I don't think it's necessarily that bad to live in a world where people aren't always nice. People like to set up this dichotomy, like, will we achieve a totally unified pacifist communist Star Trek future or will the universe be ruled by eternal war and oppression? The truth is probably somewhere in between. Cyberpunk is more interesting than space fantasy anyway.
"Nice" is a somewhat loaded term nowadays I think. I think in general we should always be striving towards a world with less suffering and more joyful life (so no easy solutions like the painless extermination of all sentient life to quickly meet the "zero suffering" criteria
).
Cyberpunk might be more interesting, but in reality if I lived in some sci-fi society where tech was pretty cool but a sizable chunk of society were still oppressed, ignorant, or more likely to suffer violent death, I'd still feel that we should try to understand why there were still people living these seemingly less desirable lives, and ultimately make it so that this happened less.
I guess that my question would be better posed as, is our innate human drive for more knowledge and resources,
as far as it makes us able and willing to preserve and if possible
create more love and joy in our lives, inseparable from the tendencies that
cause us to inflict suffering on other sentient life, willingly or not?
Or, perhaps, even better -
is it possible to create a society where no-one suffers, without it also being a society where we all live identical lives as emotionless drones?
I don't mean to set up any kind of dichotomy here, and neither of the extreme options in such a dichotomy look desirable to me. What seems preferable for the future of humankind is that we can have our cake of all the advantages of super-advanced-technology in the most fantastical utopian scenario we can imagine, and eat it too, without also destroying everything unique and special about being human, and without any of this "unique and special" stuff including inflicting extreme involuntary suffering on others.
...I will concur though, all that said, that I concede that
realistically it's
probably never going to be possible for the
whole of human society to be a utopia, especially if we do manage to spread out beyond the Earth because of the significant challenges in maintaining a cohesive society the larger it grows. I think that it
should be possible for smaller units of that society to be quite utopia-esque however, hopefully in future a region as small as a single planet should be child's play.
Either way, I think it's a good ideal to bear in mind, because the universe itself will always be a willing and ever present adversary, hell-bent on destroying us when we least expect it and in a way that we least expect.
