Ask A Genius 1046: The Svein Olav Nyberg Session
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/28
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Svein Olav Nyberg is a member of the high-IQ communities. He says, “Ask him if he has any thoughts on the ancient problem of the One and the Many.”
Rosner: Yes, I have thoughts about that. We live in an era that is more selfish than previous generations. Everyone knows about the Greatest Generation, at least in America, which is the generation that lived through the Depression and fought in World War II.
They willingly made sacrifices on the home front, and the young men willingly, more or less, went off to face the possibility of being slaughtered. They came home and built 1950s America, which some people think was a good version of America. Then other people are like, “Fuck you if you want us to return to that.” But in any case, people were more at home with group sacrifice. What would happen if you tried to institute the draft today? The draft disappeared in the early 70s and was widely unpopular and resisted.
Partially, that’s because we sent 50,000 Americans off to get killed in a war that many people considered pointless, the Vietnam War. Millions of young men were drafted, so it’s hard to say that that generation was more selfish, except that it is now in their 70s.
You could argue that, yes, they are selfish. The boomers and older—the last boomer was born in 64, so the youngest boomer is 60, and the oldest boomer is 79. You could argue that my generation has been more selfish. We’ve accumulated all the money and bent the laws to favour us. But then you could argue that subsequent generations—X, Z—are pretty selfish, too. If you watch any reality dating shows, you can see that people are overly impressed with themselves and have lunatic standards.
One hundred years ago, the average distance between where you grew up and the person you married was like a quarter mile. You made do with the people around you. Now, people have access to thousands of potential sex partners. But people are having less sex on average, less coupling up, and are making fewer babies. This speaks to me of people needing more because personalized information feeds from our devices and social media constantly reinforce our specialness.
That only directly addresses your question about the one versus the many, except that our current landscape focuses on the individual. But that is about to get kicked because of the location of consciousness in your skull and the impossibility of truly merging consciousness… You’re locked in your skull; you can’t merge with other people. That’s going to change. We’re going to have engineered consciousness. When Musk experiments with Neuralink, we will have the means to achieve practical telepathy.
This attempts to send signals directly in and out of your brain. He might be ashamed of how far he’s come with that project. But I’m sure thousands of others are working on hundreds of similar projects worldwide. They will eventually succeed to some extent and then to a greater extent. People and other engineered information processing systems will be able to merge more intimately than ever before. The difference between one and the other will get increasingly blurred.
And that leads to or is part of a set of philosophical issues. For instance, right now, America has huge income inequality. To a certain extent, we have mortality inequality. Whereas people in poorer states are in worse physical condition and die sooner, that gap will increase with AI. We might see greater intelligence inequality. In America, there are huge segments of the population who’ve been propagandized to be anti-science and anti-education. The philosophical and practical question is: How far do the segments of society that are more and more able to exploit technology that, in practical terms, makes them smarter go to try to rescue the dumbs from themselves? Or do you entertain them off to sleep? Every generation passes away. Do we try to uplift the dumbs, or do we just let time take its course?
How do we address these issues that impinge on the one versus the many, especially when the many include cheap engineered intelligence and throw-away intelligence? It’s a cliché in near-future science fiction: the robot who ends up still conscious in a garbage pit. How will we design society so we’re not meant to build intelligences just as smart as we are? How do we make sure that the cheapening of consciousness by engineered consciousness doesn’t screw humans over?
These are all important questions. How do we protect ourselves from some nastier aspects of merged consciousness? How do we get the government up to speed? There are agile governments like Estonia, which has a population of about one and a half million. They try to make themselves the most technologically advanced government in the world. Meanwhile, our government is paralyzed by a bunch of reactionary a-holes who get money from billionaires to try to mess up public education.
Any of these issues are more entertainingly argued in entertainment than we should be seeing. I hope we see many near-future stories that address these issues in non-clichéd, intelligent ways where they recruit writers and consultants who know what they’re talking about. They’ve been thinking a lot about what’s to come, and we get them to help build good stories about the issues raised by this technology. By good, I don’t mean like Star Trek-y stuff, where Star Trek addressed a lot of simplistic philosophical issues in the guise of science fiction. But the science fiction wasn’t convincing, and the philosophy wasn’t super compelling. So I’d like entertainment that takes shots at guessing what the issues will be and makes them part of compelling stories. Rotten tomatoes.
Jacobsen: Alright, man. I’m out of stuff for the night unless you have something else you want to talk about.
Rosner: No, I’m good.
Jacobsen: So, tomorrow?
Rosner: All right. Thank you.
Jacobsen: All right. Thank you. Talk to you then.
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