The Utopia Experiment

by Dylan Evans

  ‘Look,’ said Dr Satoshi. ‘I see a lot of people from pretty poor backgrounds. I know that they will probably stay poor for the rest of their lives. When they are old, they will spend what little money they have playing bingo or drinking in their local pub. They don’t have a problem with that. That vision doesn’t hold any fear for them. But you would hate that. That’s not the world you come from.’

  I appreciated his honesty. It wasn’t the kind of thing I imagined a psychiatrist would or should say. It certainly wasn’t very politically correct. But it happened to fit very well with my way of thinking. The image of my older self eking out his last days in some cockney boozer, rubbing shoulders with badly spoken drunks and geriatric bingo players, put the fear of god in me. I would do anything to avoid that fate. I simply had to get well again.

  ‘It is just as well you came here when you did. You have had a lucky escape.’

  At the time, I didn’t really understand what Dr Satoshi meant by those words. But it is clear to me now that I was unwell, not just mentally, but physically too. I was skinny and malnourished, dirty and unkempt.

  ‘For the moment, I’m just going to put you back on citalopram.’

  That was an antidepressant I’d been given when I was depressed before. It worked then. But then I hadn’t been nearly so bad. I had managed to keep doing my job throughout the illness. And a few months later I was better, and came off the pills.

  ‘We’ll put you on forty milligrams a day and see how you get on.’

  Twice my previous dosage. I hoped it would be enough.

  ‘But tell me more about how the whole idea first came to you. The scenario is interesting, but why did you write it in the first place? When did you first think about setting up such a strange experiment?’

  2. MEXICO

  The idea for the Utopia Experiment first came to me in September 2005, while I was in Mexico. I had come at the invitation of the British Council to give a series of talks about robotics. The talks were informal affairs, held in cafes around Mexico City and Monterrey, with the aim of encouraging popular engagement with science and technology. I described my attempts to build robots with emotions, and tried to provoke debate about the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence. Then, when all the talks were over, I took a flight to the Yucatán peninsula, to spend a week exploring Maya ruins.

  I landed in Mérida, the largest city in the Yucatán. Founded by the Spanish conquistadores in 1542 on the site of an old Maya settlement, it still retains much of the old colonial charm that has been largely erased by modernity in Mexico City. You can even see some of the carved stones from the original Maya temples set in the walls of the main cathedral, as if the old gods still lingered on, unbowed by the weight of the Catholic statues above them. The genes, too, survive; Mérida has the highest percentage of indigenous people of any large city in Mexico, with over half of the inhabitants being of Maya descent. Their brown faces with beak-like noses, their colourful clothes and stocky bodies all mark them out from the paler descendants of the Spanish invaders, who are still far richer and taller and more powerful today, five centuries after they first arrived to plunder the New World.

  As I wandered around the quiet streets, peering into the white buildings with their high ceilings and cool interiors, a young man came up to me and asked me where I was from.

  ‘I’m from England,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, England! You are Englishman!’ He smiled. ‘You want to see traditional Mexican clothes? I take you to shop with good prices.’

  The first rule of buying stuff abroad is never to do it on your first day. Take your time, stroll around, look at what’s on offer and compare the prices. If you shop around you soon discover that the same item can be bought somewhere else for ten times less than in the first shop you entered.

  ‘To hell with that,’ I thought. ‘I’m on holiday! Everything is so damn cheap here anyway. Why not go and see what this guy has to show?’

  So I followed the young man down a couple of side streets, through a large wooden doorway, into the courtyard of a colonial house, where several old Maya women sat weaving and embroidering in the shade of the archways.

  He introduced me to one of the women.

  ‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Dylan. ¿Cómo se llama usted?’

  ‘Ah, you speak Spanish!’ she exclaimed. ‘¡Qué bien! Yo me llamo María. Would you like to see some traditional Mexican clothes?’

  She led me through one of the archways into a large room, where the clothes hung densely from every nook and cranny, making a kind of textile maze. There were brightly coloured blankets with zigzag designs, crisp white shirts with fine tiny pleats, thick grey woollen ponchos, pale brown sombreros made of straw and black ones made of felt, and, at the back of the room, shelf upon shelf of neatly folded hammocks.

  ‘Maybe you would like to try on a guayabera?’ asked Maria.

  She took a shirt off its coat hanger and handed it to me. It was a brownish off-white in colour and slightly rough to the touch, in a pleasant kind of way, but not at all heavy. It didn’t feel like cotton.

  ‘What’s it made of?’ I asked.

  ‘Sisal. Very good quality.’

  Sisal is a coarse fibre made from a species of agave, a vaguely cactus-like plant with thick, fleshy, waxen leaves that shoot up from the ground and end in a fierce-looking sharp spike. The leaves are crushed and beaten until only fibres remain, which are then dried and brushed before weaving. Clothes made from sisal help to ward off mosquitoes, since they retain some of the agave’s natural insecticides. They are also very cool and lightweight, making them ideal for the hot Mexican climate.

  I ended up buying not just the shirt but also a pair of matching baggy trousers, and a sombrero, also made of sisal. I thought I looked faintly ridiculous in this traditional Mexican garb, but Maria assured me I looked very handsome and dignified.

  ‘Maybe you would like to try a hammock too?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure I really want to buy a hammock right now,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Come on! Try! Try!’

  Maria led me back out into the courtyard, where a hammock had magically been strung between the pillars of one of the archways that formed the perimeter. She gestured to me to lie down in it, and when I did she handed me a small wooden cup with a clear liquid inside.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘Traditional Mexican drink. I think you like. Try!’

  Gingerly, I took a small sip. Wow! It was strong. It tasted like tequila, and left a burning sensation in my throat. I gasped for breath.

  Maria laughed. ‘You like?’

  I tried to speak but my voice was hoarse. I nodded politely, and took another sip to show willing. And then another.

  I lay back in the hammock and closed my eyes. It felt very comfortable, as if my body was melting into it. A warm sensation spread over my limbs, and I pictured myself in a few years’ time, reclining in the same hammock in some Mediterranean villa that, by some stroke of good luck, I now owned. Life was good.

  I bought the hammock too, of course.

  The next day I took a bus to Uxmal, an ancient Maya city about sixty kilometres south of Mérida that flourished between 600 and 1000 CE. Our bus arrived midmorning, and the sun was already fierce. I was grateful for my sombrero, and wished I had also donned my sisal shirt and trousers, instead of my customary T-shirt and jeans, which were soon clinging to my body, damp with humidity and sweat. But I forgot all about my discomfort when I saw the great Pyramid of the Magician, an imposing grey stone building standing over thirty-five metres tall. It is unlike other Mayan pyramids in having slightly rounded sides and an elliptical base. The sides are also steeper than usual, and it was with some trepidation that I climbed to the top, panting in the heat. When I finally reached the temple that stood at the summit, I turned round and surveyed the rest of the site.

  I remember a feeling of melancholy coming over me as I pictured the b
ustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares below, a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all I could see now was the green canopy of the jungle, stretching in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peaks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.

  My reverie was interrupted by our guide, who sat down next to me and asked me where I was from.

  ‘I’m from England,’ I replied.

  ‘Far away?’

  ‘Yes, very far away. Where are you from?’

  He mentioned the name of a place I had never heard of, but I nodded as if I knew exactly where it was.

  ‘What do you do back home?’

  How do you explain to someone who may never have even seen a robot that you are trying to build robots that have emotions?

  ‘I’m trying to build machines that have feelings,’ I said.

  My guide looked puzzled. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  I drew a deep breath.

  ‘Well, many people think that machines will become more and more intelligent over the coming years. They will become like people, and they will live with us in our houses, like servants or even friends. And that means they will have to be able to recognize our emotions, and maybe even express their own feelings too.’

  The guide nodded, and looked down at his feet for a few moments.

  ‘But why do people want machines like that?’

  That was a question I had been asking myself recently too. When I had first become interested in the possibility of emotional robots, I was so fascinated by the very idea that I hadn’t paused to consider such practical questions as what such machines might be used for, and why companies might bother to manufacture them. But now I was actually trying to build an emotional robot, those questions were becoming more pressing – not least because I had to justify my project when I was applying for funding and talking to journalists. And I found it increasingly hard to give a sensible answer. I wanted to build emotional robots because I thought it was damn good fun. But did they have any real use?

  I trotted out my standard answer, even though I didn’t find it very convincing.

  ‘Well, one reason might be to provide companions for elderly people,’ I said. ‘A lot of elderly people in my country are very lonely, and don’t have anyone to talk to. So they might appreciate a robot companion, if it was sensitive and sympathetic.’

  ‘But why can’t the old people keep each other company?’ asked the guide.

  Now it was my turn to look down at my shoes. He had seen the same flaw as me: why seek a technological fix for a social problem? Is the answer to loneliness really just to make more gadgets? I imagined a block of flats, each with a single elderly person inside, and a robot companion sitting next to each one. It was not a happy thought.

  But instead of conceding the point, I tried to battle on, and suggested that perhaps a robot companion might in some ways be even better than a human one. As I spoke, though, I could see the expression of puzzlement on the guide’s face deepen, and it struck me that not only were our two worlds separated by a cultural chasm, but that my world was perhaps rather pointless and self-indulgent in the greater scheme of things. This man could barely make ends meet. And I was building robots.

  Uxmal was one of the last great Maya cities to fall into ruin. It was still flourishing in the ninth century CE, when crisis was sweeping the southern lowlands in what is present-day Guatemala, and populations there plummeted as city after city was abandoned. But eventually Uxmal fell silent too.

  The reasons for the Maya collapse are complex, but climate change seems to have played an important role. There is evidence of an intense drought lasting two hundred years, and this was compounded by deforestation. As the cities expanded, more farmland was needed to feed the growing population, and the transformation of forest into cropland led to reduced transpiration and thus to less rainfall. Crops failed, famine ravaged the cities, and a bloody civil war erupted as the people turned on the ruling castes, who seemed to have lost favour with Chaac, the rain god.

  This picture of a growing population outstripping its food supply seems to fit well with the ideas of the British clergyman Thomas Malthus. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, he argued that there is a hard limit to the number of people that can be sustained by a given amount of land. Today, ecologists talk about the earth’s natural carrying capacity, and how disaster looms as humans exceed it. The basic idea is the same. Sooner or later, Malthus argued, a growing population will always reach a point where it can no longer grow enough food to feed itself. And then something must happen to cut the population down to size. Perhaps ‘sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague [will] advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands’. And if these disasters do not bring the population back down to a viable size, ‘gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world’.

  The parallels between the Maya collapse and our current global predicament are clear. Just as the Maya grew too numerous for the carrying capacity of their environment, so the global population was threatening to grow beyond the carrying capacity of the earth itself. In 2005, when I climbed that pyramid in Uxmal, there were six and a half billion people on the planet. That was forecast to rise to over nine billion by 2050. How would we be able to feed those extra billions when there was already famine in many parts of the globe? If a great civilization like that of the Maya could implode, could the modern world fall prey to the same fate?

  There are, of course, some big differences between the world of the Maya and our own. For one thing, our civilization is global, so if one part of the world gets into trouble, the rest of the world can help. The Maya, on the other hand, were isolated by the lack of ocean-going vessels.

  Globalization also means, however, that trouble can quickly be exported. A new strain of bird-flu emerging from the markets of Guangdong could become a global epidemic. An earthquake in Tokyo would send shockwaves throughout the world’s financial system as insurers liquidated their assets to settle all the claims.

  The hyper-efficient supply chains that bring cheap food to our tables are also increasingly vulnerable to local shocks. When goods are shipped on demand and inventory is reduced to a minimum, one broken link can disrupt the entire chain. A supermarket stocks perhaps enough food for three meals for each consumer in its catchment area. Those three meals are all that stand between civilization and anarchy.

  If the idea of our civilization collapsing seems outlandish, then no doubt the idea would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. The crowds who once thronged the streets of Uxmal would surely have scoffed at the suggestion that, within a few years, those same streets would be empty and silent.

  So when I sat atop that pyramid and felt overcome by images of the Maya collapse, it whispered of the fragility and impermanence of my own high-tech world. Pictures of Hurricane Katrina were still fresh in my mind. When a single storm could unleash hordes of looters and federal troops onto the streets of the most advanced country on earth, it was not hard to see a parallel in the ruins of Uxmal.

  The Maya did not die out when their civilization collapsed. Millions perished, but some survived by retreating into the jungle. If a global catastrophe put an end to our modern world, something similar would no doubt happen to us. The survivors would abandon the cities and eke out a living in places where they could grow or catch their own food. This would not be so hard for those in developing countries, where there are still many who live off the land. The Maya even figured out a way to make clothes from spiky plants! They lived without modern technology for thousands of years, and some still do, in the little villages that dot the jungle in the Yucatán peninsula. But what about the people in advanced economies, where only a tiny proportion of the population knows anything about farming? How would the refugees from New York or London cope in t
he aftermath of a global catastrophe?

  These were the questions that began to sprout in my mind in the days after my visit to Uxmal. As I travelled further east, and visited other ruined cities, I began to conceive of a kind of experiment that might provide some answers. Instead of trying to imagine, from the comfort of my armchair, what life might be like if civilization collapsed, I would act it out, with the help of some volunteers. We would grow our own food, make our own clothes, and do everything else necessary to survive, without any of the resources of our modern high-tech world. But it wouldn’t simply be another hippy commune or Walden Pond – it would be an exercise in collaborative fiction, continually informed by a scenario of global collapse, which we would develop further as we played it out in the real world.

  By the time I reached Tulum, the site of an ancient Maya city on the east coast of the Yucatán peninsula, the experiment was no longer a fanciful idea but a definite plan of action. Though somewhat smaller than Uxmal, Tulum once served as a port, and the ruins stand atop small cliffs, looking out over the Caribbean Sea. It was one of the last cities inhabited by the Maya, and managed to survive for several decades after the Spanish first arrived in Mexico, until the population finally succumbed to European viruses.

  I found a beach hut to rent for a couple of days, a very simple structure – a circular whitewashed wall, probably made of brick, with a large straw cone on top. A makeshift wooden door allowed access, and inside there was nothing but a camp bed and a small wooden table. The floor was merely the sandy beach on which the hut stood.

  I eased my rucksack off my back and let it drop onto the bed. It was around midday and the sunlight filtered through the straw roof, giving just enough light to unpack my things. There were my new Mexican shirt and trousers, my new hammock, a couple of T-shirts, some socks and underwear, swimming trunks, a book or two, and toiletries. These were all the things in the world I had with me now, and yet they seemed quite enough. I felt gloriously unencumbered, and yearned to live like this forever, with almost no possessions and in the simplest kind of abode.