Almost certainly not. Productivist visions of paradise are unrealistic if they don't incorporate an all-important biological revolution in hedonic engineering. Beyond a bare subsistence minimum, there is no inherent positive long-term correlation between wealth and happiness. Windfalls and spending-sprees do typically bring short-term highs. Yet they don't subvert the hedonic treadmill of inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the brain. Each of us tends to have a hedonic set-point about which our "well"-being fluctuates. That set-point is hard to recalibrate over a lifetime without pharmacological or genetic intervention. Interlocking neurotransmitter systems in the CNS have been selected to embody both short- and long-term negative feedback loops. They are usually efficient. Unless they are chemically subverted, such mechanisms stop most of us from being contented - or clinically depressed - for very long. The endless cycle of ups and downs - our own private re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus - is an "adaptation" that helps selfish genes to leave more copies of themselves; in Nature, alas, the restless malcontents genetically out-compete happy lotus-eaters. It's an adaptation that won't go away just by messing around with our external environment.

        This is in no way to deny that our descendants will be temperamentally ecstatic. They may well consume lots of material goods too. Yet their well-being cannot depend on an unbridled orgy of personal consumption. It depends on dismantling the hedonic treadmill itself.

        So what sort of scenario can we expect? If we opt for genetically pre-programmed bliss, just what, if anything, is our marvellous well-being likely to focus on?

         First, in a mature IT society, the harnessing of psychopharmacology and biotechnology to ubiquitous virtual reality software gives scope for unlimited good experiences for everyone. Any sensory experience one wants, any experiential manifold one can imagine, any narrative structure one desires, can be far better realised in VR than in outmoded conceptions of Real Life.

        At present, society is based on the assumption that goods and services - and the good experiences they can generate - are a finite scarce resource. But ubiquitous VR can generate (in effect) infinite abundance. An IT society supersedes the old zero-sum paradigm and Fordist mass-manufacture. It rewrites the orthodox laws of market economics. The ability of immersive multi-modal VR to make one - depending on the software title one opts for - Lord Of Creation, Cassanova The Insatiable etc puts an entire universe at one's disposal. This can involve owning "trillions of dollars", heaps of "status-goods", and unlimited wealth and resources - in today's archaic terminology. In fact one will be able to have all the material goods one wants, and any virtual world one wants - and it can all seem as "unvirtual" as one desires. A few centuries hence, we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for granted. And this virtual cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a tiny elite. Information isn't like that. Nor will it depend on masses of toiling workers. Information isn't like that either. If we want it, nanotechnology promises old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside synthetic VR.

        Nanotechnology is not magic. The self-replicating molecular robots it will spawn are probably more distant than their enthusiasts suppose, perhaps by several decades. We may have to wait a century or more before nanorobots can get to work remoulding the cosmos - to make it a home worth living in and call our own. Details of how they'll be programmed, how they'll navigate, how they'll be powered, how they'll locate all the atoms they reconfigure, etc, are notoriously sketchy. But the fact remains: back in the boring old mind-independent world, applied nanoscience will deliver material superabundance beyond measure.

        For the most part, admittedly, vast material opulence may not be needed thanks to VR. This is because we can all have the option of living in immersive designer-paradises of our own choosing. At first, our customised virtual worlds may merely ape and augment organic VR. But the classical prototype of an egocentric virtual world is parochial and horribly restrictive; the body-image it gives us to work with, for instance, is pretty shoddy and flawed by built-in obsolescence. Unprogrammed organic VR can be hatefully cruel as well - Nature's genetic algorithms are nastily written and very badly coded indeed. Ultimately, artificial VR may effectively supersede its organic ancestor no less (in)completely than classical macroscopic worlds emerged from their quantum substrate. The transition is conceivable. Whether it will happen, and to what extent, we simply don't know.

        Heady stuff. But is it sociologically plausible? Doesn't such prophecy just assume a naive technological determinism? For it might be countered that synthetic drugs-and-VR experiences - whether interactive or solipsistic, deeply soulful or fantasy wish-fulfilment - will always be second-rate shadows of their organically-grown predecessors. Why will we want them? After a while, won't we get bored? For surely Real Life is better.

        On the contrary, drugs-plus-VR can potentially yield a heightened sense of verisimilitude; and exhilarating excitement. Virtual worlds can potentially seem more real, more lifelike, more intense, and more compelling than the lame definitions of reality on offer today. The experience of this-is-real - like all our waking- or dreaming consciousness - comprises a series of neurochemical events in the CNS like any other. It can be amped-up or toned-down. Reality does not admit of degrees; but our sense of it certainly does. Tone, channel and volume controls will be at our disposal. But once we've chosen what we like, then the authentic taste of paradise is indeed addictive.

        Thus in an important sense Brave New World is wrong. Our descendants may "consume" software, genetic enhancements and designer drugs. But the future lies in bits and bytes, not as workers engaged in factory mass-production or cast as victims of a consumer society. In some ways, BNW is prescient science fiction - uncannily prophetic of advances in genetic engineering and cloning. But in other ways, its depiction of life in centuries to come is backward-looking and quaint. Our attempts to envision distant eras always are. The future will be unrecognisably better.
 

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