Ask A Genius 433 – Sucking (3)
November 4, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: But you could make an argument. I mean this as a general argument that could be secondarily made: the opioid crisis, suicide in middle age, poor diet, inactivity, and obesity in men can be indications in a society.
If the development of a society declines a bit, these problems will rise. These are indicative of health problems but also of a developed society in moderate decline.
Rick Rosner: If this society wasn’t so good, if the cheapness and availability of delicious food that made us fat were not as available, if the entertainment kept us lazy, and if the overall good conditions that allowed us to get injuries and then be treated with drugs – like Oxycontin – that we can become addicted to, I agree.
These are the secondary effects of the overall quality of life. Expectations will keep rising for the quality of life.
Jacobsen: That is non-trivial. What do you mean as the driver of the increased quality of life?
Rosner: Technology will keep driving the increased quality of life. Entertainment, medicine, and food will improve; there will be more and more awesome stuff and more and more wherewithal to experience.
Jacobsen: Where is this technology being driven from?
Rosner: It is market forces plus Moore’s Law plus just increasing understanding of everything thanks to AI plus big data. We are going to figure out more and more stuff. The more and more stuff that we figure out then the more and more awesome stuff we can make.
Things will keep getting more and more awesome until our very humanity is stripped from us.
Jacobsen: From the inside out?
Rosner: Eventually, there will be better containers than bodies to contain consciousness. The individual consciousness, at some point, will be supped up to the point where it ceases to be the unit of consciousness and experience.
There will be many more ways to experience consciousness. There is a horrible and creepy movie called Under the Skin. It is super creepy. But basically, she is operating a venus fly trap. She draws guys in.
They get more and more excited and horny.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] it is like the woman from American Gods.
Rosner: They get stuck in this ooze and remain in this state of suspended horniness. But they don’t matter because their brain has been taken over by this constant anticipation of getting laid by Scarlet Johannson.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: They are then taken over by this ooze. That is what will happen with the technology of the future. We will be more and more excited by this technology until we’re completely enveloped by the technology and then morphed into all sorts of forms of the future that we, as humans, will find disturbing.
Throughout the process, we will continue bitch about stuff and continue to find examples of assholery and suckiness. It used to be the notion of a clean future and everything is awesome.
A current version is a bunch of awesome stuff in the future but people don’t really find it awesome because the future is grimy, rainy, and gross. The first example of that was Blade Runner, which was an amazing but grubby future.
There was one show that lasted only one show on Netflix called Altered Carbon. It is a lazily imagined future. They took all the tropes from Blade Runner including the rainy sets, AIs, cyborgs, and nudity, because it was for Netflix or, maybe, Showtime. It was the dirty future, which is probably closer to the future.
It is increasing wonder and awesomeness. I’ll tell you what is amazingly wonderful and awesomely sucky, Khashoggi. He transmitted his torture and murder via Apple Watch. He has an expectation of things going badly for him in the embassy.
He sets the Apple Watch to transmit to his fiance to the cloud and on audio. He ended up transmitting his own torture and murder. It is on audio. Plus, Apple Watch tracks your heart rate. His heart during torture started beating harder and faster until it stopped.
So, the various investigating authorities have a fairly complete account of the guy’s murder, which is both awesome, amazing, and super terrible. It would be science fiction if it was something that was imagined 12 years ago.
[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:
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- 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 