Ask A Genius 1148: Twenty Forty-Five
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/09
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the year 2045?
Rick Rosner: So, I thought we would talk, maybe in chunks, about the future moving forward. This is the same scheme as Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando, which is a novel about AI fucking transforming everything. He probably wrote it 20 years ago now. But with 2045, your devices will be a lot more intimately linked.
we already have earpieces, but they’re stupid now. You have to stick them in your ears. There’ll be contact lenses. There’ll be glasses. AR will, in terms of average hours of use per day in a population, I’m guessing AR will be more than VR. Don’t you think?
Jacobsen: AR will be more than VR in the future?
Rosner: Yes, you’re gonna be in augmented reality six hours a day. You’re gonna be in virtual reality three and a half.
Jacobsne: I used to do writing for a place that did a lot of interest pieces on AR and VR. It was a guy who reached out to me after doing a bunch of work for a fashion outlet, so we worked together a little bit after putting that stuff out. That was interesting. I had a little bit of an issue in that distinction between AR and VR.
AR is limited VR. It has an interactivity with the real world, but if you get a world in VR that is as realistic as the real world, but you could even get meta on that and make a world so realistic in VR that it tricks the person. You knock them out and wake them up with the set on, making them think they’re in the real world. And then, in the virtual world, they’re putting on a set of glasses for AR, so you have a VR/AR experience. It’s layered that way, and that could totally happen in the future if it gets that realistic. I’m saying 20 years from now.
Rosner: It’s for the average person, not a gamer or someone who lives online extensively. For the average schmuck, they’re not gonna be spending that much time in VR, quite a bit, but not the matrix.
Jacobsen: There’ll be medicine, good preventative medicine. There’ll be actual medicine that’s thought to add 20 years to your lifespan—maybe 15, 18, 20 years to your healthy lifespan.
Rosner: So, the promises made by the medicine will be that at 70, you’ll look like you’re in your late forties, and you’ll feel it, and you can still get some. Some of the medicine will be a daily deal, some of it will be pumped into you by some little wearable/surgical gadget.
Jacobsen: Like metformin?
Rosner: Yes, for instance. If it trickled into you whenever you came near food, that would probably be a good thing to have. There’ll be some periodical advancements, of course. It’ll be a mix of lunatic quackery all the way to tech bros spending $120,000,000 a year on it, and most people in the middle adopting some reasonable behaviors to live longer.
Ozempic. You’re a fool now if you don’t, as far as I know. Maybe it’ll change in a couple of years, but if you can get Ozempic—and it’s expensive now if you don’t have a prescription—but eventually, the patent will expire, and you’ll be able to get generic. So, everybody’s gonna be on Ozempic or something similar that comes after.
So you can eat like a fucking monster and stay not fat. There’ll be some other health things. I was talking to an immunologist once a week. We meet on PodTV. I tried to ask him, “Is the 21st century gonna be the century of pandemics?” and didn’t get an answer out of him.
But now in California, 10 to 15% of our cows are dying of bird flu. Whether they’re dying of it or being murdered because of bird flu being cold, it’s a ton. I’m sure it’s fucking up the whole dairy industry. A month ago, agronomists were saying it was gonna hit 2%, but now, no—it’s more. It’s a fucking ton.
Rosner: I’d argue that, yes, the 20th century was the century of mass murder, but it was also the century of pandemics killing a shit ton of people. Probably not as many as wars and genocides, but not too different.
Jacobsen: So, I assume by 2045, we may have had one of those—a big, scarier pandemic than COVID.
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