Ask A Genius 923: Most of Life is, Basically, a Bore
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/21
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was thinking about building off something you were kind of semi-formulating; the idea that after 20, most days are pretty dull, and so you sort of have to jazz up your day or, like a lot of it, it’s just space-filling and some kind of trying to refocus your attention.
Rick Rosner: I’m looking at it in two contexts. Carole is writing this semi-fiction book incorporating letters and documents between my parents before and during their short marriage. Right now, she’s writing about when my mom got increasingly disgruntled with her marriage and her life and work situation in Albuquerque in 1960. So, she’s trying to convincingly capture that mood and the transition from my parents loving each other to hating each other. We’re looking at historical details and also details from everyday life. I know Albuquerque doubled in population from 1940 to 1950, America’s fastest-growing city, and then again from 1950 to 1960, supermarkets were opening up. I lived in Albuquerque from the 60s on for a month every year when my dad visited, and I’m not a fan of Albuquerque. You’ve got these wide streets with nothing along them except for chain restaurants, pond shops, bail bonds, ugly architecture, and brown stucco forever. I want some of that because my mom shared my disdain for Albuquerque. Trying to capture that and the details of vague annoyance with everyday life.
I’m trying to write about the 2030s, and the central character in my novel is very privileged, wealthy and pampered. So, his life will be shinier and more science fiction-y because he’s deeply involved with tech and has medical issues that require a bunch of high-tech support. However, I’m still thinking of the everydayness of the 2030s compared to now, where things will essentially be the same. The moment-to-moment experience of the science fiction future shortly will look quite like now and chime in with any other phase changes you can think of. One of our most significant changes was using smartphones from 2008 to 2009, which changed everybody’s day-to-day behaviour. Before smartphones, you had cell phones and flip phones, but they weren’t something you looked at every minute. They didn’t do much, and people used them for actual calls. Besides that, they would go back into your purse, and you could ignore them. If you could text on them at all, texting was a massive pain in the ass. There needed to be a key for each letter of the alphabet. Each key, a physical key, corresponded to three letters, and you had to scroll to the letter you wanted. It was a pain, and a few people texted. If you were going to be a texting person, you got a blueberry.
Smartphones have made constant contact with the internet and social media easy. That’s a change. So, will we have some other change by 2030? Not exactly; I think that our devices will become even more intimately linked like some hipster folks; they will maybe sell devices that ride you that maybe have little legs, and just instead of being in your hand, it’s either on your wrist or I mean we already have apple watches. Still, the face needs to be bigger for them to be as convenient as your phone. Whether it’s reasonable or not, I have like this little crawly kind of iPhone type things that just sort of perch on your shoulder, and so you don’t have to worry about them; they’re always with you, looking out at the world with you and offering input, but that’s more of a change in fashion than a phase change, than a behaviour change. If we have practical Google Glass or contact lenses that pipe information directly into you, I’m not sure if that changes the everyday tech experience. You may not get changes to everyday life that are as big as the smartphone change until you have chipped people being able to communicate and receive information with less mediation through the senses like direct-to-brain communication.
I wonder if people would want that or if it offers a significant advantage over just getting information through your senses. The information you obtain via some direct link still has to be translated into terms your brain can easily use. Those terms are often words and images which we already get. So, you can feel other people’s feelings, say by the 2040s, if both have interfaces, but I don’t know if that gets you much else. Being able to share thoughts with people directly would still be in the form of words and images, primarily with some feelings writing those, and I don’t know what gets people. I may have to think about it more, but I’m unsure. What do you think?
Jacobsen: I think computers are going to gradually become more and more intimately linked to everything that we do, and it’s going to be as barely noticeable in a historical context like our lifetimes that we noticed before, like I barely remember when Facebook was introduced and when phones were introduced, but now, they’re sort of pretty embedded into my life.
Rosner: In the 2030s or 2040s, you’re intimately linked to your own personal AI alter ego/concierge/curator/conscience. Are you familiar with Jimminey Cricket as a symbol of conscience?
Jacobsen: Not as for conscience, but I’m not into Cricket.
Rosner: All right, so in Pinocchio, he’s a young wooden boy who doesn’t know anything and gets in trouble, and Jimminey Cricket is this little cricket guy in a suit, I think, who acts as his conscience and says maybe don’t pull that bullshit, little wooden boy. Anyway, the AI will like be providing lots of guidance and I guess that will be a change, a voice in your head, in your ear that’s just constantly…. Like, if an ambassador at a significant state function, if you watch political shows on TV or like Selena Meyer, the VP on Veep, has an assistant hovering behind her whispering in her ear as people come up to her saying, this is so and so, reminding them of that person’s name and just giving them an information feed so they can look like they remember the person. So, I assume you’ll have AI doing that a lot, just like giving context for the world you’re moving through and offering strategies. I get boggled in the supermarket; I do almost none of our shopping—so, Carole’s the grocery shopper. When I do go to the grocery store, it’s pretty daunting; there’s just so much stuff. With an AI guiding me through the store, I could make more efficient choices; it would know my taste and nutritional preferences and be like a little whisperer guiding me through everything.
Jacobsen: Well, if it had more information about you, it could also tell you what you need to eat in terms of nutrition.
Rosner: Yeah, it will be a combination of you want to eat this stuff, you want stuff that tastes good, might point me to the Cool Whip but the generic stuff that has no fat, or it might tell me to some other treat that would offer a more fulfilling experience for not much. So, you’d have this and then would you want it? You’d get used to it. Would you have a slightly adversarial relationship with it? We know from our technology experience that it would not be exciting even though it’s science fiction-y that we would get used to it quickly. Our judgment of it would depend on what we thought about the content rather than the technology itself.
So, other everyday stuff is that we go to fewer places because we can access more things via our tech. Again, this feels entirely natural every day. We get stuff dropped off by Amazon every few days. We get our dog food from Chewy; we no longer do retail. That’s a huge change. When Carole and I go out, it’s to a place that still requires your presence in person. So, restaurants you still have to go to. You can have food dropped off, but we still go out to eat a couple of times a week, but we only go walking the Boulevard a little to look in stores. If you’re going to go shopping, it’s much more efficient to do it online.
The Ventura Boulevard is the leading retail drag across San Fernando Valley and much of the valley Tarzana, Encino, and Van Nuys. It’s a wreck, just lots of doomed enterprises or empty storefronts. Studio City is luckier than most stretches of Ventura in that we’ve got a ton of restaurants, and people still come here to go on the Boulevard. You’ve got a vanity project and boutiques like Lisa Rena, one of the Real Housewives. She has a boutique on Ventura Boulevard. Does it make money? I don’t understand how any retail in terms of clauses and notions can make money anymore, but it doesn’t have to; it can be a fun project for her.
So, you have this everydayness that the world, for most people, never feels shiny and new because market forces quickly knock down the deluxeness of new tech. As we’ve talked about, Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification that you hook people on new tech. Then you start making it crappier because the hooking phase is where tech companies will lose a lot of money, offering stuff to people that cost more than it makes them. Deals on Uber: Uber offers free introductory rides, and their rates have been cheap for years. Ube. Uber was losing tens of billions every year, and then Uber became more expensive once people became hooked on Uber. So, it’s a natural progression that this fancy new tech also feels shitty and very grubby and everyday-ish like cities. One of the innovations of Blade Runner was a depiction of a very futuristic but also very shitty city. Comparing that to Star Trek, which is a spotless and inspiring future, and now it’s the mark of a crap near-future science fiction movie or TV show that they have those same disvaguely market-driven dystopian rainy shitty urban streets with animated… the thing beyond neon which is instead of like sexy neon girls you have like a holographic animated stripper accosting you as you walk down this crappy street.
The near future won’t be radically different, and significant changes will still or not affect our day-to-day behaviour, just like going about vaguely discontented with stuff. At some point, say the 2040s, it’ll become clear that people will have opportunities to live a lot, decades longer which will change our behavioural clocks which you’re already seeing; people having less sex, having fewer babies, having them later, maybe taking longer to get their shit together. We’re going to have to figure out if jobs will change. It’s not a phase change, but it changes all the shit tech-mediated jobs that all these half jobs that are rip-offs like being an Uber driver or a door Dash driver or delivering for Amazon where you have to work your ass off, and if you do the math on what you’re making, it’s shitty money. So, I mean, that’s a phase change, though people have always had jobs that they hated and jobs that exploited and underpaid them. So, it’s less of a change than people using smartphones. The point of this thing is that the bummer-ness of the changes and their shitty-ness will mask the radical-ness of some of these changes.
[Recording End]
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