The telos of technology, we might say, is to allow us to accomplish more with less effort. If we extrapolate this internal directionality to its logical terminus, we arrive at a condition in which we can accomplish everything with no effort. Over the millennia, our species has meandered

As Posner says, “the traditional aspiration of the English upper class was not to work at all”, and not to appear to care too earnestly about money.86 And in this respect, the Lotto lout, although solidly lower working class, actually exhibited a more aristocratic demeanor than people on the middle rungs of the social ladder.87

A “multiplayer” version of the experience machine has been proposed (including by Nozick himself), in which many people together plug into the experience machine.116 This would enable us to have real interactions

our appetites may be relative in a way that makes them collectively insatiable. Suppose that we desire that we have more than others. We

For example, Paul Ehrlich wrote this tract, The Population Bomb. It was published in 1968, and sold more than two million copies. Very widely influential among the intelligentsia. Up until that point, the world population had been growing exponentially. Ironically, the same year that Ehrlich’s bestseller came out, the trendline went into reverse,

Surveys of subjective well-being often report a peak among people in their late 60s,

We, by contrast, we Homo cubiculi, needs must rely on self-discipline and structured incentives to get us to perform the requisite labors.

To repeat, the three types of consumption desire which could plausibly continue to motivate people to work even at very high levels of productivity and income were: to acquire novel goods and services that provide some noncomparative personal benefit; to accomplish ambitious social projects; and to acquire positional goods that help one gain

“Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.