Ask A Genius 159 – Longevity and Tech Disruptions
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Future technology will allow current 50-year-olds to live to 95 or 105. They will not see the effects of those extended lifespans for another 20, 30, or 40 years. It will take time for those people to get into their 70s, 80s, and 90. Although, we are seeing the beginnings of the economic effects of just the cost of great medicine. For 10 years now, the country has been tying itself in stupid knots over trying to come up with workable healthcare coverage.
It is kind of an impossibility because awesome medicine costs out the butt and will continue to cost more. So anyway, enough about medicine. There will be disruption over gender roles, which is already happening to a significant extent. Where you have 5% of the population, that is actively gay. That is just claiming gayness as their identity or as the sexuality part of their identity.
In recent years, you have people coming out as trans. It was 1/3 of 1%. Then you have gender queer and the LTBQ, LTBGQ, all of the initials. I am going to sound like a moron, but okay [Laughing]. There are some changes in society that will make people more likely to embrace and experiment with non-heterosexual gender roles. Medicine again will at some point impinge on gender roles as it makes it easier for people to be gender fluid.
That’s far down the line. Now, to switch from a male body to a female body or vice versa, or somewhere in between, it takes hormones and for the more serious re-engineering it takes surgery and brutal surgery – turning a penis into a vagina or vice versa is nasty surgery. It is nasty cutting and stitching.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is also self-contradictory ideologically because many of these people advocating for this, taking a distanced view, will say that you can’t reduce a man or a woman to the genitalia, but then they would go through drastic surgery – that would be cutting up a penis or a vagina to make the genitalia a penis or a vagina – and then saying that then therefore makes it a man or a woman. It is means to be more extensive to be legitimate.
RR: Legitimate or not, and the politics of it or not, in 60 years, when the gene therapies come to be widely available that bring you 80% of the way from male to female and female to male, and can take you back, there will be lots of people willing to try it out. As I’ve said before, there is a stereotype of women experimenting with gayness in college.
SDJ: The number of self-identified lesbians has gone up 3-fold.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 