Ask A Genius 1396: Envisioning Diverse Paradigms of Future Computation
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/02
Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner outline potential compute futures: dystopian “cruel” systems, protective “conservative” networks, uncompromising optimization turning everything into infrastructure, leisure-driven “endless fun,” passive “idiocracy,” market-driven “capitalist,” adaptive “contextual” orchestration of CPUs, GPUs, QPUs, and speculative “Darwinistic” evolution where compute outlives humanity, cost, time, and energy efficiency optimization.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think are the different futures of compute? Different styles of computation or perspectives on how compute is done? Even if the underlying hardware—CPU, GPU, QPU—remains consistent, we might frame or apply it differently.
Rick Rosner: Let’s break that down. First, worst-case scenario: cruel compute.That’s when mean computers run the world and do not give a fuck about people. It’s the classic dystopia—Skynet, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, all those 1960s-onward stories where the machines become conscious and say, “Fuck you.” Humanity ends up having to fight the machines.
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That’s worst-case. Best-case—for us—is conservative compute. That’s a scenario where AI wants to preserve history, including us. And it finds that doing so is relatively inexpensive. It lets the babies have their bottles—we’re the babies.
And then there’s a variant of cruel compute—like the “paperclip maximizer” scenario. An AI gets it in its head to optimize compute at all costs, so it turns the whole world into compute infrastructure. Not likely, but still a theoretical path. So, we’ve got:
- Cruel compute.
- Conservative compute.
- Out-of-control optimization compute.
Then there’s endless fun compute. As data processing power increases, we increasingly use it not for serious shit, but for entertainment—movies, games, social media, porn. And this could continue. You could justify it by saying entertainment is a form of play that helps us model the world. Our brains evolved to find value in acted-out scenarios. That’s why we crave it.
But you could blend that with idiocracy compute—a world where everyone is constantly entertained but paralyzed. Conscious beings reduced to passive consumers with no agency.
Then there’s capitalist compute, where market forces dictate the direction of all computation. A mix of styles and philosophies emerge depending on what sells—or, more precisely, what generates computational “profit.” In the future, it’s not about dollars—it’s about energy bucks or compute bucks.
Jacobsen: And the most immediate development will be contextual compute. That’s the integration of CPU, GPU, and QPU, intelligently orchestrated. I interviewed a guy who specializes in this—building chips and systems that dynamically allocate tasks depending on context. The idea is to use the right processor for the right job, based on cost, time, and energy efficiency.
Quantum might be the ultimate in compute, but it’s expensive—maybe energy-intensive. So, contextual compute optimizes when to use simple processing for basic tasks and when to fire up the quantum core for running complex simulations or probabilistic futures.bThere are definitely more efficient ways to handle this. Maybe we should call it appropriateness compute or something like that.
Rosner: There’s also another flavor—Darwinistic compute. That’s where compute evolves on its own, leaves us behind, and we’re left to scavenge the remaining scraps of resources. I do not think that will happen, but still… whatever form you can imagine, it is probably going to be a free-for-all.
The most applicable early models will be social Darwinistic and capitalistic—looking for niches to exploit.
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