What will we do when all our jobs are done for us?

Laughs are in short supply in the academic world unless that world is serving as the victim of satire. So full marks to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom for loading Deep Utopia – his reflections on life in a ‘solved world’, perfected by technology and science – with self-mockery and slapstick.

Bostrom isn’t the first to fret about the travails of extreme leisure. John Maynard Keynes feared that economic abundance would produce more disgusting aristo-like behaviour. It’s nice to see how mighty minds can be so wrong. Bostrom cites John Stuart Mill being seriously depressed by the prospect, as humanity solved its problems, of there not being enough music to keep everyone happy all day. As we’ve discovered, there probably aren’t enough people to cope with the terabytes of material currently available from the back catalogue and bootlegs of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, even before we get to jazz, the classical repertoire or the Hawaiian nose flute.