2)
30 (Birhane et al., 2022)
31 In her poem, Utopia, the Nobel poetry laureate Wisława Szymborska satirises these failures with a vision of a ‘perfect’ island, which the people shun: ‘Unshakeable Certainty dominates the vale / and Essence of Things spreads from its head. / Despite these attractions, the island is deserted, / and the tiny footmarks seen along the shores / all point towards the sea.” (Szymborska, 1990)
32 For more on this, see, eg, (Weyl and Tang, 2024)
33 Eg, (Bregman, 2017; Srnicek and Williams, 2015)
34 (Coyle, 2017)
35 (Helliwell et al., 2026)
36 (Weyl and Tang, 2024)
37 See, for example, the utopian ‘solarpunk’ movement (“Solarpunk,” 2026)
38 See, for example, arguments for an ‘algorithmic leviathan’ (König, 2020)