Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the

Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number

158.

When we can find a pattern, recognize a trend, or predict a

path forward, human beings collectively and individually

tend to default to 1 of 3 responses and

or reactions to that pattern, to that

trend, or to that path forward. We

fight, we flee, we freeze.

Societies, cultures, institutions and organizations behave in the same way

as individual people, except they do it at

scale. And ever since the Post World War II promises

of political, cultural and social advancement have proven to be

so much smoke and mirrors in the early 21st century.

We in the west have resisted the advancements that we have

received and we have fled ignominiously into

entertainment and hedonistic whimsy. Or we have

encased ourselves willingly and into inaction,

indecision and stasis.

But none of these reactions of flight,

freezing or freeing are

happening in a vacuum, and the ways in which societies, cultures, institutions and

organizations attempt to manage their reputation, resources

and reactions is rarely as opaque as

they believe it is. Which brings us to our

author today. Today on the show

solo episode, we will be introducing the author,

exploring some of the dominant themes, and expressing

some of the thoughts I have on one of these seminal science fiction

novels of the mid to late 20th

century. It is a book that predicted

with dreary certainty the world we in the

west currently inhabit, and continues to

predict with dreary certainty the technological and social

world we are about to inhabit. Just about five minutes

from now, the basis for

the movie blade runner from 1982,

we will be introducing and discussing Do

Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip

K. Dick Leaders

we get the world we want either through action or inaction.

Either path is a choice and no choices can be made

without consequences.

So as usual, we will be summarizing

some of the themes that we are going to be

exploring here and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? We

will not be reading directly from the book. Instead, what we're going to

be doing is we're going to be talking about specific

chapters and areas and sort of a broad summary because this book is

still under copyright and we do respect copyright here on

this show. So when you open up new

Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, you are introduced

to a world that is ashy,

a world that is covered in gray dust, a

world that is declining, an earth that is declining as

a result of a third world war

that was indeed nuclear. Chapter one opens

up with us being introduced to a man named Rick

Deckard, played in the movie by Harrison

Ford. Now, Rick Deckard is a bounty

hunter. He's an independent contractor hired by the police

to, to hunt down and to quote,

unquote, retire androids that have escaped from

the Martian colonies and returned

to Earth where it is illegal for an Android to be.

We're introduced to his wife, Iran, and I did say

Iran I R A N. And his wife is

struggling with some mental health problems,

depression, anxiety. And she

finds safety by grabbing the handles of and by

engaging with something called an empathy box and

engaging with the religion of mercerism.

More on that later. Rick also

has a sheep. Now, the

sheep is part of the setup of the book and

the sheep is not a live sheep. It's an electric sheep,

which, you know, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? That's sort

of where the title really kicks off. And so we open up

the book, we open up the story, and nothing much happens

in the first couple of chapters but this. Then Rick is on his way to

work and he is seeking to figure

out how to get a live animal because

everything is floating in ash on the Earth.

Everything is denuded. As a matter of fact, one of

the things that many of the characters point out in doandroids Dream of

Electric Sheep is that, no, all the human

beings basically that could leave, could emigrate from Earth have already

emigrated to go to other places like Mars or other

interstellar settlements. And all the folks that

are left on the Earth are living in the remains, living in the

rubble of what was once a great society,

particularly what was once a great city in known as

San Francisco. By the way, when I say that there are no live animals,

there's a whole running piece

inside of of the book that

is really focused on the value of a.

Of a live animal. And there is a

magazine and this is going to come back, come back to haunt us a little

bit later on in the book. A catalog actually called

Sydney's. And Sydney's catalog is a catalog that

prices live animals. This is

going to come back later on when Rick Deckard

runs into Rachel Rosin

with some interesting consequences

that will come about from that.

Now that we've laid out some of the opening themes, some of the initial

themes that are in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

by Philip K. Dick, let's take a look at the literary life

of of Philip K. Dick. From his

Wikipedia article and a few interviews, we were able to glean

numerous details about the man's life, both directly

from his mouth and from things that other people

wrote about him. Philip Kindred

Dick was born December 16, 1928 and died

March 2, 1982. He was an American

science fiction writer and novelist. A

prolific yet troubled creative, he wrote 44 novels and about

121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction

magazines during his lifetime. As a matter of fact,

Philip K. Dick struggled as a science fiction

writer until

Duandro's Dream of Electric Sheep really took off, as well as

probably his most notable notable book,

which was turned into an Amazon, an Amazon studio streaming

show a few years ago, the man in the High

Castle. His fiction explored very

various and varied philosophical and social questions

such as the nature of reality, the nature of perception, what

exactly is human nature and identity. And his

stories commonly featured characters struggling against against elements

that they could not understand and had trouble identifying, such

as alternate realities, illusory environments,

monopolistic corporations, and even monopolistic governments,

drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and

most interestingly, altered states of

consciousness. Philip

K. Dick was primarily raised by his mother after a vicious

divorce where his mother refused to move

basically across the country. Well, not really across the country, but from one state to

another state with his father, who by the

way, his father worked as a writer for the U.S. department of

Agriculture. I am firm in my

belief that the process of the divorce and the way in which

he was raised by his mother, first in Washington D.C. and then later on in

San Francisco, deeply impacted psychologically,

the young Philip K. Dick. Matter of fact, it affected

him, impacted him. Infected is probably a good term. Impacted

him so deeply psychologically that he

was unable to really be effective in school.

Particularly during a mid century time when conformity in

school was thought to be the highest honor that you

could possibly have as a student. A

genuine king in his own mind. Dick dropped out of

college because it bored him. He took a lot of classes, he did a lot

of things, but he never landed on a major and he never received

a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. At the

time, by the way, UC Berkeley hadn't yet become a

haven for hippie dumb and progressive and

later on, Marxist thought. By the way,

the reason he dropped out of college, the reason that was

stated according to his third wife Anne's memoir about him,

the reason that he dropped out was because of ongoing anxiety

problems. And I tend to believe that that was probably true.

And also pointed out that Dick really didn't want to be

involved with or engaged around mandatory

ROTC training. As a matter of fact, when you look at

Philip K. Dick and you look at George Orwell, both of

their relationships to power influenced later on

and hierarchy influenced later on their relationships and

how they wrote about the relationships between individuals and

a hierarchy. A man driven by confusion,

driven by anger and perplexity at the world and his place in it,

and a man seeking answers to questions in all the wrong places.

Philip K. Dick was a complicated individual who

did not have an easy life. He also

experimented and dabbled in drugs, as did many people of his generations

of his generation. But he came to significantly different conclusions

about that drug use and about the results of that

dabbling. Science fiction was an

outlet for Philip K. Dick. It was a way for him to express

all of the ideas and thoughts, thoughts and feelings

that he could not successfully express to others

and also gave him away, quite frankly, to be weird

fellow. K. Dick was not Robert Heinlein, although Robert

Heinlein was, was a friend of his. He was not

Charles Gibson. He was also not Isaac Asimov or Ray

Bradbury. Those guys were at least a

generation older than him. Philip K. Dick was part of a

new generation of science fiction writers who were

utilizing science fiction in order to work out

therapeutically their own psychoses and of

course, to project their own ideas of a new world

and new men on to readers

both now and readers that would read them later on

in the future.

Back to our analysis of the book, back to Do Androids

Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K.

Dick. So we pick up

in chapter three of the book

and Rick Deckard goes to the, the

San Francisco police station. Now it's a

newly built police station in a different part of town and,

and it's called the hall of justice on Lombard Street.

And when he arrives, he is informed in

no uncertain terms that

a new unit of Android has been released

called the Nexus 6 brain unit or the Nexus

6 Android. And the Nexus 6 Android is, is,

is, is supposed to be designed so that it can be

unidentifiable, so that it can be,

it can be indistinguishable from human

beings. He finds out that a colleague of his

is in the hospital from having killed or retired

one of these Nexus 6 robots, sorry,

androids, and that there are something like six

more of them floating around the earth

somewhere. He's also ordered by his

boss, a Mr. A Mr. Bryant,

to, to go out to the. Go out to

the, the, The Rosen Corporation. And the Rosen

Corporation is an organization or it's the organization

that creates the, and, and makes the

Nexus 6 robots. As a matter of fact, they make all of the Nexus 6

here saying robots, Nexus 6 androids that are on the

Earth. And whenever an Android escapes, it is the

responsibility of the manufacturer to make sure that that

Android is brought back. They of course,

cannot do this without the help of the police, and the police cannot do this

without the help of the bounty hunters. And thus, that is the virtuous circle.

Rick Deckard is equipped with something called a Voight Conf

Test. V O I G T K A M

Pff. And the Voight Komp test measures

the level of empathy that a human has versus an Android,

or the level of empathy or empathetic responses that

an object has, and then identifies the difference between

the empathetic responses of an Android versus the empathetic responses of

a human being. Now, primarily this is done

through questioning individuals or

questioning androids and measuring their,

their biologic and their mechanical

responses to the. To the questions. Because

without being able to do that, the Nexus 6 Androids

can effectively pass for human.

Deckard goes to the Rosin Corporation and

he administers the Voight Conf test to a

woman named Rachel Rosin. And it is

revealed through the failure

of Rachel Rosin to pass the empathy test

that the Rosin association of the Rosin Corporation

has indeed created a an

Android. And Rachel Rosin is one of the

Nexus 6 androids. Not the one that has escaped

from the Martian colonies, but one that was created

in order to live here on Earth. Now, of course, it is

illegal for androids to live on Earth in

the Earth of Do Androids dream of electric Sheep?

And this sets up Rick Deckard as

our not only as our protagonist, but also as our

also gives him motivation for going out and pursuing,

getting the bounty by killing

these or retiring these Nexus 6

androids. But of course, just like everything

else, Rick Deckard cannot do this

act successfully alone.

He who fights with monsters might take

care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if

you gaze for long into an abyss, the

abyss gazes also into you.

Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy

of the Future, 1886.

When we think about Philip K. Dick and when we think about some of the

themes in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I think of that line from Beyond

Good and Evil. Now what we've covered Nietzsche on this podcast,

we've talked about Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And as

you know, if you listen to that episode way back in season one,

I am not a big fan of Frederick Nietzsche. I. I think that he played

the classic Two lies and a truth.

And he did it a lot with folks. And as a philosopher,

he left something to be desired.

However, his words have impacted other folks and

they have caused people to think about reality differently.

And of course, the people that he influenced the most were people who were

in ways of personality and temperament and probably even

intellect, most like him. And these are people who are looking

for and looking at and looking down

the barrel of post World War II

nihilism. We kind of

stumbled across this a little bit when we were discussing George Orwell in

1984 and we did

not cover on the podcast this year Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,

which is the other end of the spectrum on this. But both of those

novels and Brave New World is a little more science

fictiony than 1984 and a little

actually significantly better written. Both of

those, both those novels look at and view

future dystopias not

necessarily with. With glee, obviously, but

mostly with a sort of mute horror. But

it's a mute horror that goes along with or is accompanied by

a sense of the inability to act as if

events merely happen to a person.

They can do very little to respond.

Philip K. Dick was a drug user. And as a

drug user he was very much influenced by Aldous Huxley's writing, in

particular Aldous Huxley's writing and thoughts around

lsd. Now, Dick used

lsd, or maybe he didn't use lsd. There's,

there's a little bit of lack of clothes clarity around that. But I can

say that in an interview that he gave

before his death, he did admit that

he had seen people use drugs and that many of the

brightest minds of his generation had been consumed by drugs and

that drugs were indeed a bad deal.

However, Dick was also a free thinker and he had an FBI

file on him, most notoriously

for being associated with avowed communists and Marxists

as well as. Because one of the jobs that you could get as a

low paid or lowly paid science fiction writer, one of the only

jobs you could get in the middle part of the 20th century was working

with high school students and teaching them, of

course, influencing minds for the future.

But with all that being said, Dick didn't gloss over the negative effects of drug

use and their impact on. And this is where he was mostly

interested in drug use, their impact on the nature of belief.

Philip K. Dick had some interesting views about the nature of reality and the nature

of transcendence and the nature of God, much of which

showed up into Android Stream of Electric Sheep. But

some of that also showed up in, in his book, the Three Stigmata

of Palmer Eldritch. And that was a book he wrote,

quote. I wrote that after reading a magazine article on

hallucinogenics by Aldous Huxley. Drugs have taken the lives

of some very, very dear friends of mine. Close quote.

He had a different view on drug use

than most free thinkers did back in the

1960s and 1970s. And one of the

key themes that is revealed in Duan Droid's dream of Electric sheep

is the idea of the nature of the differences in perceptions of

reality between people with organic brains, like

Dick, like you, like me, like anybody listening to this show

today, and objects that

embody the anthropomorphized reflections

of the human beings around them. Or another way of

saying, this is when we put on our objects the

things that we come up with, the perceptions of reality that we come up

with out of our own brain. And if those perceptions

are influenced through the use of hallucinogenics or

psychedelics, our nature and our

perception is going to then be

strange as we anthropomorphize our

objects forward. By the way,

just in case you think I'm crazy, the guy who founded Apple Computers,

one of the two guys, Steve Jobs, he was an avid

LSD user in the 60s before he founded

Apple Computers. And as a matter of fact, the logo of

Apple Computers, the apple, is taken

from the story of.

Of. Of a Turing, right, Alan Turing, who

during World War II came up with the idea

of artificial intelligence, but also came up with the idea

of a way to test whether or not a computer system was quote,

unquote intelligent. And Turing, of course, died

of suicide taking, if I remember

correctly, arsenic out of an

Apple. Hmm.

Back to the book, back to Do Androids Dream

of Electric Sheep? So we're going to pick up in

the middle part of the first part of

chapter 10. And this

picks up or this, this is right in the middle

of the retiring by Deckard of

several of the androids. As a matter of fact, this. This chapter picks up

right after he. He fails to retire.

And one of the Nexus 6 Androids named Luba

Luft, who is posing as an opera

singer and performer in.

In. In San Francisco, and he goes

to Luba and he administers the Void conf. Test,

she or the Android, it immediately

rejects the questions that are being submitted to

it in the course of the Void comp test, and then

calls an Android cop, another

Nexus 6 Android, to come and arrest

Rick. And when that arresting or when

that arrest Happens, Rick is taken to the Mission

street hall of justice building. And so what the. What the Nexus

and Nexus 6 Androids have done, which is really quite clever

actually, is they've created an entire separate

ecosystem for aping or

for pretending to be engaged in law enforcement in order

to fool bounty hunters. And this, this

fooling of bounty hunters has worked so well that they actually have a human

bounty hunter working for them underneath and taking the

orders from an Android as

his boss. And so this bounty hunter is named Phil Resch.

Phil Resch works under the Android. Garland does

not know that Garland is an Android. And when

Rick is then brought to this, the second police station

and is taken into Garland's office for question questioning, Phil

Resch comes in and states that he is going

to. He's going to

deliver a. A test

to. To. To Deckard. And the test that he is going

to deliver that Phil is going to deliver to Deckard because Phil

believes that Deckard is the. Is the.

Is the Android. That test is a. Is a little bit

of a different test than the Voight Kampf test, although it does measure

the same basic. The same basic

idea or the same basic tendencies around empathy.

Now when this test is. Is delivered,

and by the way, that's called the Benelli reflex arc test,

when this test is, is. Is delivered, or when Phil actually

goes to get the gear to deliver the test, Garland reveals to

Rick that he's really an Android. Rick asks Garland, does

Phil know? Garland says Phil doesn't. And then Rick

proceeds to retire Garland.

When he comes back, or when, when Phil comes back,

the, The, The. The

inter. The interaction right, between Rick and Phil

becomes. Oh my. It

becomes, it becomes

a little fraught. And by the way, I have that wrong. I just, I just

read in the, in the chapter, just looked at it, actually. Resh was the

one that fired at Garland and retired him. So I apologize

there. Let me correct that right up front. Anyway, so the interaction between

Phil, this is what I want to focus on. The interaction between the human Phil

and the human Rick now becomes fraught with

suspense, right? Because Rick had a thought,

and this is very, very interesting. He had a thought that maybe he was

crazy, right? Or that maybe he was an Android himself. Matter of

fact, when he went to retire Luba Luft, he was wondering if he had the

ability to retire an Android or if he was beginning to feel empathy

for the androids. Phil, on the other

hand, Phil Rash, the other bounty hunter, had. Has

already begun to move through to the other side of the

veil from where Rick is now

in the story, as a matter of fact, Phil and Rick

commiserate in the car. They talk about the Nexus

6 androids, they talk about the Bonelli test, they talk

about retiring. And you know, Rick

has his suspicions about Phil, Phil has his suspicions about Rick.

Rick and both of them have to decide

are they genuinely really human

or are they posing? And this creates a real

existential crisis for Rick that continues

to drive the remainder of his actions as a bounty hunter forward

in the book. Even drives his

interaction with Rachel Rosin, his purchase

of another animal from Sydney's

catalog. And finally the retiring

of Roy Batty in

a abandoned and dilapidated apartment building

later on in the story. This

idea that, that,

that k. That that Philip K. Dick introduces in this

story, this idea that two human beings would struggle

to find the humanity with each other

in themselves because their

recognition of that is being blocked by

their concerns about androids. And their level of

empathy is part of their. That theme

that Dick often explored in his book

around, well around the

challenges of seeing through illusory

environments, dealing with monopolistic corporations like the

ones that created the Nexus 6 androids. And the nature

and even the androids questioned this with

Deckard and Phil. The nature of who

works for and enforces the rules of

authoritarian government.

One of the more compelling questions that is

that is proposed in, in Philip K.

Dick's book do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One of the more

compelling questions that's proposed is a, is a question

that is actually framed in our time better

by the character from the movie

Avengers, Age of Ultron. The, the. The

robot, in essence the Android that is

the creation of Jarvis, a

combination of Jarvis and Tony Stark's Iron man

armor. The character Ultron in the movie

Ultron asks a question or makes an

observation actually after utilizing his

AI, his large language model driven brain

to examine all the inputs that Tony Stark has placed on him.

And Ultron makes this observation about the Avengers. He says, and I

quote, you want to protect the world, but you don't want it to

change. This

is actually an important point because

Philip K. Dick wanted to change the world,

but he didn't. He didn't know what it was going to be

changing into. And there are many folks who have come after

Philip K. Dick who have

also experience this sense of and this,

the experience, the handcuffs of

stasis in the world. Peter Thiel points this out

not only in his book Zero to One, but he'll talk about it on any

podcast that he is invited on to. It's

this idea of believing that the future will be brighter,

but not taking any steps to making sure that the future will

actually be brighter, not taking any action. And there are several

themes in Doandroids Dream of Electric Sheep that we did not cover

today. On this, the introductory episode to the

book. We didn't cover how

Philip K. Dick looked at the future world as an

incredibly low trust society that was experiencing

decay, not just interpersonal decay, but decay

at, at a scale that could only be brought about

by a third world war. We didn't talk about

the aspects of sexual exploitation that are in the novel

as well. Philip K. Dick actually did a speech

one time talking about can there be sex between androids

and human beings. We didn't talk

about the phenomenon of quote unquote chicken heads. That's in the book. Individuals

who cannot escape the Earth and

are decaying in the dust of the nuclear war. And

it's impacting their brains, it's lowering their IQs, it's

impacting how they think. And they can't escape, they can't get away, they

can't go to Mars, they can't go to interstellar colonies, they can only

remain on a dying Earth. And of course, we

did not touch on mercerism, an entire

religion designed to, to engage in

and create empathy with empathy boxes. But

then there's a whole reveal at the end of the novel

between Buster Friendly and Amanda about the nature of

mercerism that the Nexus, Nexus 6 robots believe

will destroy that belief and will allow human

beings or will force human beings to accept

androids as well

human. You want to protect the

world, but you don't want it to change.

That's key because the materialistic perspective we are confronted with

in New Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a logical

outgrowth of the end of evolutionary theories of human development.

The same evolutionary theories that are driving much of our.

And we're going to talk about this in the next section. Much of our

deployment of robotics and of

LLMs that we are now on the cusp of taking

to scale in the very near future.

However, this all comes with a challenge that we can't seem to

philosophically name, or at least we can't articulate

it, but we can philosophically name it and we have a sense of

disquiet around it. The challenge is that if our objects treat us as gods

because we created them, how long will it be before our objects

perceive that we only have feet of clay?

In a speech in 1972, Philip Dick talked

about this. He said that many of our drives originate from the subconscious as human

beings. And that subconscious controls us and makes us predictable.

But according to Dick, we all have attributes of an Android.

As he later goes on to say, androidization, which is an

interesting word, requires quote unquote predictability.

And if our subconscious leads us to predictability, then it is something that is completely

out of our control, meaning the merging of ourselves and our technology

is unavoidable. Dick does not believe that to be an

Android has any relation to physical attributes. He talked about this in his speech in

1972. Instead he said being an

Android is to be pounded down, to be manipulated without consistent

consent. And that is something

that lies at the core of the androids problem.

The, the core of Roy Batty's problem, the core of Luba

Luff's problem, even the core of, of Rachel Rosin's problem.

In the novel,

Dick believed that the world can only be made new by

resisting the pull towards a denuded, flat and hedonistic

worldview, while at the same time

resisting the pull in the opposite direction towards a worldview

that separates our objects from ourselves and looks

at them and views them and treats them as mere,

well, things

which way? Future

Western man,

foreign.

So as we round the corner to our ending here of our

show today, our introduction to our episode today,

which is an introduction to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep By Philip K. Dick

and I would encourage you to go out and, and get a copy of this

novel. You can find it pretty much anywhere

or you can find it in a collection of, of novels.

I have, I have my copy in a collection called

Counterfeit Unrealities that was

published by oh gosh, Science Fiction

Printing in May of 2022. And there

are three books in, in this, in this, in this novel or

in this, in this collection. The three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

obviously do Androids, Juvenile sheep. Actually there's four. So the

stigmata Android Drew Electric Sheep which we're focused on today, Ubik

and a scanner darkling go out and pick up a

copy of that collection today.

So solutions to problems, right?

Philip K. Dick proposes several different problems that I think

have already started showing up in the world. Probably started showing up 25 years

ago with the beginnings of the proto

beginnings of social media and were probably,

probably going to show up anyway with the advent of the commercial

Internet being turned on in 1989.

These problems that Philip K. Dick has proposed

and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep we're about to be confronted with

and I don't think we have any really Good answers for any of these problems.

As a matter of fact, I'm not even quite sure we have a bunch of

clarity on what the problems are that we are really going to

face. So here's one

problem we're about to be confronted with.

Embodied objects and what that actually means in

the world. Sure, we've had objects in the

world before. I mean, look around your, your, your room or look around

your car if you're driving. Right now in our

time, the best example of artificial intelligence and the best

example of an artificially intelligent driven robot

is a Tesla vehicle. But they're about

to get a lot more humanoid looking. And we're

already seeing the initial proposals for robot

companions showing up in the marketplace, LLM driven autonomous

robots to work in our factories and to provide security from, for our homes

and our businesses. And of course we are seeing the

rise of, and the proposals for humanoid

slaves to do the work that we don't want to do.

Whether that work is physical,

psychological, and of course we're going to try to push

the boundaries to having them, or demanding that they do that

work in the spiritual and psychological realm as

well. These proposals are being resisted. And

this is another next level problem. The

resistance to these sorts of proposals and these

proposals are being resisted in all forms primarily because

the utility of such proposals really does nothing to address

that genuine real problems humans have, particularly humans in the

west, and of course human specifically in America, but

humans globally. And the problems that

we have are quite frankly the ones that are generated by too much

leisure, too much boredom and too much

hedonism. When you have everything that you

want at your fingertips and all your material desires are

fulfilled, another object to fulfill material

desires is probably not the solution to

your problem. Hmm.

And that's just a couple of problems we will be

confronted by in the next 10 to 15

years. Look, the way forward is neither

going to be easy, nor is it going to be entirely predictable, other

than predictable in the fact that human beings will continue to perform in ways

that feed their most base appetites.

And of course, other human beings will resist such appeals,

and the vast majority of human beings will be confused by the question

and will slowly and painfully adapt.

But one thing is for sure. Next 10 to 15 years

that Philip K. Dick predicted will be neither a

dystopia nor, nor will it be a utopia.

It will probably be closer to something like,

well, just another advancement

in your normal life.

And, well, that's it

for me.