Dear Posthumanity,

Many thanks for your recent(?) correspondence; it sounds like a lovely place you have. This is the first time I have written a letter to the future, though my friends, Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi (2001) helped me out and I hope you will find it suitable. Actually, it occurs to me that all letters are written to some kind of future or past person, so I think my task here is probably easier than I first imagined it to be.

I hope that none of the things I say here are a source of concern for you or, indeed, are cause to weaken the chances of your coming into being. However, I fear that they might be, so I thought I should warn you of this, at least.

I am encouraged by your capacity to write on behalf of the whole of humanity. Alas, I cannot do this. I cannot speak for the suffering, or for those who are from countries where the monotony of a commuter ride seems like something of an ideal to work towards. I am also not in a strong position to exercise the diplomacy required to gain support from others. I’m quite a regular person here, you see, with a quite modest lifestyle. As such, I thought it best that I reply only as an individual, but I will endeavour to be fair to the range of people that are alive today and take into account what might be their interests.

In any case, I am curious to know how you were nominated to represent your people. Are you their leader, if such a concept still applies in your time? It's not clear to me that it would. Perhaps your words are indicative of their collective consciouness. We have recently developed things called wikis here, which are like encyclopedia entries, but anybody can edit them. I wonder if your letter was written this way, such that it conveys the sentiments of all people. Forgive me if this sounds a little primitive but, to some here, such a proposition is still quite radical and we are hopeful that this kind of system could lead to meaningful social change and enable a greater representation of diverse perspectives. I suppose I am saying all this because I need some reason to trust that you are the person that you say you are, rather than someone who randomly found a way of sending something through time. In any case, I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Your letter spoke of some very enticing prospects, which I revel in, regardless of whether I will live to see them come to fruition. I am reassured that everything works out well for us in the end – 2 or at least for some period of time – even if I don't see how some people will make it through to the end of today. I have many questions that I want to ask you, which I hope you might be willing to engage with. I am trying hard to understand your claim to greater intelligence (there are some really, really clever people around here!), wondering whether this means that I should demand that you have answers to my questions. However, such answers have eluded the intellect of people since time began, so my expectations of what you will say are modest. Indeed, I am hopeful that you will not have answers, since I am troubled by the kind of omnipotence that you claim to enjoy. It's just that we have dealt with a lot of people who believe themselves to be superior to others and have become quite wary of any language that appears to embrace such distinctions of superiority.

To tell you the truth, this is a very difficult subject to think about or discuss. Well, you will know what happened to us in the 20th and 21st Centuries – and, indeed, before. People still want to claim that there are reasons to support the eradication of certain kinds of people in this world. The spectre of racial science has not completely disappeared from our society and I don’t really know what to do about that. The most eloquent of arguments has been made against it.

One of my first thoughts when reading your letter was that you seemed somewhat disengaged from our situation here. I’m sorry if this comes across as a little angry, but you must have known that we are not anywhere near ‘peace’ and that ‘prosperity’ is terribly unevenly distributed among us. I know you were just trying to be cordial, but I’m trying hard to demand more from you than just pleasantries. I also need for you to realize that your enhanced status does not make you superior to me, or endow you with greater entitlements than I currently enjoy. I regard you as some kind of brother or sister to us – you said we are kin - and I cannot resist my honesty to tell you that times remain hard.

Personally, I have difficulty in knowing whether I am prospering or am at peace. My government is at war with various places, but I sit at home enjoying classical music on the radio and watching plays in theatres. Sometimes, a very good play makes me think ‘This is Utopia’, where such wonderful creations and unabated freedoms seem self-evident. When moved by such moments, I find it hard to imagine that there is anything more beautiful, though I do feel sometimes that art progresses, as if further insights are occurring as we progress through time. I wonder how art varies in your era.

Regardless of these trivial emotions, I would like to know more about how you make sense of peace and prosperity and how it all came about. Did it require some great conflicts to occur, or the suppression of certain kinds of ideas and lifestyles? I get the feeling that it did not. I also imagine that these two conditions have only just come into being where you are, and that you are writing to me on the day after Utopia was declared. How else could you recall the absence of these terms, unless you have lived through them? Am I right?

When you say ‘I hope you will become me’, I presume you do not mean this in a literal sense. What you mean, surely, is that you hope for me to enjoy what you see as the better life that you (or humanity in general) lead compared with mine. I ask only because I want to rule out the possibility that my body could be appropriated one day by some, more powerful or deserving other, in order to provide the biology for some other person, perhaps you. I’m being silly aren’t I? But then we have the cryonics movement and, well, let’s forget that for now.

I was delighted to see you refer to using pens. These implements – in their various forms – have been so central to our humanity, both literally and, perhaps more importantly, symbolically. I am glad to learn that they remain a part of your world. Tell me, are they still central to how we express ourselves, or simply nostalgic implements used only by the romantics? I wanted to ask you more about your experiences of bliss. You invite us to consider why our lives cannot be comprised of uninterrupted blissful moments and I find myself reluctant to ask that question. I’m not sure it has occurred to me that life would be better in such a state. I admit that, at 3 times, I find it hard to see bliss in the world, even if I feel it in my everyday life from time to time. I’m not a pessimist, I just feel quite disengaged from the suffering of other people and I want more for them. I want more for me too. However, if I may say so, I think you misrepresent bliss. If I consider your reference to the ‘ecstasy of love’, then I must find that you speak surely of the bliss of young love, which is but one kind. I have been with the same partner for some time now and I genuinely feel that our love gets stronger every day. I even sometimes find myself thinking this. Yet, we have also endured hardship and we have grown through it together. I cannot easily extract my enjoyment of the bliss we have shared from this hardship.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish to claim that hardship is something we should willingly endure or seek. Clearly, there are certain hardships that have differing conditions of value. For example, the hardship of suffering through a severely difficult illness, such as the persistence of kidney stones throughout one’s life, is different from the hardship of raising a child. Each is hard, but I think we would be wrong to pursue the hardship of kidney stones and right to pursue the hardship of raising a child. I’m sure you would agree. Yet, so far, most of my hardships have been like raising a child and I think I’d quite like to keep them. Well, you seem to indicate that you value these hardships as well, when you speak of the importance of the ‘journey’.

Similar concerns of mine are aroused when you ask me to consider the memory of my ‘best experience’. I just cannot think of my life in this way. I regard moments of extreme banality to have been insightful and, even in times of suffering, I sense the possibility of understanding something valuable. I think the core of my doubts about your situation is revealed when you indicate that you are ‘happy’ and ‘feel good’. You say this as if your happiness is the highest of your goals. Yet, it seems that there is much more to your completeness than just happiness. You seem reconciled with the world in a way that seems richer than happiness and this intrigues me more. What is happiness for you?

I liked your three transformations very much and I am glad to report that I think we are getting there. However, some things puzzle and confuse me about them. When you talk about our growing capacities that are unimaginable to me how, I think of the capacities that I now have, but which were not imaginable to people who came before me. This seems like a similar exercise to help me understand whether, indeed, anything is beyond my imagination. I feel inclined to claim that there are no such things that I cannot imagine. I want to claim that anything imaginable is possible with the mind I currently have and that the depth of human imagination present in the vast range of texts that have come before me, provide an infinite wealth of possible influences. I am drawn to thinking of the capacities of flight or space travel, which are instances of capacities that were unavailable to my predecessors. Indeed, actual human flight still eludes us, but it has always been conceivable, as the Myth of Icarus attests. So, perhaps I can imagine your circumstances, after all, can’t I?

Nevertheless, as I said, I think we are on track to achieve more, but I feel certain that we will not get there in one emergent step. Like the pursuit of flight, I think we will need the imaginations of science fiction writers to assist us, along with the incremental progress of science. If this is true, I wonder whether we will ever become completely disconnected from our current understanding of humanity. I’m not so sure that we will, but, if I am being generous, then the most we might expect is to regard your Utopian state, as similar to how I now regard our origins as having developed from apes. Yet, I must confess that even this causes me some anxiety. Here, we are not at all in agreement about the significance of so-called species boundaries. We disagree a lot about our position in the world as superior than animals. By the way, what happened to animals? Are they also living a utopia? You did say that it is ‘the birth right of every creature’ to pursue pleasure. I wonder how far you have extended that commitment.

I also wonder what other capacities you have that are ‘beyond human’. When you use that phrase – ‘beyond human’ – do you mean that you have the capabilities enjoyed by many animals, such as faster movement of limbs and the capacity to see in the dark, for instance? Are there not great sources within nature to inform how we might imagine our enhanced status? It’s here where I’m looking first, since there’s such rich variation and I’m curious to know whether this is also 4 where your people began. It seems to me that we might locate our inspiration for enhancement within the broad boundaries of nature. Indeed, the capacity of extending our lives is also visible here.

This incremental approach to biological change, I fear, places us in a difficult position when attempting to respond to your advice. You say for us to go slowly with our ‘paradise engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right’, but how should we know when we are in this position? I feel that we have often progressed in ways that exceeded the readiness of the world at large and it doesn’t seem too bad to continue on that basis, while always being mindful of the risks. Are you urging us simply to exercise precaution, as I feel that approach might limit any major progress in reaching your position.

I think what intrigues me most about your letter is the ambiguity of your own position within history. You present your circumstances as something of an end state, a goal that is reached. But, where do you go from here? Is it just Utopian maintenance, or does its existence deny the capacity to regress towards a lesser state? And next time, send some photographs!

Finally, I hope you might be able to shed some light on something. I have wondered whether your letter was intended for some of my recent ancestors, rather than us directly. The ‘yellowing photos’ you mention belonged mostly to people who came before us. We have not had them for quite some time now; most of us possess only digital images. Oh yes, what came after digital!? I’ve been longing to know. I just can’t imagine that there is anything beyond the digital. Is this what you mean by being unable to imagine beyond human? (That said, we did try to age digital photos for effect.)

Yours Sincerely,

Your Previous Self.

PS: Soon after we received your letter, we received another one, which we believe was sent from your successors. They say only the following: ‘It’s all gone wrong! If you receive a letter titled ‘Letter from Utopia’, ignore it. They are trying to mislead you.’ Where do we go from here?

Acknowledgements

Bostrom, N. (2007). "Letter from Utopia." http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/273/.

Casati, R. and A. Varzi (2001). "That Useless Time Machine." Philosophy 76(298): 581-583.

Thanks to James Hughes, Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies for timely comments on Version 1.0 of this paper.