Ask A Genius 912: Carole has a Book, Too!
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/12
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, I’m going through my book and talking, which is set like ten years in the future, about what life might be like then. You said to plug Carole’s book, too. I’ve been working on this thing for years and years; you could argue for decades because I’m taking much stuff from my other attempts at books and rolling it over into this one. You said to plug my wife’s Carole’s book too. So, in just months, Carole has cranked out the first draft of a whole book. She’s much faster and works much harder than I do. We cleaned up my mom’s house, and Carole found a box of maybe 80,000 words of love letters between my mom and my dad when they were courting, and they were way in love. Then, within five years, they hated each other and were divorced. So, she’s turning this into a whole book; it starts in 1954 and ends in roughly 1961, and it’s pretty good. She’s surprisingly good and reasonably inventive as a writer. The thing is publishable. Plus, she puts in the work; she’s taking classes on how to pitch, revise, get published, and get an agent. She’s doing everything you should do. With a product, I’m snotty. I’ve read 8,400 books, so I know what a good book is and what a shitty book is, and I think her book’s good.
Anyway, back to my book, just stuff from my little ideas. So, in my future, people have mesh, which is, as I’ve discussed in other sessions, like a little flexible grid that you get a hole drilled in your head that’s 3-4 millimetres in diameter, and robotic tech lays a metallic mesh grid that’s maybe 10 cm by 30 cm across your brain that’s able to transmit information. It’s like Neuralink; it’s able to interface with your brain, and 10 years from now, the technology is better that you can transmit much information directly, especially for people with the right genetics. The character in this book has some weird mutations that make him extra amenable to neural interfaces. It’s called being a centaur linked with AI; he uses his skills to get rich. One of the things he does is he buys a WNBA team because they’re cheap. An NBA team might run you 80 billion dollars, and a WNBA team, I don’t know, maybe 50 million in the year 2035, but he links them all via mesh to make them a super team that they can communicate with each other better than most teams, and it hasn’t been outlawed yet. So, he tries to see if making them vaguely telepathic makes them a better team.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s an exciting idea.
Rosner: Also, I mean sports are going to get weird because we’ll be able to modify people in all sorts of ways like right now in America, Republicans are using trans women being out-competing women who were born women to get right-wing Americans all upset. It’s culture wars bullshit. There aren’t many less, I’d say a dozen. I would guess there are fewer than two dozen trans women who set women’s records or beat all other women in their events. It’s not a huge problem, and we’ll figure out how to deal with it. For instance, one way is you’re allowed to compete depending on when you became a woman. If you were born male but went on puberty blockers before you obtained your full-grown male musculature, then maybe you can compete as a woman, or perhaps you’re in a sport where having been a male isn’t an advantage; I don’t know, but we’ll eventually figure out a set of rules that will be fair for most competitors.
There’s other shit that right now, like wealthy parents could be giving their kids HGH, human growth hormone, when given to a kid who’s still growing in height. If you spend enough on it for 40 Grand, you could add two to three inches to your kid’s height. Say you’ve got a 6’4 kid, and you want them to get a scholarship or maybe even make it to the NBA; getting them to 6’7 will significantly increase their chances. RFK Jr, our lunatic fringy third-party presidential candidate, is on something, either HGH or testosterone because he’s 70 years old and he doesn’t work out that hard, but he’s got a big ripped body with slabby pecs. I’ve seen him do push-ups; he does lady push-ups from his knees, yet he’s got these massive pecs. So, he’s on testosterone supplementation or replacement. So, HGH, even later in life, won’t make you any taller after the age of 14, say, but it will make you ripped as if you’re on steroids.
So, there might be dozens of psycho parents making their kids taller and by 2035, there’ll be quite a few wealthy ass parents quietly using crisper technology to tweak their kids to get them more muscles, to get them more height. Maybe we’ll figure out ways to identify genes associated with faster reflexes, and then we’ll have to decide whether that modification is permitted. Some leagues might allow it, some may not. So, yeah, sports is going to get weird along with everything else.
[Recording End]
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