[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do people care about the future? If so, why? If not, why not?
Rick Rosner: All right, the deal is that when politicians talk about climate change they talk about the world we’re leaving for our children and grandchildren. Nobody talks about great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren mostly because it would be ridiculous for somebody to start talking about great-great-grandchildren in a speech. It would just sound goofy but also do we really give a fuck about people, our descendants more than a few generations into the future? And I would say no, that we’re not practiced at picturing them and neither do we particularly care about them.
In the time of America’s founding fathers, they truly built this democracy and probably pictured the society that would flow from it if it worked but I think they didn’t particularly picture world technologically transformed or if they did picture changes they thought that the competent leaders in the future could make the changes though America has shown itself to only be like semi-competent at making those changes. They built the three-fifths compromise into the constitution that every black citizen of a state or every slave, I don’t know if it was specifically black or if it was slave, in terms of apportioning representatives and every black citizen was worth three-fifths of a person.
I think one of the ideas that went into them making that compromise was that it was maybe a stupid compromise and that they hoped and expected people to address it in the future. And then we have the second amendment which has turned out to be subject to intentional misunderstanding by people who try to sell guns. I mean I went off on a tangent. The deal is that during the time of the founding fathers, even though it was like three centuries past the beginning of the renaissance and then a couple centuries into the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution and all that, things still move slowly enough that the founding fathers could picture like an orderly progression into the future that wouldn’t significantly, at least in their imaginations that I’m assigning to them, that America would still be an agrarian country. We do farming, we do industry, we build bridges and railroads and beyond that I don’t think science fiction wasn’t a thing yet and few people over the history of humanity have done much predictive thinking.
Most of the predictive thinking, the science fiction-y type thinking; the vast majority happened after the beginning of the 20th century. But now things move fast enough that we know that the civilization a hundred years from now will be quite a bit different from the way it is now. Things will be wildly transformed and we don’t think about that in a serious way for the most part. A lot of people now do a lot of worrying about climate change and also worrying about the erosion of democracy but even with all that worry now about the future and maybe about AI, there’s not much of a market for serious thinking about the future. I don’t know if there are any colleges that teach a course in what the future will be like. I mean there are futurists but you don’t hear about them much and they’re probably mostly used to predict business trends and you don’t see serious attempts to present any kind of reasonable picture of the future besides little statistical snapshots like the life expectancy will rise to a 100 in developed countries.
The only people trying to paint entire pictures of the future are science fiction writers and most science fiction writers are just trying to write entertaining stories with any kind of actual prediction kind of being secondary. We don’t want to be bothered with the future and I don’t know that we really give that much of a shit about the world five generations from now; our great-great-great-grandchildren. Nothing in our culture suggests that we have a serious interest in more than 100 years in the future except for entertainment purposes.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 