Effective Altruism and ‘Computism’ With Rick Rosner
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/03
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. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about Effective Altruism and Computism.
Rick Rosner: I’ve noticed and I think we talked about it briefly a few months ago but accelerationism and there’s this symbol or term e/acc, which I think is short for Effective Accelerationism which is a play on Sam Bankman-Fried’s effective altruism. Anyways, now you’ve got effective accelerationism and accelerationism is the feeling among some, I guess Tech Bros. I get the vibe that you should be the opposite of cautious about AI that you should move forward with AI as fast as humanly and inhumanly possible. And that seems like a very like bro-ish… I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of chest beating around crypto which often led has a big Venn diagram overlap with Magabros and just bros; anything manly. So, the manly side of AI is accelerationism which is like “Fuck it, bro, let’s go” It’s just something I noticed and haven’t looked at very closely yet and I don’t know if what the philosophical underpinning of it is. Like it’s going to happen anyway so we might as well just let’s go do it, I don’t know.
I can think of reasons in favor of accelerationism. One is, it’s inevitable so you might as well lie back and enjoy it. Two, if you’re my age you want to go really fast so you can get the increased longevity that might come from AI while you’re still alive to get it. I also think it’s just a lot of dick measuring; the AI version of having a barbed wire bicep tattoo. Any thoughts?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I mean there is an efficacy to accelerationism. The view goes back a long time if you read some of the writings, even the quotes of Alan Turing. He talked about computers outstripping human capabilities. He even demeaned human capabilities as feeble and he talked about how computers would be able to sharpen their own wits in “conversation” with one another and that process of refinement would quickly outstrip us. That makes a lot of sense. So, there is an efficacy to accelerationism. The pressures of finance and talent and nation states and economies and supply chains of research and design and development; those will be different areas of how the acceleration will take place.
Rosner: I guess you could argue that accelerationism, that one would be to maybe save the world from population pressure and the climate change that’s associated with that. So, the quicker you can bring AI online the sooner it can solve our problems. I think it makes more sense for Alan Turing to have talked about it because back then it was more of a choice. It reminds me, what you just said of the war on pornography in the 1970s. There were two points of view; two main camps of pornography in the 70’s. One is, you should encourage pornography because it lets men blow off steam that might otherwise turn into raping. The other camp was like it’ll probably make men more rape-y plus it’s demeaning. And that discussion made sense to have back then because you could still conceive of somehow winning the war on pornography and now that’s inconceivable. The war is over and pornography won. There’s no way to put pornography back in any kind of bottle.
I would argue that it’s similar with AI that AI is inevitable and I don’t know how much control over the pace of AI anybody can have. And by ‘can’, it’s impossible to imagine Draconian cracking down on AI but then when you look at the market forces that want AI, that just seems like an impossible fight too. I just read an essay by Cory Doctorow that AI is a gigantic bubble that he compared to Uber and to the dot com bubble of more than 20 years ago, where Doctorow says that large model AI is incredibly expensive and small model like abridgments of large model AI can do amazing stuff that at least on the surface is amazing like art and chat models but the real shit might be more expensive than we can afford at this point. And so, the whole thing might be, he calls it a bezzle. He calls things like Uber a bezzle; disruptive companies that actually can’t make a profit in the long run. He says a bezzle is an embezzlement that hasn’t yet been discovered and he says that’s what Uber is and a lot of disruptive companies are in the VC stage where they can burn through money to get people hooked on it and then they say all the money to be made is in the future when we can start raising prices and he says that you can never raise prices enough to make Uber profitable. He suggests there are similar issues with AI.
I’ve read one article on this and most people have read zero articles but AI is trained by tens of thousands of people working for less than minimum wage in Africa and other countries where you can get them to work for cheap; pre- digesting material to make it comprehendible by AI. People working for 80 cents an hour taking pictures of shirts and circling the shirts in each picture and adding keywords “striped, red, open collar, so that the AI can get those things in easily digested chunks. It takes tens of millions and billions of bucks to pay for all that pre-digestion of data. So, on the one hand AI is coming, it’s going to kick our asses whether we’re accelerationists or not and on the other hand maybe not. Any comments?
Jacobsen: Whether or not we’re accelerationist or whether or not technology kicks our ass in a theoretic frame of mind, an abstract frame of mind; the inevitability of technological progress seems a pragmatic reality. The theory of that process of change will have macro and micro aspect. The macro aspects of changing technological landscapes, geopolitical spheres of influence based on that technology and the micro aspects of everyday life being more or less improved even though there’s a lot more frippery and nonsense.
Rosner: I call it computism because it sounds like capitalism and communism but I think that capitalism and communism will become increasingly bad ways to characterize different economic systems because everything is going to be information processing and the costs and benefits of it. The future economic wars will be fought over resources for information processing and other shit will get really cheap, like a lot of human needs that will be able to throw up like food and clothing have gotten steadily cheaper and that’ll continue to happen but eventually medicine will get cheaper or at least a ratio of what you get for your medicine dollar; you’ll get more for it. It may stay expensive because you’ll be getting amazing shit but housing will get cheaper as robotic construction. I’ve said this before but is it really communism if the necessities; the things you give to people without them working for it, if that shit is free then it’s not communism because you’re not spending anything on it. So what the fuck is it? It’s fucking computism because the AI bullshit made it possible for that shit to be free but AI itself is fucking expensive. That’s what I got. Any more comments?
Jacobsen: Not on this one.
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