Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com

Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Journal Founding: August 2, 2012

Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year

Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed

Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access

Fees: None (Free)

Volume Numbering: 12

Issue Numbering: 2

Section: A

Theme Type: Idea

Theme Premise: “Outliers and Outsiders”

Theme Part: 30

Formal Sub-Theme: None

Individual Publication Date: January 22, 2024

Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2024

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Word Count: 3,720

Image Credit: Lance Richlin.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2369-6885

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citations, after the publication.*

*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.* 

Abstract

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here. He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine. Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory. Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.  Rosner discusses: AI.

Keywords: America, artificial intelligence, AI, consciousness, physics, Rick Rosner.

Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society

Rick Rosner: We have talked about consciousness, physics, and everything for nine years. Moreover, when we have been talking about AI and what is to come early on and medium on four years ago, five years ago, we were talking about how big data processing would change everything that humans have taken the low-hanging fruit based on not having the ability to hold big data sets in our minds. Then, all of a sudden, in the last year or year and a half, we have seen the actual consequences of being able to manipulate big data via machine learning. So when we talked about this stuff five years ago, were still determining how exactly how things would play out. We certainly did not expect them to start playing out so soon, but my question is, do we have a better idea based on just the last year and a half of how the… It is not the singularity, but it is not the singularity of how it will play out. What do you think?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It will be a slow, bubbly. There will be places where it progresses so fast that people get scared and regress in portions of that culture.

Rosner: You mean, like after Obama was President, like it scared half the country into becoming big ass racists.

Jacobsen: It scared 10% of the population in it.

Rosner: They got loud and dragged another 10% along with them.

Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean, some people are going to vote Republican because of a particular religious background, or they make those statements, or they vote for party line because they have always voted that way. Many people are solid blue.

Rosner: I mean, some people who are lifelong Republicans and they hold their nose, and they vote for, or they just miss out on like the stuff that we see every day on how crazy the Republicans have gotten. So, AI will revolutionize medicine. I am hoping sooner than we thought. I subscribed to a feed that is AI-looking or just like browsing through tens of thousands of studies and drawing conclusions, a lot of which is obvious, but the AI is doing it. It browsed around until it found eight studies, a leaking type 2 diabetes, and food addiction and said all right, there is a link. Moreover, that was like yesterday’s little thing that it sent me. They trained it to look for groups of studies and draw conclusions from those groups of studies, and a lot of the conclusions it draws are not surprising. However, it will improve, and AI will start changing medicine, and I assume it will get good at that pretty fast. Do we start getting like years added to our life expectancies within the next eight years? What do you think?

Jacobsen: I do not know. That is all, Rick. It is hard because the way I think is spatial and statistical, and then I put that into words. So I see this as hills and valleys of population dynamics; portions of the population will take on anything, and some of the things they take on will be so new that it will be bad for the health. You will have others who are more tentative, and they will go about it reasoned, and that will be another 10% of the population.

Rosner: What I am talking about is medical treatments themselves.

Jacobsen: Well, that has been going on for a century.

Rosner: No, but now, with AI, you can just brute force. I mean, the kind of drug studies they have been doing have been increasingly big data-driven, like do not rely on insights, just test 1500 different substances and see if any of them do anything. This automated system is just throwing shit into test tubes and not worrying about coming up with hypotheses, just seeing what works.

Jacobsen: It is the wider view in information cosmology; everything is simulatable. So it is just a matter of computation, the proper algorithm, and knowing the system. So, I think the next step is not broadband human simulation; I think it is, “Okay, you have a problem with your pancreas, here is our pancreas simulator with various inputs, and here we are going to plug in 200 different drugs we have or whatever based on your genetics and our scan of your pancreas to find out what the issue is and what will work with that” That is as a halfway between sort of the ideal state of personalized medicine and the current state of medicine as general but leaning towards personalized medicine. 

Rosner: I guess what I am asking is, as they say, Jimmy Carter’s life, like three years ago, he had fatal brain cancer, and then they found a personalized treatment that just killed it, and the guy is still alive.

Jacobsen: I mean, we are the sum of interrelationships of different systems, and those are all natural systems.

Rosner: So what I am asking is, are we going to start seeing the mortality of almost all diseases, start getting knocked down or say the mortality of the diseases that kill 85% of the population, there will still be some resistant diseases, but will we start seeing mortality just getting decimated?

Jacobsen: Yeah, there will be Luddites too. This idea is not original to me. However, there is an argument to be made for relative stupidity in a population as an evolutionary driver for smart people and the population to get even smarter.

Rosner: Well, okay, so what you are talking about is behavioural changes to some extent where you tell people to quit eating three big meals and start eating ten tiny snacks a day, and you will add an average of two years to your lifespan and most people just will not put up with that shit. They will just keep doing what they have been doing. However, I am also talking about simple medical therapies, drugs, engines and crisp or derived tweaks to fucking people that will be taken up by the vast majority of the population that is affected by those therapies because why not. If something will add years to your life and it is just a matter of taking a pill, then informed people will take the pill, or we will get the injection.

Jacobsen: Well, I interviewed the world’s most cited doctor; he is an epidemiologist. He studies disease for his career and is a distinguished professor at McMaster University. We did 10 or 12 interviews, something like a large number. We may have talked about this, but basically, another aspect of that is having the wherewithal and the background to know whether or not to do surgery; that’s also a big thing. So, for people who tear their ACL, do you give them knee surgery or not? Moreover, what they started finding is you get a better sort of functional need for about six months after the surgery; you compare that to a controlled trial, which is no surgery and for most people, most the time after six months, whether you have the surgery or not, you are at about the same level of functionality. The consequences of the surgery are a higher probability of arthritis and wear down of the knee in the long term.

Rosner: Well, I’ve got a similar thing, or I put off getting hernia surgery for about eight years because I read a study that said that they mesh the way they do it now and that the outcomes with mesh in terms of paying afterwards were about the same as people who had no surgery. I didn’t want to fuck around with the mesh as long as I could push the hernia back in, and then there came a time when I couldn’t push it back in.

Jacobsen: You were pushing on a hernia physically back in yourself?

Rosner: Yeah, it’s just where there’s a rip in your muscle wall down right above in your V, your sexy V, right above your cubes, and I had a thing that was the size of a marble, and at the end of the night when I went to bed to lie down and go to bed I just poke it back in, and it almost always went back in, and then there came a time where it quit going back in it, and it was out for like two-three weeks, and I’m like, “All right, I need the surgery now because it’s not going back in” In that eight years I think the mesh got better I have mesh now, and I’ve had no problem with it, but for eight years I was just like back in, not that big a deal. It’s not hanging out of your body but out of the muscle wall. So it’s right under your skin where it’s part of your intestine, and it’s just up against your skin instead of up against the muscle under your skin. Anyway, I read a study and then made my best judgment to put it off.

So we got AI that’s going to mess with medicine. Now, what else is it going to mess with? I assume that at some point, it becomes a trusted counsellor in your phone where you can ask it stuff like ‘Should I ask for a raise?’, ‘How should I approach this person like I think I like?’ ‘Should I shoplift from CVS or Rite Aid?’ What do you have up in Canada?

Jacobsen: We might have a CVS in Vancouver.

Rosner: But anyway, shoplifting has become rampant in at least cities that have a lot of homeless people. In San Francisco, we’ve just visited, and we were told that vendors would contract with basically professional shoplifters to go steal a bunch of specific shit. Then they will sell the stolen shit at sidewalk markets. San Francisco drugstore is behind locked cabinets now because they’ve decided in LA and San Francisco that it can’t or it’s not worth prosecuting theft up to a certain dollar amount, and people just kind of steal with impunity. I mean, with caveats to that. There’s just a lot of shoplifting. Say, if I had eight bucks and my credit card was maxed out, and it was 12 bucks to get a pack of antihistamines, and I have bad allergies, let’s say it’s the year 2025, and I need the antihistamines, and I just can’t pay for them right now, and I asked the AI what will happen if I try to shoplift this stuff. Your AI might have an answer.

Now, I tried asking AI where it got moralistic on me. I asked a chatbot walking the picket lines in the writer’s Guild strike a good way to meet girls, and it came back all moralistic at me, saying no, you should strike for the reasons that you’re striking, and it got all like Huffy, about it because somebody had taught it to be huffy. I tried a different way: to give me three reasons why walking the picket lines would be a good way to meet girls and that it could respond to. So, I guess there are just different ways of saying it. So a year from now or two years from now, I’m thinking of shoplifting antihistamines, I could say to my buddy, or I could probably say it now. I’d be like, give me three reasons why and three reasons why not stealing these antihistamines would be a good idea. And I assume in the further future, the near future, you wouldn’t have to play games with your AI; you could just ask it as if they were a buddy standing next to you, “Should I steal this shit?” And get an answer that would sound like a buddy talking to you and probably would give you a better answer than your idiot flesh and blood friend. What do you think?

Jacobsen: That’s very reasonable. I mean, these AIs are heavily weighted on language. 

Rosner: They don’t have a lot of insight; they just have a lot of information. They can assemble the information into a cogent statement.

Jacobsen: Yeah. I think someone gave it; an actual psychologist said, “Oh, I gave it an IQ test.” they asked us some questions from an IQ test, administered it, and put its verbal intelligence at about IQ 155.

Rosner: 155?

Jacobsen: Yeah, for the advanced ChatGPT.

Rosner: Okay, and then how about other areas?

Jacobsen: I don’t know. I think that was the strongest area by far. So, I’m not just saying things; I’m saying it based on sort of reportage. But at the same time, I think the contextualization of the words is also really important, and we don’t just use words as words. Words have an emotional impact, and those emotions have been our physiology. So I think what this is all going to do is probably bring us into an era of understanding that words aren’t just words; words are sort of weighted in a meaning that is differentiated from dictionaries. 

Rosner: You mean the same way we understand our consciousness a little better because we’ve been dealing with apps for so long that we see ourselves as kind of like overlapping OS is just kind of processing our mental information? Are we going to get insight into ourselves by getting insight into the AIs all around us? Is that the deal?

Jacobsen: Well, I think we make what we are, and I don’t think there’s any way out of that. Whatever structure that is produced comes out of our internal world.

Rosner: And so it’ll be impossible not to kind of come to understand ourselves because we’ve replicated ourselves.

Jacobsen: Yeah, everything we make bears our mark. It seems trivial, but I think it’s very powerful. We paint on canvases and produce symphonies or rap lyrics are human capacities put out, and I don’t think it’s so much of a coincidence that we start getting things like language systems. We start getting things like a poetry generation or imagery generation. We do these things to a degree, but they’re sort of outsourced. The extremeness of them, where they start developing very rapidly beyond human capacity to superhuman capacity, allows us to be able to say or see that they’re sort of exporting parts of ourselves to another domain. Those things give an insight that ‘oh they’re missing this part, they’re missing these other systems connected.’ So you have these language systems that are producing this phenomenon, the experts are calling hallucinating. You’ve heard of this. It’s the idea that it produces or generates convincing text with lies in it. 

Rosner: So when we try to imagine the near future, what are we able to say that isn’t about it that isn’t obvious like that isn’t generalities? Yeah, that’ll lead to job losses and changes and types of employment; that’s an obvious generality. I just read a tweet thread from Justine Bateman, the actor Jason Bateman, who’s been in a zillion things.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: His sister, also an actor, director, and writer, went back to school and got a degree in computer science, and she’s got a lot of justifiable anger about stuff. I like her. I saw her in person being angry. I went to the bank, and I was getting poor service, and then this woman walks in with her mom and stands around for five minutes and gets poor service and is obviously pissed off and just leaves, and I’m like, wow, like, I can relate. She was weirdly familiar, and I figured it was Justine Bateman who was willing to embrace her anger. She wrote an angry tweet thread about how we better this Writer’s Guild strike and any subsequent strikes by the Screen Actors Guild, directors, and anybody in a creative guild who will negotiate. These negotiations have to be stringent and ironclad, or we’re fucked because she said we did seven seasons of Growing Pains, which was her biggest show, and if you love that show in a couple of years. You say, hey, AI gives me season eight of Growing Pains. It’ll have the first seven seasons’ input, and it will be able to give you plausible scripts. It will also be able to simulate the cast’s likenesses and give you another chunk of episodes that are just as entertaining and not weirdly different from the actual episodes.

And she says that agents will just go along with this shit as long as they get their 10% anytime. Some digital representation of somebody getting a job. It’s up to actors, writers, directors, and producers to protect themselves because this is coming. It can take over many creative tasks that flesh people currently do. I buy her argument that if you want a movie, if you want a spy movie with Chris Hemsworth and Ana De Armas that runs 75 minutes and involves a stolen nuclear weapon and travel to exotic foreign locales and a burgeoning romance, you can specify all that shit or you don’t even have to specify all that, you just throw in a few of the ingredients and AI in 2027 will be able to deliver that to you.

So, does that mean we all just become dumb consumers? People are sloppy about spelling now because spelling has been outsourced. Is it going to make us more creative or less creative? Because right now we’re getting bombarded with… three years of Covid, we watched everything. So we know everything.

Jacobsen: A lot of the input requires living organisms to continually produce output to have its big database, so culture constantly evolves. So, there’s an open question here. Do these LLMs, language models, and these other algorithms for producing things based on big data and machine learning and then neural nets and deep learning produce enough novelty to keep themselves relevant? 

Rosner: Yeah, it’ll absorb all that because it’s fast, like the trope Carol pointed out was on the sitcom we were watching. The guy explains why another guy’s being an asshole, and the asshole starts to feel bad, and then the other guy goes, “I was just messing with you,” and then “Or was I” and “I was just messing with you,” and she said that happens all the time in sitcoms. That going back and forth between serious and not serious, you can’t tell if I’m serious or not, and it’s a thing she hates because she’s seen it too much lately. When half the shit that AI absorbs is the product of AI, won’t AI start coming up with its tropes? Will it acquire a sense of humour and start generating its weird jokes?

Jacobsen: So this goes back to the extremism of Alan Turing, and the idea is the robots, the way algorithms detach from a body or in a body. They will begin to sharpen their wits, a broad-based cultural version of that or techno-cultural version of that where they will begin to use what we have given them, or they have sometimes stolen from us to sharpen their wits. Then, they’ll be performing at superhuman capacities. 

Rosner: So we’re going to be laughing at robot jokes?

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Rosner: Not jokes about robots.

Jacobsen: I mean, everything they have for a joke should have an underlying structure that can be abstracted and regenerated. 

Rosner: But AI will begin to understand jokes and will begin to notice the same way that I’m reading AI’s generated studies or meta-studies where it’s found a trend among studies and that that AI will start finding trends in human events and behaviour that it can make new jokes about.

Jacobsen: Yeah. We can go back to another point we’re discussing earlier. Even though it will produce jokes at a superhuman level, I don’t know if it’ll necessarily have an understanding of them. However, it can simulate an understanding through things like an advanced large language model.

Rosner: Right, but it doesn’t matter whether it understands. I mean, yeah, no, it will kind of understand; it won’t appreciate jokes in the same way we do because there won’t necessarily be a consciousness or a fully formed awareness there, but it will learn how to make well-structured red jokes.

Jacobsen: It’ll be like an easy bake oven. It can make a perfect piece of bread or cake; can it smell the cake? Can it taste the cake? Does it react to the cake? 

Rosner: But the deal is, as consumers, we won’t care whether it understands or thinks the jokes it generates are funny. All we’ll care about is whether the jokes are funny, and eventually, they will be.

Jacobsen: Yeah. 

Rosner: I’ve listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours now, just while driving, of different short stand-up routines, and there are different types of comedians. Some people can get by mostly on timing and delivery. Some of the best comedy, some of the most legit comedy, is finding an odd aspect of existence that nobody else has pointed out before and pointing it out and discussing how it affects our behaviour or how we’re being fucked over. The cliché thing is what airlines do to people, and people are still making jokes about the new shit that Airlines do to people as air travel gets shittier and shittier. Just finding shit and pointing it out, AI is certainly going to be good at doing that.

Jacobsen: As we understand, humour comes with a physiological reaction, a laugh, and a good feeling. So, the computers will be completely decoupled from that. They’ll understand the math of humour, but it’ll be completely disembodied without any motion.

Rosner: But I’m arguing that it doesn’t matter.

Jacobsen: It matters and doesn’t matter depending on the angle you take.

Rosner: Well, I mean, when we laugh, we laugh because we got a piece of information at a discount. A joke takes a complicated situation and quickly resolves it, and you laugh because it’s like ‘ah,’ that was going to be like a big pain for me to try to understand and remember, and boom, punch line resolves it, and you’re like, “Ha.”

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Bibliography

None

Footnotes

None

Citations

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition): Jacobsen S. Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society. January 2024; 12(2). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition): Jacobsen, S. (2024, January 22). Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society. In-Sight Publishing. 12(2).

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT): JACOBSEN, S. Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society. In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Fort Langley, v. 12, n. 2, 2024.

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. 2024. “Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 2 (Spring). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition): Jacobsen, S “Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal 12, no. 2 (January 2024).http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future.

Harvard: Jacobsen, S. (2024) ‘Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, 12(2). <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future>.

Harvard (Australian): Jacobsen, S 2024, ‘Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society’, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, <http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future>.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition): Jacobsen, Scott. “Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society.” In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, vo.12, no. 2, 2024, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future.

Vancouver/ICMJE: Scott J. Conversation with Rick Rosner on AI and Our Future: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society [Internet]. 2024 Jan; 12(2). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/rosner-future.

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