Ask A Genius 1130: From Richlin to Information Wars
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/10/31
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did Lance and you meet?
Rick Rosner: I posed for him over 30 years ago. He’s an artist. He needed a model, and we became friends because he’s an interesting and smart guy. This was before he went completely off the deep end—he didn’t lose it until after 9/11. So, around 2001.
We were friends for more than a decade before that. The topic we were discussing at the end of last night’s session was about my kid. She specializes in women’s history, particularly textiles, embroidery, and needlework. She makes the point, which is valid, that women leave less of a mark on history. History is largely a record of people who have come before us.
Since men traditionally went out and engaged in public affairs while women stayed home, men left more of a historical record. Though, it’s a brutal reality for everyone. Look at the entire history of humanity. We can discuss the different eras and what kinds of records people left behind. Humanity goes back around 100,000 years, and about 110 billion people have lived here. The first 60 billion humans lived before any form of language—certainly before written language.
So, the only record from that period—stretching from 100,000 years ago or even further back, if we want to consider earlier hominids human—up until 10,000 years ago, might have been a few cave paintings. We don’t know anyone’s name from before, maybe 8,000 BC. Then came written language.
So, you get some kings, a few queens, wars, and some heroes in those wars for thousands of years. You get the names of gods, which isn’t helpful since they weren’t real people unless you believe they were based on historical figures. But the record is super spotty until, what, about 3,000 years ago? That’s when we started knowing the names of dramatists, artists, warriors, philosophers, and scientists—very few of whom were women.
Your chances of being known to history back then were slim. It might have been 1 in 5 billion or 10 billion during the pre-written language era. Then, with the advent of writing, your chances improved slightly to 1 in a few hundred million or tens of million.
Let’s say the human population around the time of Jesus was roughly a quarter of a billion, around 250 million people. Over 1,000 years, you’d have an average population of—I’m going to mess up the math because we’d also need to account for lifespan.
Forget the math. Let’s say that during the Fertile Crescent era, when early civilizations emerged in places like modern-day Iraq and Iran, as well as the Phoenicians and the Persians, the record of individuals from those times is incredibly small.
10 billion people, maybe 8 billion. From those early periods, we probably only know a few thousand names. So, suppose you divide 8 billion by 1,000. In that case, your odds of being known to history are 1 in 8 million or 1 in 5 million. Then we move to the Common Era, starting at year 0 and continuing through to, say, the Renaissance.
So, from the fall of the Roman Empire through the rise of various empires in India and China, through the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, you’ve got, what, another 8 to 10 billion people? And from that period, we probably know a few hundred thousand names. So, if we do the math—800,000 names out of 8 billion people—that’s 1 in 10,000. Those odds sound way too good, however. Maybe it’s closer to 1 in 20,000 or even 1 in 50,000. I’m not sure.
Then, during the Renaissance, we start having more consistent records, the Domesday Book in England, and censuses. You get records of merchants and many others—not that we know much about them except for their business transactions, court appearances, or marriage licenses. If you were a man, your odds of having your name recorded somewhere and that record surviving until today were a lot higher—maybe 1 in 3. But those odds drop to 1 in 10, 15, or even 20 if you were a woman.
Then we enter the modern era, and suddenly, everyone is on various documents. We even have photos of people from the mid to late 19th century. By the way, feel free to chime in if I’m getting something wrong. Parenthetically, I can tell when a session is more about you versus when it’s an ask session. This feels like one of those “you” sessions.
So, people start reliably leaving records of themselves—especially men—starting around the 1700s or 1800s, but still, not much personal information. Some people kept diaries, and others were described in letters. But women, again, miss out on a lot of this documentation. My kid loves it when you find a sampler made by a little girl in 1728 that is also 12-cubed.
Oh, and 1729 is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways. Ramanujan pointed that out while talking to Hardy—that’s from around 1920. Anyway, I digress. But these records of women, samplers, aren’t satisfying by modern standards.
Then comes the watershed moment of the Internet, followed quickly by social media. We’re in the middle of that now. I’m 64, and half of my classmates are practically invisible online—they don’t engage much with the Internet, so there’s little record of them. Meanwhile, I’m all over the Internet.
You’re all over the Internet with podcasts, TV, and interviews. But if you’re a sweet church lady— some of my classmates have become, including those I used to lust after—they’ve become sweet church ladies. Maybe someone still lusts for them—their husbands or the people they see at the grocery store: my college girlfriend, Kathy.
I used to find one photo of her on the Internet if I searched hard. I last looked for her a few years ago. What happened to her? I can find no online record from the past 30 years. But people your age leave an increasingly complete record of their lives, so a lot so that there’s a Black Mirror episode where a young woman’s boyfriend dies in an accident. She’s able to virtually resurrect him through AI and the digital footprint he left on social media. There’s enough of his words and videos to create a convincing doppelganger.
Someone she could interact with via a screen. The whole episode is about how unsettling and sad that turns out to be. Then we’ve got future watersheds where people might be able to digitize their consciousnesses—not in 30 years, but maybe in 50. There’s already a sitcom about this. It only ran for two seasons—maybe one—from Greg Daniels, the creator of The Office (American version), called Upload. It’s a comedy about the process of digitizing consciousness.
It’s strange because it’s a sitcom. It has to appeal to a broad audience, including people interested in something other than the science behind it. But digitizing consciousness is now a part of our common understanding of the future that even a sitcom can make relatable. Many science fiction movies explore this idea, too, though some are lazy with it. Altered Carbon is one show that frustrates me in this regard—it’s not great sci-fi, in my opinion, even though it deals with replicable and downloadable consciousness 300 years from now.
It’s almost taken for granted now that this kind of technology will eventually happen. That’s a huge watershed because you would have a record of people down to the structure of their thoughts. They would only die if they wanted to. Their digital selves could continue as long as they wanted or as long as civilization allowed.
In the future, there could be information wars where millions, even billions, of virtual people are wiped out because their digital repositories are sabotaged. That’s not discussed much, but it’s simple science-fiction logic. Wars could be fought in the realm of information. Of course, maybe we won’t have wars anymore—that would be fantastic—but we probably will. Those wars will target stored information, including people’s digitized selves.
If people are stored digitally, the threat of war could mean the end for them. But let’s assume most people won’t be obliterated. That’s still a huge watershed moment. Then there’s the next one—the merging of consciousnesses and the budding off of new consciousnesses, which we often discuss. That would introduce entirely new ways to survive and be known, or not, as consciousness becomes more flexible. As we’ve discussed before, the uniqueness and specialness of consciousness will be significantly reduced.
So, in the future, people might care less about preserving their consciousnesses and identities for as long as possible. Humans may hold onto their individuality longer, but other entities might not be as concerned about it. They could be content with blending their awareness into some group mind or consciousness, where much of what they were is retrievable and reconstituted if needed but ultimately part of a bigger collective set of thoughts. That might become this strange kind of group mind. The end. Any comments?
Jacobsen: No comments. That seems coherent to me.
Rosner: Yes, sometimes I’ll start with a clear point I’m trying to make, but then I veer off into unprepared thoughts. It’s not intentional, but I go past where I had clear thoughts, and we sink into a lack of clarity.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
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