Ask A Genius 1092: Post-Networking Speculative Futuristic Discourse
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/18
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I just returned from travelling and networking in Vancouver. Regardless, I sent you two topics for tonight. The first is the future of the commodification of human beings and the human body. It would be smart to split the definitions of a human being and the human body, where the first incorporates the second.
Rick Rosner: The future is a jungle. It’s like the Cambrian explosion where animal life quickly, over geologic and evolutionary time, spit out millions of new species, and shit was crazy. Yes, the future is going to spit out a lot of new shit and a lot of new ways of being, a lot of new beings.
Over the next few generations, from 10 years from now through 300 years from now, it becomes too speculative. It becomes hard to predict if you want to go 500 years out. But we know there will be a proliferation of new technology, machines, semi-machines, organic concoctions, combinations, and hybrids. So it’ll be a jungle and a shifting jungle where the dominant behaviours and things will shift over 2, 3, or 5 years. We’re still talking about when smartphones came into being—2006, 2008?
Now, we have 7 billion of them, which means most people on Earth have a smartphone because there are 8 billion people on Earth.
Jacobsen: The first version of a smartphone was invented by IBM. It was called the Simon Personal Communicator. The Apple iPhone, that’s the one that changed everything. Integrated applications in one device. A quick preface—the first real one was in 1992. The first iPhone was June 29, 2007.
Rosner: So, not even two decades ago. It’s been 17 years. We don’t even realize. I remember the ’90s when people walked around with those brick cell phones that you could only talk on. Before that, there were car phones, which were phones wired into your car, which seems ridiculous because now you can take your phone wherever you want. But anyway, that was only 17 years ago. It has reshaped how we behave and maybe even how we think. And that change has been a pretty steady state for the past ten years, where it became smartphone-sized, and then that calmed down. The change happened, but it was a change that overtook humanity in less than a decade.
Changes might be less radical in the future every five years, but maybe every ten years. It’ll transform us again within five or six years and then keep accelerating. There will be many beings in the world, along with sub-beings—things that aren’t fully conscious but are connected to the Internet and share data back and forth. For example, your refrigerator might tell you what you need, recommend new items, show ads, or even order from the supermarket. Hence, it’s ready to be picked up or delivered but won’t be conscious. It’s still rudimentary, like when you go to the gas station, and the pump plays an ad for you.
Over time, there will be fewer unaugmented humans proportionately. Augmentation will take various forms, with each segment of society and each individual having limits and preferred modifications. I came up with the term”flesh equity” today, though it might not be right. The idea is that, just as liberals strive for fairness and inclusion, the liberals of the future will strive to include humans in future endeavours even when humans aren’t the best at whatever those endeavours are.
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They’ll try to ensure that we won’t become pets or toys. Civilization will try to maintain access points to the latest advancements so that beings, in whatever form they take, can participate in the different ways of being and the various endeavours that a transhuman—or whatever term we use—society will engage in. Someone might come up with a statement of rights ensuring that even the lowliest newborn has the right to become a fully qualified member of the Technosociety of the Future through augmentation or whatever means. We’ll see if that persists, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t. We will likely continue to pay attention to our human heritage even as things get weirder and weirder.
So, even if humans remain part of the mix for at least the next century, there’ll still be many of us, and things won’t have progressed so far that there’s no place for us. Economically, you need humans as consumers until a new type of potentially post-human economy is formed. For most of the next century, there will be more humans who are consumers than other entities, so that’ll save us for a while. All our stories have been built on a human foundation, so the entities will tend to take after us for a while until new forms culturally evolve.
But I guess you could argue that eventually, unaugmented humans will mostly be eligible for participation trophies, and the world will make room for them, but the cutting-edge stuff won’t be done by the unaugmented. Is that a reasonable supposition? We’ve talked about the cheapening of consciousness, where we’ve felt special for thousands of years because we could talk, create art, and build things. But when we create stuff that can do those things, it’ll be a big “screw you” to us.
It’ll be like, “Yes, I can buy something that can outperform you for $550, and then for $3.50, and then for under $100—whatever the equivalent of $100 is 50 years from now.” That will lead to some precariousness, but there will still be cultural and civilizational guardians who will try to make the world less vicious. There will be evolutionary viciousness—new ways of being, new products—things will evolve so fast that unless entities look out for others, the meat grinder of the future will grind. But there will be ethicists and moral arbiters striving to provide some safety, some temporary rules, to avoid the whole thing chewing itself to pieces.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
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