What will humans do if technology solves everything?

In “Permutation City”, a novel by Greg Egan, the character Peer, having achieved immortality within a virtual reality over which he has total control, finds himself terribly bored. In Mr Bostrom’s latest book, “Deep Utopia”, he considers a rather different outcome. As Mr Bostrom writes, when aided by powerful tech, “the space of possible-for-us experiences extends far beyond those that are accessible to us with our present unoptimised brains.” Yet Mr Bostrom’s label of a “post-scarcity” utopia might be slightly misleading: the economic explosion caused by superintelligence would still be limited by physical resources, most notably land. He argues that beyond the post-scarcity world lies a “post-instrumental” one, in which AIs would become superhuman at child care, too. Economists have long believed that humans have “unlimited wants and desires”, suggesting there are endless variations on things people would like to consume.