Ask A Genius 376 – A (Apparent Non-Socialist) Socialist Civilization
September 8, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is our future civilization?
Rick Rosner: We have a future where things will be cheap. By the way, we live in a socialist civilization right now. Nobody acknowledges this. But dead people give us everything; they do not hang onto anything.
Inheritance is the engine that runs our civilization and economy. People die and then their stuff gets owned by other people. Giving 100% of your stuff, it doesn’t get more socialist than that.
However, the future will be less socialist that way because people will die less and less. Anyway, there are several dimensions or axes. That you have to look at. People will be sort of enclaved. You can argue people are enclaved now.
Every once in a while, a new type of person is celebrated in the media. The Yuppies in the 80s, Hippies in the 60s, Beatniks in the 50s, Women’s Libbers in the 70s, all sorts of variations. Buppies, DINKs – Double Income No Kids.
People form new lifestyles all the time. In the future, there will be a greater spectrum of lifestyle. There will be a certain amount of enclaving, of people teaming up to share lifestyles, because of accepting technology or rejecting it.
Although, people will have the same amount of mobility in the mixing of lifestyles, as there will be more to choose from than from those now. It will be enclaving of picking ways of life and picking the philosophical beliefs that support those.
At the very traditional end, we will have humans living as we do now, and dying, because it is too weird not to. That supported by religious or philosophical beliefs. At the other end, you will have people living wildly technologized lives, which given trends in technology will probably be merging with technology and with each other.
The ability to accomplish new stuff, new and powerful stuff. It will be at the high technology end. There will be more traditional humans crafting or home crafting stuff. That may have some quaint appeal. That will not be as powerful as the highly augmented and technology powerful people are doing.
The traditional lifestyles will be eroded by the awesomeness of established technology. Technology comes along with the early adopters trying it out, even though it sucks and is unwieldy and it takes a lot of technical expertise to use.
That new technology becomes established. People begin to understand what is good and easy about it. Once it is well-established, it goes to work on the rest of the population. Similarly, there will be a constant erosion of traditionalist stances, as the great stuff of the future proves to be too attractive.
Anyway, you will have a big spread of people from the most traditional to the most wildly experimental. But across the whole spectrum into all the lifestyles, you will see an accelerating increase in standards of living or in simply powers over the world.
Because it is weird to talk about standards of living when you’re talking about entirely new standards of living. People at the very highest technology end will continually be exploring.
That’s enough of that.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 
Hi Rick, How did you become such a great writer?
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