Conversation with Rick Rosner on Alan Turing: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/22
*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 Pizzanamed 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: Alan Turing.
Keywords: Alan Turing, America, computer science, quotes, Rick Rosner.
Conversation with Rick Rosner on Alan Turing: Member, Mega Society; Member, Giga Society
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to talk about Alan Turing’s extremism. I found one extreme quote, but I think it is more or less correct. I am saying this extreme even compared to some of the most, let us say, zany or even “rational” extreme positions of some futurists. So the quote is, “This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what will be. We must have some experience with the machine before knowing its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any fields normally covered by the human intellect and eventually compete on equal terms.”
Rick Rosner: Alan Turing, I think, must have been born before World War I, right? He helped Britain win World War II, and then he was driven to suicide in the 1950s, right?
Jacobsen: He was from June 23, 1912, to June 7, 1954.
Rosner: Wow! So, he was not even 42 when he died, which is crazy. Moreover, he was saying this stuff at least 70 years ago when there was barely anything you could call a computer. So yeah, he saw a whole landscape, the entire human enterprise being disrupted before there was jack shit to do any disrupting. So it is a shame that he was hounded because it was illegal, I think, to be gay in Britain at the time. He was, as far as I know, well-adjusted gay, especially for the time when he was not particularly closeted except where he needed to be professional as far as I know. Like, he would go on vacations to Mykonos and stuff where there were a lot of like-minded dudes, and he would have dude time. What happened was he had been with a male hustler, and the hustler ripped him off, and he filed a police report, and then that led to the police figuring out that it was a gay thing and there were consequences. You could not be gay and work in National Security back then because you were thought to be a blackmail risk from foreign spies. The upshot of it was that he had to consent to be chemically castrated, which involved, I think, probably taking a shit ton of estrogen, and he hated what the estrogen was doing to him.
I probably got 60% of the details wrong, except that eventually, he just put cyanide on an apple and ate the apple. It is a shame because this guy not only won World War II but understood the future better than anybody else. That might be an exaggeration, but not by much.
Jacobsen: I found another quote.
Rosner: Is this the more extreme one?
Jacobsen: I found it, but I give that as the third one. It is from 1951. “It is customary… to offer a grain of comfort in the form of a statement that a machine could never imitate some peculiarly human characteristic… I cannot offer such comfort, for I believe no such bounds can be set.”
Rosner: That is freaking crazy because he is one of the fathers of computing and huge in the realm of not just theoretical computing, but he figured out how to crack the German Enigma coding machine. So, he was tremendously practical but also super theoretical with the Turing test. He did theoretical work showing that a step-by-step computer is barely a computer that could flip zeros to ones based on a set of simple rules and could compute anything given enough time. The pocket calculator was still 20 years away. Transistors were freaking five or seven years away. At best, he was working with vacuum tubes, the integrated circuit was 20 years in the field, and he is coming to these conclusions not because he was a science fiction guy but because he was a fucking theoretical computing guy.
Jacobsen: And the quote that I came across where I have never seen such an extreme statement, especially from someone with such an authoritative identity in history. And it goes, “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage, therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.”
Rosner: That is wild. He is thought to come out of the early 1950s and from somebody who is not a science fiction writer. The idea that they would sharpen their wit through conversing is, in a nutshell, what AI does to sharpen its wits. It freaking gets big data and works its way through a shit ton of data which is, in a way, like having a billion conversations and getting pretty good at conversing via absorbing data. However, you could argue that you do not understand a billion conversations. Critics are being scared of AI now and are all saying it can simulate, but it does not understand. However, the path will be to simulate understanding better and better until it is the equivalent of our understanding because, as we have talked about, our consciousness and our understanding are, in essence, a simulation of some true understanding that cannot exist. There is nothing like some magic Cartesian fluid beyond the real world that bestows thinking with its magic that we understand via simulating understanding to a high degree.
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