Ask A Genius 909: The Forever-Book In-Progress

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/07

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: So, we’re still talking about notes from my novel in progress. The entertainment industry facilitates sociopaths; I think that’s long been apparent, especially sociopaths who either are talented or claim to be gifted. There’s the saying nobody knows anything in the entertainment industry, which refers to nobody knows what’s going to be a hit and what won’t be; that’s by William Goldman, the screenwriter of The Princess Bride and Marathon Man. So, if somebody is thought to be talented, people will put up with all sorts of misbehaviour from that person. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: They seem like a truism of Hollywood culture.

Rosner: Yeah, and with me, too, there’s been a crackdown on it, but I’m sure it’s like stepping on ooze that will ooze in different directions. 

Jacobsen: There’ll be adaptation to many things, too. For example, the guys who get taken down or the ladies who get taken down will be shovelled to a different position in a different company because these are the same professional networks.

Rosner: Right, though some of the worst predators have aged out of the predation game even if they haven’t been imprisoned. If you look at most of the people caught by ‘Me Too,’ Weinstein Cosby, and these are guys in their 80s now. I’m sure there are still predations, but it’s maybe less blatant, especially not having had an entertainment job for nine years or more. Not that I was even like some part of some swirling world of glamour when I did have a job. 

Jacobsen: Did you notice this kind of swirl of bad behaviour among others while you were in the central part of Hollywood? 

Rosner: Not so much. I’d go to work, and I’d do my shit, and I’d go home, and I didn’t get to go to fancy parties filled with the powerful and famous. When I met the famous, it was like a 50-50 shot, whether embarrassing or not, because you want to be calm and end up not being cool. If you’re at a party with famous people, the best thing to do is look for the food and not approach them. You can slide by them but don’t say anything. 

In this book, this character helps run something called The Salon. At this point, I’ll come up with a better name for it. It’s a series of parties in which sex is available, kind of like Plato’s Retreat. Are you familiar with Plato’s Retreat?

Jacobsen: No. 

Rosner: It was a sex club in New York City in, I think, the 70s, maybe into the 80s and as creepy and sleazy as that might indicate, though, like trying to be classy, hence the name Plato’s Retreat, but just a bunch of High School assistant principals who’d roped a girlfriend or maybe a paid girlfriend into going there as far as I know. There might have been some genuinely horny libertine couples, but that stuff always verges on the creepy. So, anyway, this Salon is designed to be a place for sexual opportunities where all the participants, at least the non-powerful and famous ones, have been highly vetted and are engaging in extreme consent. They’re screened psychologically and sign a bunch of releases and make a video release so that it’s designed to give the participants confidence that this won’t bite them on the ass, that everybody there is okay with it and that nobody will freak out later to the best of the predictive abilities of the screening techniques and decide to come after them. In this environment, among the things that people are there for are: a) some people might be cool with sex or even like sex, especially with famous and influential people, and they’re all cool to the extent that this can be established through screening. They’re cool with quid pro quo that if they get with a famous, influential person, that person might be willing to offer opportunities, and that’s just one setting in this thing that the hero of this book is a mix of good and not-so-good. 

Jacobsen: That’s pretty good, man. Is there going to be weather manipulation in the future based on the level of technology and AI systems that we have to understand the weather?

Rosner: Well, in the mid to far future, yeah. If I write more than one book in a series that will cover further into the future for sequels, which is way premature considering this thing is stated, I will discuss the increasing Disneyfication of the planet. We can see that you don’t accomplish much in addressing climate change via modifying behaviour. Nobody’s willing to… and its market forces to a great extent that will address global warming. Number one: market forces. Number two, maybe some coercive government policies, but even those government policies have to be linked to financial incentives. So, yeah, I believe the Earth will become increasingly engineered. The Earth’s climate geology and biology will be subject to what I hope will be tampering in a positive direction. I mean climate change and trying to save the planet’s species; I think the weather will be more laissez-faire than some other stuff.

We’ve talked about this, and one of the big helps to fight climate change is a population that quits increasing; right now, 25% of the countries on Earth have shrinking populations. Thirty years from now, it will be over 50%. By the 22nd century, three-quarters of the countries will have shrinking populations, and the Earth’s population will stop growing. That, coupled with increasing technology, means that we’ll be able to handle a population of 10 billion with less damage to the world than today’s 8 billion. So, I mean that will make things better. As people live more and more virtually via telecommuting, they’ll consume fewer resources in the real world versus the virtual world. There is a coming change/threat with the extreme power consumption of big data computing, which includes AI, which chews up much energy. Also, in the future, technology will consume minerals different from those we’ve formerly consumed, like lithium and copper. 

So yeah, there will still be rape in the environment, but I’m hoping that it will be reduced and that once climate change is more in hand, that weather will mostly be allowed to be weather though that won’t be the case if we get hit with mega weather events like in eco-disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow. 

Jacobsen: Do you think many of it will be self-simulated weather models that can predict that weather based on more dates than have happened?

Rosner: I saw charts of how much more reliable weather forecasting has gotten; the one-day and three-day forecasts for any locale are 90% plus accurate, and even 10-day forecasts have gone from less than 10% correct to over 50% correct. So, modelling will improve, and people will at least be able to prepare for superstorms. When you look at super storms, like a ton of hurricanes tearing across the US and, I guess, typhoons tearing across East Asia, they don’t kill that many people; they just cause much damage. So, do you want to develop extreme methods to control against those, or do you develop strategies to protect from them? I don’t know. I mean because they’ve tried primitive ways of managing the weather, like seeding clouds with silver nitrate pellets. I don’t know if that ever worked, but that’s what they were doing in the ’70s, and I don’t know that there are any weather control methods being used today. The Netherlands has this giant Seagate that’s like a kilometre long or 3/4 of a kilometre long, and they swing shut when there’s a storm to stop the ocean from coming in. Protecting against weather will be more effective in the medium future than engineering the weather and a trillion-dollar industry.

When somebody comes up with reasonably doable technology to put up retractable sea walls around southern Florida to protect Miami when the sea rises, and New Orleans is already below sea level and is supposed to be protected by giant slabs of materials that are supposed to channel water away from the city which all failed under Katrina. Also, New Orleans is vulnerable because of land reclamation or, like many barrier islands off of Southern Louisiana, these scrubby little Islands serve to slow down the ocean as it comes roaring in, and they’ve either been submerged or developed or turned into I don’t know what but New Orleans is no longer shielded by as much stuff as it was. So, you’re going to need sea walls around New Orleans and Lower Manhattan, as well as many coastal areas worldwide, and the company that becomes best at doing that will make hundreds of billions of dollars.

Jacobsen: What about parks and such? Could you imagine a future in which robot tenders will be used for both wildlife and the land of closed-off forests that mimic natural environments?

Rosner: Yeah, it’s a common theme shortly science fiction that the wealthy live in fortified enclaves fortified against the 99% of people who aren’t rich who might be pissed off. There was that Matt Damon movie that there’s an orbiting space station where everybody lives forever if you’re rich, not a space station, a lovely space Utopia for the rich. The whole movie is about him trying to break into that joint. There are gated communities all over the place now, like in India, Florida, Los Angeles, and any place where a large population of not-rich surrounds rich people, and it is going to get worse as people can buy extra decades of life. If increased longevity comes to the rich and not to the less rich, then that will require even more fortification and hiding because we can assume that somebody worth a hundred million and used that wealth to still be healthy and active at age 95 or 105 and maybe looks like they’re 70 or 65 and presentable. 

Rupert Murdoch is 93 now, and he looks terrible because he’s 93 and he’s an Australian, he spent his life going to the beach, and he still goes to the beach, and he’s with his girlfriend, who’s 65, and he looks like shit but somebody in the future who’s 105 and looks 65, it won’t be like a usual 65; it’ll be like a weirdly engineered 65. It’ll be evident to people who know what they’re looking at that this is somebody who’s way old and had a bunch of jiggering done. That person can’t go to Ralph’s Supermarket without risking being accosted by some pissed-off lunatic. So, there will be protected areas, but those won’t be the only protected areas; there will be all sorts of reasons to live apart from general society. It depends on how tolerant the future will be of different ways of forming partnerships and couple-ships and all that stuff. I think the future will be very friendly to non-traditional heterosexual life schemes, but on the other hand, maybe not. People doing certain things may want to live apart from society. Indeed, people who are freaked out, as we’ve talked about, by certain aspects of the technology may choose to live in communities or areas where they’re somewhat shielded from the technology they consider creepy, but I’m guessing that most people won’t have the time or the concern to shut themselves off from larger society but rich people certainly will have a reason to shut themselves off.

You can still have a mobile security perimeter. It can look like you’re out in public, but with robotic technology, you’ve got little mini drones the size of flies like just monitoring, and you’ve got access to all these security perimeters that may not be super visible to the people around you. 

Jacobsen: What about AI analysis of the systems that make up a human being? Will there be any adaptation or manipulation of those systems that can extend life non-eugenically?

Rosner: Yeah, I think once people start getting bracelets or other some kind of wearable that continuously monitors, say, your blood glucose and, like, say, doses you with metformin or some other spike suppressor to keep it so your blood glucose even after a big meal never like spikes over 120 and mostly is in the 80s; just that alone should add years to somebody’s life. Something that monitors inflammation levels and maybe finds out what parts of your body, if there are specific parts, like, I’ve got a tooth that I don’t want to give up with a tiny infection. It’s been going on for a year, and I had a tooth replaced after one tooth just cracked apart, and that’s a year-long process; it’s a pain in the ass, and it’s like $6,000. This other tooth has this minor infection, my dentist says, and is slowly leaking a few bacteria into my system; I think it’s minuscule, probably less than a cubic millimetre a day. Is that enough to increase my inflammation appreciably? I kind of doubt it, but maybe so, and if you had a system that would monitor and look at your inflammation levels and direct you to get care or hit you with anti-inflammatory drugs, that could add years to your life.

I take Fisetin several times a week, which supposedly cleans out like senescent cells, which add to inflammation and just your body’s burden of supporting all these crap cells. I just started on Rapamycin, a weekly dose which is an antifungal that also fights mTor problems. mTor is this growth factor that your body needs, but also, when you get cancer, it harnesses your mTor to go crazy with the growth and Rapamycin fights that and has been shown to increase longevity in mice by 40% even when you start with an elderly mouse. So, all this stuff will buy you extra years and functionality in those years with crisper technology and gene editing. Jimmy Carter had fatal brain cancer six years ago. He was months away from being done, and they used gene therapy to wipe out the cancer, and he’s still with us. He’s been in hospice for a year and a half or more where he goes. I’m not going to take any more special treatments to keep going, but he keeps going. So, it’s not like he’s a lunatic who will do everything possible. So, gene therapy to fight his brain cancer was presented to him as a reasonable thing and as a sensible guy, he did it; it’s not craziness.

So, there will be a ton of stuff that will increase longevity, and as you know, because we’ve talked about it. Aubrey de Grey said seven areas of ageing need to be conquered before we can get true longevity. I think probably one of them is mitochondrial health. Mitochondria are the little energy generators of your cells, and they get shitty as you get older. You have wealthy lunatics now, incredibly wealthy tech lunatics who get transfused with teen blood; it’s a little like quackery because it’s like, trust me, teen blood will make you younger. It’s creepy and freaky, and it’s new-age-y. It’s like homeopathy; it’s just like kind of bullshit embraced by, say, more Lefty lunatic, I don’t know. Anyway, just because shit like that is goofy now doesn’t mean that they won’t figure out how to make it actual science in the future.

Jacobsen: What about monitoring complex natural systems like forests with AI systems that can see tempos and patterns in that natural environment much more in-depth than we can? Could that be a basis for manipulating and modifying that kind of environment?

Rosner: We already manipulate forests incredibly, and it’s always a source of big arguments and also big disasters where if you prevent fires from tearing through a forest every once in a while, then that forest develops a bunch of trash on the ground and unhealthy trees and then you can end up with a big fire and that burns down the homes of people who keep encroaching further and further into forests with out of the way homes. There was an argument that Trump, famously an idiot about everything, tried to blame forests in California on California not sweeping the floor of the forest. We tear down old-growth forests and then replace them with pine tree farms because pine trees grow super-fast, and the wood is super helpful in making paper and lumber. So, we already do it, and we’re just going to end up getting better at it and less shitty at it. We’ll have the internet for everything, which is also called the waking up of the world. 

As I’ve said, you can’t do a heist movie set today because there are so many cameras everywhere, and there needs to be more use for cash, so it is challenging to do a heist. Then I was proven wrong last week over Easter weekend when a bunch of thieves stole $30 million in cash in LA from a cash storage facility. So, you still can do a heist, but it’s less common. I think we have fewer bank robberies. LA was the world capital of bank robberies because of all our freeways, but you don’t hear much about that anymore. The world will become more highly monitored, and we’ll have more robust technology to make sense of the information we get from every corner of the world. So, we’ll figure out how to do better with forests, and ideally, the population will level out, and we’ll have less encroachment into previously unencroached areas. 

California also has a developing technology for fireproof houses. You use aluminum studs; you face it with stucco and concrete, and there’s just nothing to burn in the materials of the house; then you practice responsible land management so there’s nothing flammable within 100 ft of your house that’s if you want to have a home in the forest or if you want to build a whole little town that’s right up next to a forest.  We’re going to see more environment-appropriate buildings. You don’t put up a wooden A-frame in the forest. In the future, with 3D printing and other prefabrication of building materials, when you build a house in 3D with a 3D printer, you’re using something that is concrete-like. They’re just different recipes for the goo that gets squirted out by the printer, and you use the appropriate recipe for where you’re putting the building.

Jacobsen: Do you think planes will be computerized entirely by the middle of the next century?

Rosner: So, in my book, because I keep going back to it, it becomes increasingly politically incorrect to fly for a nonserious reason because the carbon footprint of planes is terrible, much worse than like cars, I think, though I should probably research that. So, much stuff will happen to planes, though the speed with which that happens could be slow, considering the organizational inertia of Boeing. Have you been following up on what’s been going on with Boeing?

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: They changed their corporate culture. Like 10-15 years ago, they merged with McDonald Douglas. McDonald’s Douglas hijacked their corporate culture, and McDonald’s Douglas planes crashed a lot more. Boeing had a reliability and safety culture, but it does not anymore. They moved their corporate headquarters away from where the aircraft is manufactured to Chicago from Seattle or wherever Boeing makes the planes, and Boeing’s just been doing super shitty with not giving a shit about safety which is just like trusting luck, which is crazy because their luck has run out; the pieces flying off the plane on autopilot twice. Boeing installed a new aspect to their autopilot system designed to prevent stalls based on an angle of attack meter stuck out of the front of the plane, the way angle of attack meters do. However, when that thing started giving wrong information, the autopilot kept trying to correct it incorrectly, and the pilots fought the autopilot, and the pilots hadn’t been taught how to turn off the autopilot because it would have been expensive to modify the instructions or some crap or retrain the pilots and Boeing just said it’d be fine. So, in two cases, the pilots wrestled with the planes until the autopilot won and slammed the aircraft into the ground at about 500 miles an hour. 

This is all happening to Boeing 737s, the new ones. Whenever they bring out a new 737, they give it a new name like The Super Max, but the first 737 was made in the 1960s. So, they’re using a basic airframe that’s 60 years old. So, you must recognize the inertia of manufacturers, but eventually, there will be all sorts of systems to improve fuel economy and make safety more foolproof. Planes are very safe in general because of hundreds of years of aeronautics and learning from mistakes, but when you make a mistake, it can often kill a high percentage of the people on a plane compared to a car. You make a mistake in a car; it mainly doesn’t kill you; it mostly wrecks your bumper, but plane mistakes are more costly. So, yeah, we will have increasingly automated planes. I would like to see planes that can modify their shape so that their landing stall speed can be lowered to under 80 miles an hour. A big plane still needs to be going 150 miles an hour when it touches down, and that might get worse in the future because, with climate change in the summer in hot-ass cities, the hot air can’t hold as much weight. 

So, in Phoenix or Houston, you might not be able to land a passenger jet on days over 120 degrees because your landing speed might have to be 170 miles an hour just for you to stay in the air. I’d like to see planes that can increase the surface area of their wings for landing so they have more lift and a lower stall speed. 50% of the accidents with planes occur during the landing phase of the flight. I’d like to see hybrid dirigible technology where if you’re going on a short trip, like, say, LA to Vegas or LA to San Francisco, it doesn’t matter whether your plane flies 600 miles an hour or you’ve got this dirigible thing that flies at 300 miles an hour with one-third of the carbon footprint. So, it takes 90 minutes to get to Vegas from LA instead of 45 minutes at a substantial fuel savings. Who cares? Or it takes you an hour and a half to get to San Francisco instead of an hour. So, all sorts of things will happen with planes if inertia can be overcome in the plane industry.

Jacobsen: Do you think commercial space flight will be widespread?

Rosner: You have two recreational and commercial space flight forms in my book. One is you’re a rich asshole, and you go to this resort in space, and they’ve managed to bring the price for a trip up there down to about 19 Grand in today’s dollars; what that’ll be in the future, I don’t know. Say, 30 Grand in the 2030s for the first space resort. If you’re rich and an idiot, you can do that. You can spend two, three, or four days in orbit, or there’s a cheaper option where, at some point, you can take these fancy-ass vacations and trips into space virtually, and there are some remotely operated humanoid robots up on space station on the space resort, and you can experience it virtually for 5,000 bucks, also, if you’re a slightly less rich idiot. So, I think we won’t have entire cities in space, but it won’t be uncommon for rich idiots. I haven’t even thought about some permanent base on the moon. That’s still pretty impractical shortly, though I should think about that more.

We last landed a human on the moon 52 years ago. We’ve been distracted by technological advances in other areas. Life on the moon would be miserable, even more pathetic on Mars; you’re not protected from cosmic radiation. The Earth has a spinning metallic core that generates a magnetic field that creates the Van Allen belt that directs most cosmic radiation to the poles away from most of the Earth. The moon doesn’t have that; Mars doesn’t have that. So, the people there will either have to be somehow shielded from radiation or live with it and live with increased rates of cancer from getting hit with radiation. The debris, the dust on the moon and Mars, particularly the moon, is spiky. All the sand on Earth is rounded because we have weather like a giant rock tumbler over the Millennia that rounds off sand, but the dust on the moon is all pointy and super corrosive. It’s like the worst possible sandpaper because it’s not rounded at all, and the dust gets into all your gaskets on your space suits and equipment and chews everything up. 

The dust on Mars is likely to be corrosive. Mars has some weather, but we have more weather than we do. So, its dust is pointy. Living in space seems like something for 80 years or 100 rather than 20 years from now, though it’ll be a rare thing. You will need super-good fabricators to live reasonably on the moon or Mars. We don’t start doing a bunch of stuff in space until we have a space elevator because just launching stuff with rockets is extremely expensive, and it has a huge carbon footprint, though you’re not worried about that for launches because it’s not like we have tens of thousands of airplane flights a day compared to one launch a day less than that on average. Nobody’s worried about the carbon footprint of launching stuff into space, but in the future, if you’re going to need to move multiple payloads a day into orbit, you’re going to need a space elevator, which is an orbiting platform that’s tethered to the Earth with solid cables that run six miles up to the platform. 

I don’t know the equilibrium point for a space elevator, but you need this incredibly long cable to run stuff up; once you have that cable, it becomes much cheaper to move things into orbit. Then, once you’re in orbit, it’s less expensive once the space elevator, where there is no wholesale messing with space. Also, you can only get some of your junk from Earth for some reasonable colony. You need to be able to take what is out there and break it down into the molecules or the atoms you need to reconstitute into building materials and edible stuff. Sound technology for that is 80-100 years away. Until then, you’re supplying Mars and the moon with many things from Earth, which is super expensive. 

[Recording End]

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