Ask A Genius 1149: A.I. Minders
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/09
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s up, buddy boy?!
Rick Rosner: So, it looks… Iran looks like they tested a nuke a day or two ago. It’s not confirmed, but they had what reads on the Richter scale as an earthquake, except it’s not in a place that has earthquakes, and the timing is suspicious.
So by 2045, odds are, 25% that we’ll have some limited nuclear exchange someplace. If humanity were smart, we’d do… have you ever watched or read Watchmen?
Jacobsen: Yes, the comic book made into a major MCU movie.
Rosner: Good.
So, if people were smart, they would give us a similar close call, something kind of similar to the end of Watchmen, to remind people that we don’t want a nuclear war. It would be a nuclear exchange that gets intercepted with minimal loss of life—an actual conspiracy designed to scare the shit out of everybody. I’m not saying that’s gonna happen because conspiracies are stupid and generally less probable than shit just happening in the course of things. But anyway, we might… there are plenty of places that could exchange nukes—India, Pakistan, Israel, anybody around Israel, North Korea versus any Western country, yes, Russia, US. Doesn’t South Africa have nukes? I don’t think they’re gonna nuke anybody. But then there are dirty nukes.
So they don’t explode, they just scatter.
Jacobsen: Yes. Anyway, what else? Alliances.
Rosner: How people think of this is… it comes from Doctorow, Cory Doctorow. When we think of ourselves in the world, I think of myself as an American first, as a Jew third, fourth as a married guy, second as a guy, somewhere in there. A lot of the shit I do, I do as a cis guy. As an old-ish guy, as a guy who likes to think he’s smart. There are lots of self-definitions we have.
Those will be changing. Do you think of yourself as a Canadian first?
Jacobsen: No. I think of myself as a citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. As a result, citizen of Canada because we live in a global system ruled by nation-states. Therefore, that’s the assumption at that scale.
Rosner: Well, it won’t be national thinking in the future. You’re defining yourself in terms of your nation, but 20 years from now, your nation will still have a lot of control over you. But our thinking of ourselves as representatives or typical members of a nation, maybe that starts… it’s probably moving down the list of ways we think of ourselves. It’s obvious that gender self-definitions will get looser, which we’ve talked about until it’s a cliché. That women, especially hot women, don’t have a crisis of identity if they get drunk at a party and make out with another hot woman. Even diddle the other woman’s boob or go down.
But I would be weirded out if I were at a party and somehow ended up touching somebody else’s dick. It would never happen. I would never let it happen. Maybe sexual exchange… I get to fuck the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with, but somehow as part of the deal, I’ve gotta jerk off a guy. It’s… in the creepy terms of that… maybe. But I don’t… but anyway, future people are gonna be—no. I don’t know. Whatever. If shit happens, we already know there’s a trend for shit not happening. When shit happens, it might be a hookup off of a shopping-for-sex app, Tinder, Grindr, without going anywhere or just seeing if it can go anywhere, but people are super willing to give up.
Rosner: That’s probably the model now, is you’re less willing to give shit a shot. You or at least you say you are, but the shot you’re willing to give isn’t much of a shot. Is that a reasonable thought?
Jacobsen: Yes. It seems to be the general online content. So those who spend a lot of time online, they’re probably spending more time in passivity, resentment. Vague and quaint hopefulness in traditional societal narratives in the West, and also the toxic elements of, basically, electronic versions of ideologies of resentment.
Rosner: Yes. But it’s gonna be interesting. Sell them for men… yes. In hookup culture, across different ages, most people I’m sure—the percent overweight or obese of Americans, probably everybody, every place, goes up by age. You’re skinnier in your twenties than in your thirties, then in your forties. If we turn into an Ozempic culture, I wonder if everybody will be hotter, in 1970s terms. Not everybody’s gonna look like Farrah Fawcett, but there might be a ton more women who weigh 135, 138, 140 pounds than there are now. Will that overcome people’s reluctance to break their isolation? What else?
Jacobsen: Money.
Rosner: People are gonna have to get paid for more ridiculous stuff. Unless you disagree about any of this—that it will feel to people from this era more like socialism in the future. But it won’t be socialism. It’ll be some modern economics based on shit being disrupted. I suspect we’ll have to come up with ways to pay people something for being consumers, for helping keep the economy running. We’ll have to come up with places like Finland, where you can go ahead and pay people and say, “This is how we keep our economy running. It’s no big deal.”
You’re gonna get $3,500 a month to help you get by. You can have a job and make more, but with $3,500, you’re close to being able to get by. People in Finland are gonna be like, “That doesn’t freak us out.” People in America wouldn’t be happy with that.
It seems like socialism or communism or whatever, but if you’re dumb enough to hang on to it, so we’re gonna have to come up with a different system that works, starts to work in a similar way, but doesn’t freak people out. Does that sound reasonable?
Jacobsen: There is a reasonable aspect to it.
Rosner: That’s all I thought about 2045. I was reading some stories of people who say a lesbian woman is dating another woman, so it fits their traditional sex relations and gender relations. Then one of them transitions to a male and identifies as a man, so the orientation of that relationship changes entirely.
Jacobsen: It raises a lot of questions about identity and not only gender identity, but the sexual architecture of the setup for those two in that same relationship that’s become more complicated sexually. They could still have the same gender relations as woman and former woman.
Rosner: Yes, in I agree with you about all of that. There’s gonna be a lot of that. But what will change more slowly is, regardless of what gender they change into or don’t change into or their sexual orientation, it’s still gonna be a couple of people who get along for the most part. They come home from the shit they’ve been doing all day. There’s dinner, maybe, but they spend time together. They sleep in the same bed, and it’s two people in a relationship for years at a time, sometimes with kids.
2045 is too early for some of the drastic science fiction-y shit of the farther future where it’s eight people in some weird, community, sexual anything goes, everybody’s raising everybody else’s kids together. I’m not sure even that’s workable in the near and medium future, because the odds that something works go down exponentially with increasing numbers of people.
Maybe 50, 80 years from now when you’ve got AI minders to make everything more seamless in terms of relationships, in terms of raising kids, in terms of where you spend each night. Maybe all the helping people will get will make it easier to do crazy swingery, community, ever-shifting shit.
License & Copyright
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.
In-Sight Publishing 