cost of cloning (digital material such as music, literature and movies) were regulated in a slightly different manner.
Of course, that sort of economy is intrinsically incompatible with UTOPIA, which is a state of perfect and ideal existence. Such a state of perfection would imply that everyone had everything they wanted, and thus there is no point in offering money to someone for an item, for you could always get that item without offering anyone money anyway, from somewhere else. In a similar manner, there is no point in charging money for an item if everyone who wants such an item already has it. In UTOPIA, money itself has no value. A society without money, but with every need met and every want or desire satisfied. Before UTOPIA, such a situation was thought to be possible only with unlimited resources. After UTOPIA had arrived, most people thought that the previous soothsayers were incredibly naive to think that the only way to do away with money was to acquire limitless resources.
What was not anticipated was that the world was not ready for UTOPIA. Every working government depended on the law of supply and demand to work. Society depended on functioning money to survive, and no one, not even the most visionary philosopher, could have seen UTOPIA so near in the future. With the world busy working ever harder, and striving ever higher, not a single individual out of the global population of over a trillion people in 2034 suspected that soon there would arise a society on earth that would simultaneously have no need for money, while holding an excess amount of money to trade with other societies, states and governments.
Not that UTOPIA would need to trade at all - there would be nothing they would want that they didn’t already have - that is the working definition of UTOPIA anyway. UTOPIA won’t trade, but it might spread ...
⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤
The genetic-manipulation machine used a technique informally termed Crawleys Spanner. Crawley was the scientist who first discovered, and later refined, the process we now use to reprogram living cells without killing them. Her application of the technique, highly experimental with little chance of success, was initially used to produce a journal paper displaying the near-instant benefits of modifying existing crops. The main benefit was the rapid acceleration when mutating an organism towards some end-goal, which was lightning-quick compared to the older method of inducing changes in DNA and then growing each succeeding changes, keeping the beneficial changes and discarding the unwanted changes.
Changing the DNA of a living cell without killing it allowed the scientists to reprogram the DNA, examine the result, change the DNA again, re-examine, ad infinitum. This allowed the constant reprogramming of the crop while it was still growing, so that once the crop reached adulthood and was ready for harvesting it perfectly matched the goal of the programmer. Even better, the offspring will have all the programmed characteristics.
It was less than ten years before the machine was used to reprogram a human for the first time, performed under strict government supervision. The subject, a hardcore drug addict, was programmed to remove the addiction. Of course, if you can program DNA to remove the addiction, then you can program DNA to create addictions. Good intentions prevailed. The only “addictions” created were done voluntarily, and these were only light addictions, and even then, there were only a few “addictions” that were allowed to be programmed in. The list of permitted addictions were all purely altruistic ones - addictions to non-violence, or addictions to helping others, or addictions to teaching were amongst those first few.
The list soon grew to encompass other fruitful pastimes. As any musician, artist, writer or sculptor will tell you, the desire to create something is an actual addiction. A musician deprived of his instrument would whistle a new tune, an artist deprived of an easel will etch a sketch onto brick with a sharp stone. The satisfaction from creation is every bit as addictive as the hardest drug. After completing a novel, a writer will immediately write something else. They need the “hit” just as bad as any drug-addict. “Fruitful pastimes” included the majority of the arts and the performing arts. Crawleys Spanner resulted in a society in which nearly everyone had the desire to create.
But, why limit to the arts? Surely the fields of genetics, robotics, physics, medicine and philosophy could benefit from raw desire to create? Surely all disciplines could benefit? Crawleys Spanner was then employed in those disciplines. The result was a society in which people did their jobs with a fierce determination to to do as much as they could do. Scientific breakthroughs exploded in number. The number of inventions soared.
But, wait, why limit this to the sciences and arts? What about the functions performed by the less driven members of society? What if bakers baked bread for the sheer love of it, whether or not anyone would ever buy the loaves? What if house constructors built houses, not per clients specifications, but for the sheer love of creating a new dwelling? What if even the garbage collectors did their collections not for a paycheck, but to satisfy some inner desire to collect and process garbage?
An ethical government might wonder if it was right to turn humans into automatons; however such a beast has never existed in the history of Mankind and thus various governments lost no time in reprogramming everybody. It was never protested by the people - why would they protest? The resulting addiction was light enough to ensure that the subject desired to perform a certain specific function, but not heavy enough to make the subject lose focus of family, friends, and all those other characteristics that made them human. Most only ever noticed that they were slightly happier with their jobs. It was just enough to make sure that no one was ever unhappy with their job. Most people volunteered for the process which would make them enjoy their jobs.
At any rate, most people trusted the government anyway; politicians were programmed to be addicted to serving the best interests of the people. No one ever needed to vote, because a politician (now merely civil servants) who was challenged by someone else always did what was best for the people, and sometimes this lead to a politician vacating his office in an agreeable manner simply because the challenger was the better civil servant for that position.
Natural selection was still at work, and this time working with the turbo-boosted gene mutation enhancements provided by Crawleys Spanner. People pass on their genes to their kids, but never a perfect copy. Two imperfect copies from two parents combine to produce a new DNA pattern. Any problems with the offspring can be fixed with Crawleys Spanner, before the new pattern could take hold in society. Thus, no new DNA pattern would be allowed to simply flourish. Crawleys Spanner could reprogram all DNA.
And, it was UTOPIA for us. Imagine a world in which you could have whatever you needed, but no payment was necessary. Imagine a world where you never had a desire go unsatisfied? You wanted bread? Just take some from the baker - he won’t mind, and he will continue making bread regardless of the demand for it. His ingredients? Those were all acquired for free from people who simply had a desire to make those ingredients available. His desire for new utensils? Not a problem, as you were programmed to make as many as possible to fulfil your desires, so you simply let all have your products for free.
Money became superfluous. What would you buy with it? Anything you wanted was being produced by someone who desired to produce it. Likewise, you produced out of a desire to simply produce. For the joy of creating something, and the joy that came from watching others find utility in your products. When no one wanted money but only the things that money used to buy, money became useless once all those things were being produced by automatons who desired nothing but to produce. “UTOPIA,” we all thought, “had been found.” UTOPIA had arrived.
Due to people having nothing to do but what they liked best, human endeavours expanded at a rate never seen before. In the absence of financial incentives, music, arts and culture grew to unprecedented levels of sophistication and grace. Those who used to do it merely for money were now doing something else for love, and those who never got the opportunity to do it (because they were working to survive) now could do it all they w
anted to.
For much the same reason, some of the brightest thinkers eschewed a career in finance and instead went into tinkering with science, engineering and technology causing a rapid advance in the technology of the human race. In a mere few years the field of robotics matured to the point that almost all physical tasks of labour (cooking, cleaning, farming, etc) needed no human intervention, and thus even more humans had free time to explore other things.
However, not all humans underwent this voluntary process. Of those resisting this influence were two extremes. The one extreme were those who felt that such a process was simply creating unthinking automatons out of free thinkers, and the other extreme felt that such a process was unnecessary. Between these two extremes you found the bulk of those who refused the process of Crawleys Spanner. I, myself, fall in between, and started chronicling the events that lead Mankind up to this point. There was a very good reason for me writing this down.
Today, the world government decreed that all should undergo this process. I mentioned that there were no votes, because the politicians who make rules and laws are bound by their