05/10/2026
Imagining a Better Future: Creating Utopia with AI
I was born in the late 50’s and grew up with the assumption that the world would just get better and better with time. I had great confidence in humanity's ability to solve problems and our collective moral compass to navigate toward a better future for all that inhabit the Earth. I was influenced by Bucky Fuller, The Whole Earth Catalog, books from the Rodale Press on organic gardening and green building design. I learned Transcendental Meditation in the 70’s and bought into Maharishi’s theory that if 1% of the Earth’s population practiced meditation, it would cause a societal phase transition that would elevate collective consciousness and lead to an Age of Enlightenment. I later practiced Chan (Zen) meditation and was swayed by the Tibetan envisioning of an enlightened society. I went on long meditation retreats, got certification in Permaculture design, studied Passive Haus design and built a highly efficient off-grid home with my wife. I never bought into distopian visions of the future so prominent in science fiction novels and Hollywood movies. I believed countries would collaborate and share information on what works and what doesn’t, that each country would gravitate toward the common good.
But then, in 2016, people in the United States elected Donald Trump. This was quite a shock for me. He seemed to be the antithesis of my world view and my assumed vision of the future. I wondered how people could be so gullible. How could they overlook his obvious character flaws? How could anyone think he could represent us on the world stage?
To further underscore, we U.S. Americans voted him in again in 2024, even after reading Project 2025, which was definitely moving us in the direction of authoritarianism, and from my perspective, distopia.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting in various ways with ChatGPT and Claude AI. Just for fun, I created a project in ChatGPT called Creating Utopia, uploading a file that ChatGPT helped me create to set the parameters of the Creating Utopia Project. What I present here is a first draft of our collaboration on what such a project would look like, again, complements of ChatGPT.
My purpose in sharing this is to get people thinking about how we can use AI for envisioning the future, one that most everyone would find desirable and worth working toward. I think it is important to start with blue sky thinking, not simply how to tweak current systems. What would lead to the greatest happiness and fulfillment for Earth’s inhabitants and future generations? What would we do if we had the opportunity to reimagine the world we want to live in? Well, we have that opportunity and I believe AI can help in this regard.
Conversing with ChatGPT and Claude is like sitting in a room filled with experts from every discipline, all with encyclopedic memory and amazingly fast recall. And they are all willing to collaborate on your every question, synthesize relevant information across disparate disciplines and get back to you with an answer faster than you can copy and paste the last question and answer into a document to record the conversation. The ability to scan for relevant information and synthesize it into extremely lucid, logical alternatives, considering psychological, political and moral factors, is astounding.
Here’s a summary of my initial discussions with ChatGPT on Creating Utopia.
What would we do if we had the opportunity to reimagine the world we want to live in? Well, we have that opportunity and I believe AI can help us envision a better future.
