Ask A Genius 130 – The Era of Mortality (Part 1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/27
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Rick Rosner: In the era of mortality – that is, in the era in which every single person dies, which we’re drawing towards the end of, one way to be overcome your mortality is to leave some sort of legacy. Either through having kids or making a contribution to culture, but the odds of so successfully are – culturally – super miniscule. There have been 107 billion people on Earth, roughly.
A fraction of those are recognizable as historical figures. It’s one in 200,000, depending on how widely you want to throw your net. Most people are super, super forgotten by history. Genetically, things aren’t so great either. The idea that your offspring will proliferate and multiply. It helps if you were Genghis Khan and had hundreds and hundreds of offspring. Where some crazy percentage of people in the world now have genes that have descended from Genghis Khan.
Things are about to get even more depressing. In that, the products of unaugmented humans re going to become less impressive in the view of what comes after unaugmented humans, which will be technologically augmented humans in combination with various forms of AI and entities that will increasingly be sophisticated and unrecognizable to us – information processing entities – with their tremendous power will make stuff that is a lot better than the stuff that we make.
And who will tend to look at the stuff that we made as the natural products of the organisms that we were – kind of the same way, not quite as bad—we don’t give much artistic significance to wasps’ nests and birds’ nests. It is what birds and wasps instinctually make. But there’s going to be more than a hint of that in future people looking at our stuff. Yea, it’s what they made, images of the world around them, and they wrote stuff trying to figure out how people work.
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