Rick Rosner Is a Cory Doctorow Fanboy
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/30
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 Cory Doctorow, meeting him. (I didn’t, but I did interview him a while ago.)
Rick Rosner: There was a dot com bubble around the year 2000 when a lot of people including my writing partner and myself were doing the man show.comWe were doing the content for that and everybody thought that web portals have the potential to make you a millionaire if you got enough traffic and if people made your page the page that they started their cruising the internet from. That turned out to be a bubble and just not true though people do have portals but it’s usually a search engine. People usually start with Google unless you buy a certain brand of computer that has Bing as the default and you’re too lazy to change it over to Google. The portal thing came true for a very limited number of portals namely Google but that was half a decade or more after the dot com crashed.
There was everything dot com. I think pets.com wiped out a lot of people’s money and there was probably toys.com. There wasn’t enough of something to go around, I’m sure money to make everybody a millionaire from having a web page. I just read an article by Cory Doctorow, I mean you could say there was a mortgage bubble that broke at the end of ’07 and into ’08 which is anybody could get a loan to buy a house because lenders came up with a scam to make loans and then package them and offload the risk; to step away from these hand grenades before they went off. The idea was if you made a bunch of home loans, you bundled them into sets of a hundred… home loans have been very reliable sources of lending income that they don’t usually go bad. I don’t know what the percentage was. So, these people could package sets of 100 loans and maybe more to other financial institutions and they sold very well because people thought of them as a very reliable investment.
Two, three, or four percent of homeowners will default and even if they do, then you can foreclose on their homes, so you haven’t lost that much money. So, there was a wild scramble to just give everybody a home loan. This was during the period when credit was so easy that I borrowed $262,000 on 17 credit cards because people were offering you zero interest balance transfers but essentially loans for six months and nine months and a year for signing up for a credit card. I saw this and I paid off our mortgage using credit cards and then still had a bunch of money left over to just stick in the bank and just kept rolling over this debt by getting more and more credit cards just rolling it and nobody gave a shit. I refinanced our house at one point. I’m like “Do you want any documents about what kind of job I have?” They’re like, “Nah” and it was a crazy time because scammers were just putting anybody into a home and then it all came apart and millions of Americans, I think lost their homes. So, that was the home loan bubble.
Now, it’s 15 years later and according to Cory Doctorow, AI may be a bubble because to make truly powerful AI you need to spend a ton of money stuffing that AI with data. Some of these ChatGPT is called an LLM, large language model. Well, the large part of the language model is tens of thousands of people in countries with low wages coding stuff into the Ais. The article I read on this, not Cory’s but a different one, talks about people in Africa just plowing through thousands of pictures of people wearing shirts and then circling the shirt and then adding keywords that describe the particular aspects of each shirt. So, the big databased AI, when it gradually understands what a shirt is, is basing that on a million pictures of shirts and generating that cost tens of billions of dollars and Doctorow talks about how the AI stuff that we use in an everyday fashion is often like a small model and abridged model of the large models that are fun to use and often deliver disturbingly sophisticated looking results but they have no true insight because they’re abridged.
I don’t understand the whole landscape well enough to say exactly what abridged means but I understand that there may not be a business model that makes AI profitable considering how expensive it is. Since the dot com era, there’s been an investment model that early versions of stuff can operate at huge losses and Doctorow calls the companies that exploit this model bezzles, which is his term for an embezzlement that hasn’t been discovered yet. He says companies like Uber are bezzles because they’ve been operating at huge losses for their entire lifespans and he doesn’t believe that there’s ever a way for them to be consistently profitable. Uber came in and disrupted taxi cabs into oblivion but because early on companies and venture capitalists expect these companies to operate at huge losses and then to build a moat; Uber has probably a pretty big moat for Cars on Demand and you spend maybe $80 billion to get the moat and then supposedly when everybody’s locked into using mostly just Uber, then that’s when you can screw them in terms of price and start making money consistently, once people are used to using your product after getting bargain rides for a few years.
Doctorow says that the prices you need to pay to use Uber and to make it profitable for the individual drivers would be so high that Uber will never really be profitable and he suggests that there’s going to be a similar reckoning with AI which I don’t know what are my thoughts on that other than to report to you what I just read. One is that there was the dot com crash but after the crash, beginning with Google, we now live in a freaking dot com world. The internet flowered 10 years after the crash of all these internet-based companies and now we live our lives on the internet. So, I could imagine a similar bubble and crash and a resurfacing of AI a few years later. AI seems inevitable but maybe not according to the curve that we think is happening now. Any comments?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: None.
Rosner: Okay. He had one more term. I met Doctorow by the way.
Jacobsen: What? Where? When? How?
Rosner: He was speaking at our local library, at the Studio City Library. My wife says he’s talking tonight and so I went there and I heard him talk and I bought a copy of his latest novel and he signed it. He brought with him the mayor of the socialist; Mayor of Burbank.
Jacobsen: California?
Rosner: Yeah, the next town over is Burbank and they have a socialist mayor who’s running for like State assemblyman and he’s one of the only autistic elected politicians in America. So, after the meeting I go, “What’s it like? Is it tough being autistic?” He’s very personable and apparently extroverted and I’m like “What’s the deal? Is it hard to do politics and be autistic?” and he goes “Yes! This is all performative. I learned how to appear to be this way and I go home and I’m very quiet.” I can relate to that.
Jacobsen: You were a fanboy.
Rosner: Yeah, I feel like I followed a similar process like meeting people in bars. So, anyway it was an interesting night and I love Doctorow. He came up with this new other term which is reverse centaur.
Jacobsen: What is a reverse centaur?
Rosner: It’s a human who’s being written by AI. He says that in the future there’s going to be a big risk. I’d call it more than a risk, I’d call it a fairly probable thing that’ll happen which is the people who are in charge, who will rise to the top of various institutions and companies are people who are, I guess being written, who are most willing to let powerful AIs tell them what to do. We’ve talked about this and we didn’t have a term for it but the people who are most skilled and the most intimate with powerful AI are going to be… it’s not going to be Skynet necessarily, at least at first, it’s going to be people in close tandem with, not necessarily the current dumb AI but the future smart AI. We’ve talked about how even if you’re not one of the kings of the future and queens of the future that even regular people will have to become intimate with AI just to negotiate the world; to help them not be constantly victimized by information systems that are beyond their Ken or Barbie. Any comments?
Jacobsen: No.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 