Simulations of Consciousness Before Consciousness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/03
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.
Rick Rosner: Some people say, or at least one person I read, that AI is a misnomer; it’s just high technology. Calling it intelligence, artificial, or whatever you want to call it, it’s just increasingly powerful technology. We have the same genetics as humans did 100,000 years ago. We’re not getting any smarter biologically, which means it’s harder and harder for humans to keep up with the world created by technology without being aided by and combined with technology. It makes it almost tautological that we must define ourselves by this technology. You suggested I ask our buddy Chris, who knows more about this stuff. We do not know where AI is going, so the question is, will AI get smart? Will it have general intelligence, which is fluid intelligence, the kind of intelligence that we think of when we think of human intelligence, which is the ability to understand the world and come up with clever ideas on how to deal with it, and that includes to some extent our idea of smartness becoming conscious.
That will all happen. The second question is if it will happen and when. I’m no authority, but it’s going to happen. You and I have talked about consciousness extensively over the past ten years, and we understand its elements. We have a reasonably good model of consciousness. So, we know what AI doesn’t have and what it will need to have to be conscious. People like Cory Doctorow say that regardless of what happens to AI in the medium future, in the short term, there’s likely to be an AI crash the same way there was an internet crash in about the year 2000 because everybody got super psyched in the late 90s. My writing partner and I were in charge of the website for The Man Show. The website was themanshow.com, and we thought we would all become millionaires off our hope because if you had the right portal and internet gateway, you would make a million bucks. Then there was a crash when people figured out that this wasn’t going to happen and that the internet was still pretty shitty. Things like pets.com went away and took away a lot of people’s money.
Then, of course, the internet did become everything that we thought it would be with the coming of Google, streaming, and all the social media once the tech was in place to do all this stuff. So, there was a short-term crash, and then Google came along around 2005 and posted Google; the internet has boomed and comes to full-ish fruition. Doctorow and other people think before AI comes into full fruition, if ever we’re going to have a vast AI crash when AI doesn’t live up to the huge expectations people have now, both in terms of performance and in terms of return on investment. Well, AI is real people, which is ironic. However, tens of thousands of low-wage people worldwide take the world’s information and digest it, chew it up like a mama bird chews up food and spits it into the mouth of a baby bird. Information must be processed before it can become the probabilistic fill-in-the-blanks that AI is.
The article I read has hundreds of people looking for pictures with people wearing shirts in them. Then they circle the shirts and add hashtags to the shirts so that AI gets an idea of what a sweater is and how it works in the world, but not an idea, just a way to predict how an artificially generated picture that includes a shirt, how this shirt should behave. At this point, the AI doesn’t know anything. It knows how to make impressive predictions, but filling the AI with the information to make those beautiful predictions is expensive. Getting a return on those predictions and making those predictions pay off may not pan out in the short term. So, in the short term, say in the next two- or three years, people may say AI is not this. McKenzie, with a semi-evil business consultant company, predicts that AI could double the world’s GDP. That’s a super high expectation, so in the short term, when it doesn’t look like it’s going to do anything like that, people will freak out, and we’ll have a crash.
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 