Ever notice how the most beautiful promises come with fine print?
Today’s Effective Altruists and Silicon Valley tech utopians, say: “A perfect society is possible—technology will lead us there. In the near future, superintelligent AI will bring unimaginable innovation, ushering in an era of abundance where need, greed, and suffering vanish.”
It’s a lovely story. So, let’s poke at it.
Imagine the greatest city ever—call it Omelas.
Everyone in Omelas is fit, happy, and in good health. Nobody is poor. Everyone is educated and cultured and spends their time having brilliant conversations with amazing friends. Electric vehicles hum quietly. Everyone’s carbon footprint is near zero and they look phenomenal in sustainable fashion while sipping fair-trade coffee. The government is flawless and invisible.
But there’s a basement. Not unlike a medieval dungeon.
Locked inside is an innocent small child who suffers in darkness. Alone, neglected, underfed, mocked. Her only human interaction is once a day when some grownups unbolt the door and enter with a bowl of gruel. Every time she begs to be let out, but the people of Omelas under instruction to deny her, show no pity.
Yet for some reason, the way it works in this universe, is that if you remove the suffering, even for one day, the whole town of Omelas will collapse, like Rome or Carthage back in the day. This is the deal struck with the cosmos. The child must suffer, so the people of Omelas can have peace and happiness.
Don’t worry. Omelas isn’t real. It’s Ursula K Le Guin’s classic short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omela.” But it forces a question today’s effective altruists and techno-optimists tend to dodge: “What suffering are we willing to accept as the cost of a perfect world?”
If you lived in Omelas, your options would be:
- Ignore the situation, using Utilitarian rationalization: “One life sacrificed for the sake of thousands.”
- Fight it: You could try freeing the child – but there’s exile or death if others resist your efforts. And even if you do succeed, the city perishes, along with many of your nearest and dearest.
- Walk away. You could leave Omelas behind in disgust, but as the city vanishes in your rearview mirror, the image of that poor child would stick with you. You’ve walked away for your own mental health, not hers and solved nothing in the process.
The dilemma hinges on proximity to suffering. Those who feed the child bear the heaviest guilt, but most citizens in the streets of plenty above are distant from her pain and treat it as an abstract cost of doing business in paradise.
The genius of Le Guin’s story is how it mirrors our actual world. Modern comfort already relies on distant suffering we’ve arranged not to see.
Factory farms, exploited labor, environmental degradation, are all outsourced to distant lands to remain unseen. Effective Altruists argue technology will erase these injustices. But what if, like in Omelas, the thriving of the system depends on them?
Consider AI trained on underpaid data laborers. Green Energy, reliant on rare-earth mining. Automation displacing millions without safety nets.
The Omelas story in the end offers no solutions, because there are none. Just trade offs.
Idealism always has its blind spots, so before trying to build our version of utopia, maybe we should ask: “Who is the child in our basement? And are we willing to free them, even if it costs us paradise?”
