Will myth, math, and machines decide whether we climb or calcify?

In this exchange, Scott Douglas Jacobsen relays Gareth Rees‘s prompts as Rick Rosner riffs on America’s ‘Real Jesus’—a muscular, punitive avatar for zero-sum politics—contrasting the gentler ‘Old Jesus.’ Rosner pegs the odds of alien rescue near zero: vast distances, dust hazards, and von Neumann probes beat hero landings. Inequality persists, he says, yet ‘computism’ may raise living standards while entrenching elites. The next century’s power centers: massive AIs and humans aligned with them, where distillation-driven systems like DeepSeek suggest leaner intelligence. He imagines cooperative, solar-fed abundance over AI wars. The near future’s vibe? More drones, AR bubbles, same messy humanity.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I talked to a guy recently—actually, a few people—who were very curious about metaphysics. It’s not something that really interests me much. I’m not especially fond of metaphysics.

I told them you’ve had an interest in bringing metaphysics and physics a little closer together, but only in a technical and restricted way. For me, I’d need a little more “sauce” before I’d care much about theology, metaphysics, or proposed gods, while never closed to them.

At one point, I asked one of them if he had any questions. 

These are from Gareth Rees. First one: Any comments on the Jesus mania that seems to be trending?

Rick Rosner: So, is Gareth in America? The new form of Jesus trending in America is a mean, rugged Jesus.

In a book I’m writing about the near future—a novel—I have “Old Jesus.” This is the kind of Jesus, the one who holds lambs. And then the Jesus embraced by the MAGA-style evangelicals in my book comes to be called “Real Jesus.”

Real Jesus doesn’t have long hair. He’s got a buzz cut, a fade. Honest Jesus is in favour of using force wherever force is “indicated.” And of course, to the Real Jesus guys, force is always indicated.

Both Old Jesus and Real Jesus are ripped. They were carpenters. Even when Old Jesus gets up on the cross, he often has abs, pecs and biceps. But Real Jesus is really ripped. He’s not afraid to unholster any number of guns.

But he doesn’t need guns—he’s got these kinds of firearms. He won’t turn the other cheek; he’ll turn your cheek with a punch.

So that’s the American version of Jesus. It’s not very well tied to the Jesus we grew up with, the one who was just a lovely guy.

This Jesus, the Real Jesus of the evangelicals, reflects the idea that the world isn’t a nice place but a zero-sum place—where if you’re not ready to get tough, people worse than you are going to take what’s yours. Honest Jesus is an a-hole. He doesn’t believe in abundance.

And he’s a reflection of something I’ve talked about a bunch: 50 years ago, conservative think tanks started herding idiots—because idiots are easier to herd. We’re living with the consequences of 50 years of Republicans appealing to schmucks. And this version of Jesus is a schmucky-ass Jesus.

So that’s my comment—or set of comments.

Jacobsen: His second question was, “Is there a non-zero probability of ETs rescuing Earth and its inhabitants?” He put in parentheses, “Clinging to hope here.”

Rosner: I highly doubt it, because of the distances between stars and the relative rarity of civilizations.

So, let’s say a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. The odds of there being an advanced civilization existing at the same time we do? One in a billion. That’d mean there are roughly a hundred advanced civilizations in the Milky Way.

Which means—if it’s one in a billion—you’d need to explore a radius of about a thousand stars to cover a billion. That’s a sphere extending maybe four thousand light-years.

And you can’t even travel at 10% of the speed of light, because the faster you travel, the more interstellar dust becomes deadly. One speck could blow you up. So any civilization trying to explore like that would be talking about sending von Neumann probes that could take 40,000 years to fill out that sphere. But why bother when you can stay home and simulate any civilization you want with your advanced tech?

There’s also the possibility they don’t want to announce themselves, because any other civilization might wipe them out.

So no—I think there’s very little chance we’ve been visited by aliens, or that they’d be particularly concerned with us. I do think they’re out there. I don’t think they’ve come here.

Now, maybe there’s some kind of “club” near the center of the galaxy—where computation is more straightforward, where more exotic physics might be possible. Maybe civilizations that pass the test of being able to send probes to the galactic center are welcomed into a billion-year-old club.

But the galactic center is around 100,000 light-years away. Even if you could manage it, you’re looking at a million years of travel.

So yeah—I don’t think there’s much help coming from elsewhere.

Jacobsen: Last question. He also asks, “What do you think of the possibility that the world economy doesn’t recover from its current trend, and we end up with exacerbated socioeconomic classes? (Poor get poorer, rich get richer, middle class gone.)”

Rosner: I mean, that’s what’s been going on in the U.S. The U.S. is an extreme case, but similar trends are also occurring around the world.

In the medium run, I believe computism replaces capitalism and communism—that is, the economics of computing becomes a bigger and bigger part of the world economy. And that distorts everything.

It leads to abundance. It makes a lot of stuff that humans like cheaper. But it could also lead to a two-tiered idiocracy, where you’ve got a minimum basic income for all. Suppose you want to strive and enter the competitive economy. In that case, you can do that—you can get schooled, get networked, and rise above the minimum basic.

There’s also the chance that AI gloms onto everything and leaves humans existing in the cracks, kind of like rats in the bilge of an old-timey ship. That shouldn’t happen. In the jungle of new ways of existing, humans will generally move toward augmenting themselves to live in a much faster-thinking world. I don’t know—will rich people own everything in the future? That’s what I’m watching.

We’re together, discussing Alien: Earth, the TV series based on Alien, which takes place 95 years from now. In it, Earth is owned by basically five rich people. It’s all divided among these five corporations. Everybody’s got a minimum level of subsistence. Things aren’t terrible, but there is an extreme disparity between the very richest and everybody else.

So I guess I’ll say yes—the disparities are going to continue. But the quality of life for the non-rich will keep improving as tech makes things cheaper in the near to mid-future—that is, over the next 50 to 80 years.

Jacobsen: I have a question separate from that entirely. What will be not only the most dominant, but also the most effective single type or class of intelligence in the next 100 years? This is a little bit more nuanced than just “computers, hybrids, or human beings.”

Rosner: That’s really several questions. One question is: Who will rule the world? That would be massive intelligences and those aligned with them. So, people are working with AI. Lucky individuals who end up in positions like those of Elon Musk—and then add AI to their capabilities—will be hard to displace from their vast wealth and power.

The entities that succeed in gaining more power will be those with the most fortunate individuals and entities who possess the most advanced technology.

I don’t know how much more powerful an AI is because it has more servers. If your server farm has 30,000 servers, assuming they’re all the same size, is that necessarily a smarter AI than one with only 4,000? I don’t know.

There’s a lot of debate in the AI world about how much compute really matters, versus whether more compact versions of AI can be built—ones that can generate new ideas without needing such a massive training set.

Jacobsen: They had a thing with DeepSeek where the reason it was so effective was because they used a system process called distillation. So the bigger model was able to make it more efficient, information-wise, so it could get 10x or 100x efficiency for the same output. It separated the wheat from the chaff; however, that system did that. That’s one aspect of the discussion. We don’t know whether AIs are going to cooperate or compete. We don’t know if they’re going to go to war with each other.

Rosner: In my stupid book about the future, my character is trying to convince AIs not to go to war with each other—preaching abundance, that the resources AIs need can be better obtained by working together to improve the world’s energy infrastructure. That structure is not infinitely, but massively improvable for the next bunch of centuries. You don’t really run into insurmountable bottlenecks until you’ve exhausted the resources of the near solar system.

You’ve got the sun, which provides as much energy as you’d need for thousands of years. If we can capture the sun’s output, that’s enough for all the AIs in the world for thousands of years to come. You need to build the infrastructure to grab it.

But there will be bad actors trying to grab power and resources. I want the coming AI-ocracy to team up to be vigilant against AI chaos agents. The people and other entities in charge will be the primary interpreters of big data. These entities have access to a vast amount of information and the computing power to extract new insights from that enormous amount of information.

All right, an addendum: The world will continue to look like the world. I think a team of art directors could effectively envision different versions of what the world might look like over the next 50 years—more gadgets, but also all the old stuff. People will still need to eat, and there will still be restaurants.

You see versions of the future like this, where it’s the present world, just more cluttered: floating signage, a bunch of flying junk. They’re even discussing the possibility of using air taxis—essentially giant drones—to transport people around during the Olympics.

To me, that sounds like horse shit. We haven’t even seen a prototype, and we’re less than three years away. Someone may try, but the skies won’t be filled with them. The logistics are just too challenging.

That said, the air will likely be filled with more drones than we have now. Any sci-fi rendering of the future shows clutter in the air. Plus, people are doing the same stuff they’ve always done, though less of the old and more of the new. Less physical intimacy, more being hooked up to information delivery crap strapped to your body.

People walking around in their AR bubbles—not literal bubbles, but waving their hands around, like in the intro to Minority Report. We’ve already seen what the future kind of looks like. Different parts of it have been imagined by people already.

The future, at least for the next few decades, is not impossible to picture.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

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