An Interview with Rick Rosner on Women and the Future (Part 1) – The Good Men Project (blog)

Editors note: Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews his personal and professional friend Rick Rosner, who claims to have the worlds second highest IQ. Errol Morris interviewed him for the TV series First Person. This is an excerpt of that interview, originally some 100,000 words. Additional excerpted segments will appear here on The Good Men Project in the coming weeks.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Many, arguably most, women have greater difficulties than their male counterparts in equivalent circumstances.Their welfare means our welfare men and women (no need to enter the thorny, confused wasteland of arguments for social construction of gender rather than sex; one need not make a discipline out of truisms.).

Net global wellbeing for women improves slowly, but appears to increase in pace over the years millennia, centuries, and decades.Far better in some countries; decent in some countries; and far worse, even regressing, in others.Subjugation with denial of voting, driving, choice in marriage, choice in children, honour killings, andsevere practices of infibulation, clitoridectomy, or excision among the varied, creative means of femalegenital mutilation based in socio-cultural or religiouspractices; objectification with popular media violence and sexuality, internet memes and content, fashion culture to some extent, even matters of personal preference such as forced dress or coerced attire, or stereotyping of attitudinal and behavioral stances.All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God intended us to occupy.Sarah Moore Grimke said.

Everyone owes women.International obligations and goals dictate straightforward statements such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations (UN) in addition to simple provision of first life.MDG 3, 4, and 5relate in direct accordance with this proclamation in an international context mind you.MDG 3 states everyones obligations, based on agreed upon goals, for promotion of gender equality and theempowerment of women. MDG 4 states everyones obligations for reduction ofinfant mortality rate. MDG 5 states everyones obligations towards improvement ofmaternalhealth.All MDGs proclaim completion by 2015.We do not appear to have sufficed in obligations up to the projected deadline of 2015 with respect to all of the MDGs in sum.

In addition to these provisions, we have the conditions set forth in theThe International Bill of Rights for WomenbyThe Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women(CEDAW) of the United Nations Development Funds (UNDF) consideration and mandate of the right of women to be free from discrimination and sets the core principles to protect this right. Wheredo you project the future of women in the next 5, 10, 25, 100 years, and further? In general and particular terms such as the trends and the concomitant subtrends, what about the MDGs and numerous other proclaimed goals to assist women especially in developing areas of the world?

Rick Rosner: Predicting gender relations beyond a century from now is somewhat easier than predicting the short-term. In the transhuman future, bodily form, including sex, will be changeable. People will take different forms. And when anyone can change sexes with relative ease, there will be less gender bias.

Lets talk about the transhuman future (100 to 300 years from now) in general, at least as its presented in science fiction that doesnt suck. Three main things are going on:

Theres pervasive networked computing. Everything has a computer in it, the computers all talk to each other, computing costs nothing, data flying everywhere. Structures are constantly being modified by swarms of AI builders. A lot of stuff happens very fast.

Your mind-space isnt permanently anchored to your body. Consciousness will be mathematically characterized, so itll be transferrable, mergeable, generally mess-withable.

People choose their level of involvement in this swirling AI chaos. Most people wont live at the frenzied pinnacle of tech its too much. There are communities at all different levels of tech.

Also, horrible stuff old and new happens from time to time bio-terror, nanotech trouble, economic imperialism, religious strife, etc.

For more about this kind of thing, read Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, David Marusek, or Neal Stephenson.

So, two hundred years from now, gender wont be much of a limiting factor, except in weird throwback communities. In the meantime, idiots will continue to be idiots, but to a lesser extent the further we go into the future. No one whos not a retard is standing up for the idea of men being the natural dominators of everything. If it seems like were not making progress towards gender equality, it may be because theres a huge political/economic/media faction that draws money and power from the more unsavoury old-fashioned values, with its stance that anyone whos concerned about racism or sexism is nave and pursuing a hidden agenda to undermine American greatness.

Dumb beliefs that arent propped up by doctrine eventually fade away, and believing that men or any elite group is inherently superior is dumb, particularly now and into the future as any purportedly superior inherent abilities become less significant in relation to our augmented selves. Across the world, the best lazy, non-specifically targeted way to reduce gender bias is to open up the flow of information, serious and trivial (however you do that).

In the very short run, maybe the U.S. elects a female President. Doubt this will do that much to advance the cause of women, because Hillary Clinton has already been in the public eye for so long shes more a specific person than a representative of an entire gender. Is thinking that dumb? I dunno. I do know that her gender and who she is specifically will be cynically used against her. I hope that if elected, shes less conciliatory and more willing to call out BS than our current President.

In the U.S., theres currently some attention being paid to rape. Will the media attention to rape make rapey guys less rapey? I dunno. Will increaseattention to rape in India reduce instances there? I dunno. A couple general trends may slowly reduce the overall occurrence of sexual coercion and violence. One trend is the increased flow of information and the reduction of privacy cameras everywhere, everybody willing to talk about everything on social media, victims being more willing to report incidents, better understanding of what does and does not constitute consent. The other trend is the decreasing importance of sex. My baseline is the 70s, when I was hoping to lose my virginity. Sex was a huge deal because everything else sucked food, TV, no video games, no internet and people looked good skinny from jogging and cocaine and food not yet being engineered to be super-irresistible. Today, everybodys fat, and theres a lot of other fun stuff to do besides sex.

I think that some forms of sexual misbehaviour serial adultery, some workplace harassment will be seen as increasingly old-school as more and more people will take care of their desire for sexual variety via the vast ocean of internet porn. Of course, sexual misbehaviour isnt only about sex its also about exercising creepy power or a perverse need to be caught and punished so, unfortunately, that wont entirely go away. During the past century, sexual behaviour has changed drastically the types of sex that people regularly engage in, sex outside of marriage, tolerance for different sexual orientations, freely available pornography and sexual information, the decline in prostitution you could say, cheesily, that sex is out of the closet. And sex thats not secretive or taboo loses some of its power.

But I could be wrong. According to a 2007 study conducted at two U.S. public universities, one fifth of female college students studied suffered some degree of sexual assault.

A version of this post was originally published on In-SightJournal.com and is republished here with permission.

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An Interview with Rick Rosner on Women and the Future (Part 1) - The Good Men Project (blog)