Ask A Genius 918: Pornography’s Bountiful Cornucopia Existence
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: The last time we spoke, I spoke about the increasingly bountiful cornucopia of porno since the rise of AI, which can generate just endless images and that it has to be watched out for because people aren’t necessarily riding herd on this stuff and it can be corrosive and if nobody’s watching it, it can probably be nudged into of stuff that may not be illegal but is undoubtedly unethical and if legislators see some of this stuff, they could legislate against it. So, that led me to think about masturbation. So, my question to you is, are people masturbating today more than they used to?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: God! I think that people are both having less sex and masturbating less overall.
Rosner: I would say no, depending on what time frame you’re talking about. A 100,000 years ago, on the Savannah, with the average lifespan being in the low 30s, people only had maybe 18 years on average of being sexually active before a mishap or an abscessed tooth took them down. Now, we live to be 80, which means we’ve got 65 years in the case of some people’s sexual activity. So, certainly compared to the Savannah times, we do everything more; we poop more, we breathe more, we pee more, we eat more just because we’re alive for more than twice as long on average as the people we are far ancestors. It doesn’t matter to our worldview that we poop more or eat more really because our reward systems and our brains aren’t changed by; I mean, they are, but not to the extent that sexual habituation changes our brains.
So, we live a lot longer now, and shortly, we or our near descendants will be living much longer, and I don’t see masturbation as a metaphor for a lot of the changes in between our lives and people’s lives 100 years from now. We’re moving towards our lives with either no clocks or clocks that run a lot slower; my wife and I watch many TV and movies, as most people in developed countries have subscriptions to streaming services. You see how short people’s lifespans are within the framework of the lives of celebrities. Like, Brad Pit is turning 60 in the next year or so.
Jacobsen: He looks great for 60.
Rosner: Right, but he’s subject to mortality. Just a few years ago, he was discovered as the hot guy with abs in Thelma and Louise, so he has 20 years of being in his prime, maybe 30. Women, because of gender standards, may have even fewer years of being in their prime, and we get old and die, but people in the future don’t get old as fast and may get to live indefinitely. So, that’s one thing: the longer clock.
Another thing is that augmented humans are inferior to augmented humans. Big chunks of humanity will exist as consumers, exist to be entertained, and find it hard to find a niche where they can contribute either skilled, abortive, or unlaboured labour. However, this has been the case throughout humanity: not everybody is a worker or a contributor, but the role of all regular older adults will change. What do you think? We’ve talked about this before.
Jacobsen: I don’t think the drive for sex will change much for a very long time because it’s too deeply embedded in the brain or motivational centers, but I do think this expression will change. Still, I think the means of communicating it will be different, but I don’t think how people have sex or express their sexuality will be unique in human history. So, I guess what will be unique is the fact that every manner of sexual expression will happen all at once because you have the internet, which is just this universal communication system. So, every cultural expression with history will be unique in that it will be available to be expressed online and, therefore, will be described online all at once. I think those are going to open up sort of new ethical domains and new human rights questions around the exploitation of people and how people do sexual commerce as well.
Rosner: People used to get most of their sexual stimuli from other people’s lives and person to person, and now it’s much less so. To get sexual stimuli from people, person to person, you either had to be presentable or have money; you either had to attract somebody or you had to be able to pay for a prostitute. I don’t know about the various eras of prostitution, but I know that the first half of the 20th century in the United States was a golden age for prostitution until the pill came along in the ’60s. And then the sexual revolution came along; we had 20 years of that. Now, we’re in the porn era, and people are having less sex, people are having fewer babies, and 25% of the countries on earth have declining populations which isn’t just because people are having less sex.
By 2050 or by the end of the century, three-quarters of the countries will have declining populations, and the earth’s overall population will plateau. With the cornucopia of porn, there’s less pressure for guys to make themselves presentable to women to get laid because everybody can stay home and jerk off. That’s a definite change now, and then we can extrapolate into the future so that people can stay home and do everything. The last time we talked, I thought I was Googling for reclining environments for gamers who want to play every waking hour. So, they have these lazy boy rigs with horizon video displays with an aspect ratio of 6:1, three screens arranged side by side. Hence, it’s like looking out at the world. You’re lying down, your legs are elevated, and you can hold up the controller, but every other part of you is supported, so you can go for it until you have to pee.
I haven’t Googled gaming catheterization so that you can just pee out of the tube and play without getting up to pee for eight hours. I doubt that anybody’s offering that yet. I should Google’ gamers and diapers.’ I’m not set up right now to Google stuff, but I wonder if some gamers just wear diapers so they can play for 10 hours and pee themselves.
Jacobsen: Professional car racers or long-distance truck drivers.
Rosner: Did they all wear diapers, and nobody talks about it because it’s gross?
Jacobsen: No, just like NASCAR drivers; they’ll have these things set up so they can keep driving and peeing. And then, truck drivers, I think some will have a setup where they pee, or they’ll pee in a ball or something, just won’t talk about it, like a pee bag you might have that goes down to your leg or something.
Rosner: So, like a funnel that runs down your leg.
Jacobsen: Yeah, something like that.
Rosner: If a few drops splash onto your pants, it doesn’t matter because you’re a truck driver. A few drops splash onto my pants just because I’m 63, so okay.
Jacobsen: These aren’t new solutions, and they aren’t new problems. What I’m getting at is that we aren’t seeing new things outside of communication technologies in human history. It’s like you’ve taken that timeline in human history, turned it 90 degrees, and made the frame wide so you can see everything at once. Does that make sense?
Rosner: Yeah.
Jacobsen: It’s all happening at once because everyone is getting communications technology now, and that information transitions immediately. There are perverse aspects of every culture, and there are people who are on the cutting edge of wanting information.
Rosner: Another implication of this is there’s a saying that the last person who understood all of science was Ben Franklin 200 years ago. Since then, knowledge has expanded so much that nobody can be abreast of it. There’s a corollary to that: unaugmented humans without AI curation and expert curation can’t understand the world because it’s all hitting simultaneously, as you’re saying. It’s a lot, and just getting it all is difficult to impossible, which means that you have to trust your curator, your aggregator, your filter, which depends on faith and luck and, to some extent, savvy, but we’re less and less in charge. We’re going over the ground we’ve covered before. Do you want to move on to what you want to discuss in a new session?
Jacobsen: Yeah. I think general intelligence is sort of present everywhere; several sessions ago, you talked about there’s a base level of functionality in pretty much everyone so that you can interact with them, but sort of general intelligence; that’s the little thing that’s on a curve that you can then tell when you’re talking about more and more abstract thing for instance or looking for more precise sort of mental parsing of the world. That’s where you can notice it, but much stuff is just being given to us automatically, and a lot of abstract cutting up of the world is already done for us.
Rosner: People built the world. People aren’t different genetically from what they were 100,000 years ago.
Jacobsen: But brilliant people built the framework for the world on which everyone else operates.
Rosner: Yeah. I mean, I worked in bars for freaking forever. So, I met all sorts of people, and it’s a rare person who’s demonstrably dumb. It’s a rare person who has a crappy heart or a crappy liver or any other organ that our organs have a base level of functionality that most people hit just because we’re evolved creatures who need to survive long enough to reproduce and raise offspring. Because of our evolutionary model, we need to live a long time. So, we need competent organs, which include brains. So, most people don’t just have a super faulty brain; most people have reasonable intelligence. We can disapprove of how people get lazy and get manipulated. I believe that there’s a whole segment of society that is people with early onset dementia, early cognitive dysfunction, or mild. These people are dumb enough that there are entire Industries set up to victimize them because these people are older, in their 70s and 80s. In America, people 45 and older have 94% of the privately held wealth. So, you go where the money and the gullible are: older adults getting dumber, and you try to take their money away because they’re easy pickings. So, in that case, there is a whole demographic of people who are demonstrably dumber, but it’s just because they’re getting older, not just older, but they might be overweight. 72% of adult Americans are now overweight. So, some of those people might have metabolic syndrome, which means their brains might not get enough oxygen or other nutrients. So, middle-aged or younger healthy people aren’t stupid but can get stupider later.
[Recording End]
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