Ask A Genius 1399: The Anti-Natalist Bomber, Artificial Consciousness, and the Philosophy of Game Over
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/06/03
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.
Rick Rosner discusses a suicide bombing at a fertility clinic by an anti-natalist extremist, tying it to dark philosophies like negative utilitarianism. The conversation explores mortality, artificial consciousness, and civilization’s deep-rooted life drive, critiquing societal denial of suffering—from slaughterhouses to AI ethics—and the politics of abortion and engineered immortality.
Rick Rosner: So yes—an asshole tried to blow up a fertility clinic in Palm Springs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Was it a suicide bombing?
Rosner: Yes. It was.
He blew himself up in his car near the clinic and left behind a manifesto saying he was anti-natal. No embryos were harmed. They managed to save all of them, which is great for the people who went through the whole process of egg retrieval and cryogenic storage at the clinic. Good that they didn’t have to do it all over again.
But all the “thank God the innocent embryos were saved” stuff? Shut up. Stupid.
The guy was a fucking lunatic with a creepy haircut—now in pieces because he blew himself up. He believed in something called anti-natalism. He was against birth—against people being born, including himself.
There’s a small subset of extreme anti-natalists—some of them online—who say things like, I never asked to be born, and I’d rather not exist. These people align with a philosophy that’s sometimes linked to negative utilitarianism. That’s the general vector: the fewer sentient beings who exist or ever existed, the better.
And the belief that once you’re dead, it’s just game over? I think that goes hand in hand with a certain kind of suicidal mindset. I’m in pain. I could end it. If there’s no God, then it’s game over for me. It’s a grim worldview—but if you don’t believe in an afterlife, it’s a consistent one. Still creepy.
But here’s the thing: we already tacitly accept that belief when it comes to meat animals. We kill about nine billion chickens in the U.S. every year, along with tens of millions of pigs and cows. We treat them like shit. We try not to think about it. But when we do, we rationalize: Yeah, they suffer… but they get slaughtered in the end, and it’s game over.
Any memories of trauma—if they have memories—are erased the moment that bolt gun fires into their skulls. Like in No Country for Old Men. You’ve seen that movie?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: That was dark.
So, the villain—Anton Chigurh—uses a captive bolt pistol. In real life, that tool’s used in slaughterhouses, mostly on cattle. And we think: Don’t bother me about the cows. I don’t want to think about how cruel we are. I just want to believe they’re dead, I’m eating their flesh, and they’re not suffering anymore.
And in the future? We’re probably going to think the same way about artificially conscious beings.
Say it’s 2040-something. We’re manufacturing a hundred million artificial consciousnesses every year. A lot of them end up in landfills or just get turned off. And I don’t want to think about whatever suffering they might have experienced. I want to believe they were just shut off. Their artificial brains shredded. Game over. We’re gonna be doing a lot of burying our heads in the sand—about artificial heads.
And people already do that. We bury our heads in the sand about torture in the Middle Ages. We bury our heads in the sand about life itself—about the fact that it’s going to be game over for us. That awareness lingers constantly in the back of our minds. It’s a pervasive, low-grade, motherfucking hum in the background of consciousness.
This idiot in Palm Springs? Most people will never even know what he stood for. He’s being called an “anti–pro-life activist”—whatever that means. Most people will just throw up their hands and say, Fuck that, he’s some crazy weirdo. I don’t want to learn the particulars. Which is a perfectly legitimate response.
But it has civilization-wide implications. Every evolved civilization—every single one—has a built-in life wish. Only animals that want to be alive survive to reproduce. They do better. So there’s a bias to want to get up every day and experience whatever pleasures the world gives—even if it’s just jerking off into a sock and wiping it on the dog.
Most people, most of the time, want to live as long as they can.
But there’s always the insidious counterargument: if you end your life, it’s game over. That’s attractive to some people in pain. And I would say, over the vast timeline of our universe—where civilization has probably arisen millions of times across quadrillions of years—there have likely been a tiny fraction, maybe 0.0001%, who said, Fuck it. Let’s turn off the lights. Let’s go away. Let it be game over.
And they wouldn’t have to deal with civilizational bullshit anymore. Their suffering would be over.
Maybe you could even imagine a case like this: Scientists discover the sun is about to go nova—some distant star system, a hundred million years ago in another galaxy. And the inhabitants learn they’ve got a year and a half. Or fourteen weeks. And they say, Fuck it. Let’s all suicide and beat the clock.
There’s a movie—I can’t remember the name—where the government distributes suicide pills. Everybody’s killing themselves before the world-ending disaster hits. The movie takes place on the final night of humanity. Some British thing. Bleak.
But yes—it’s a troublesome philosophical point.
The way to blunt it? In the near future, maybe we can perpetuate consciousness through technology. If it’s never game over—if you can keep going—then you can keep fucking winning. You can push that painful end further and further away.
What do you think?
Jacobsen: You can engineer different patterns of thought. And if you can do that, then you can engineer lots of things. You could take a pill that makes you forget unpleasant memories. But part of what makes us robust is our ability to integrate those experiences into the larger expanse of our life narrative.
Especially as we wind down the clock—get those extra years to stay useful to others, to our species—we need that capacity to integrate experience. People who can’t do that—who can’t integrate the bad with the good and become resilient—those are the ones you typically frame as having some sort of personality disorder.
They don’t learn. They don’t grow. They don’t pass on anything valuable to the next generation.
Woody Allen had a joke about this. He said: Some people want to achieve immortality through their works—through literature, creativity, and art. And then he adds: I’d prefer to achieve immortality by not dying. He goes, “I want to achieve immortality by not dying.”
Rosner: That’s still the thing. But people your age and younger may actually have the opportunity to keep their consciousness going—somehow—if AI lets us. Or AI might offer alternative versions of consciousness: blended consciousness, ancestral consciousness… where you half-live on in the mind of your descendants.
You might be one of a hundred ancestor voices literally yammering in the back of some guy’s mind in February 2070. You wouldn’t have full agency or existence, but at least you’d still get to experience life—through the eyes of this dickhead who happens to be your great-great-great-grandnephew or some shit.
In the year 2120—yeah, you’ll need a few more years to rack up that many “greats.”
It’s one of the biggest dilemmas of existence: the natural limits imposed by mortality. Evolution wires us to want to live. But after a while, we just can’t anymore—because evolution doesn’t provide for immortality.
And we’re going to want to engineer some artificial beings to be cool with that—cool with being obliterated. We created you for a task. Once your task is done, would you please wipe yourself out of existence? Thank you.
As we’ve said before, the future is going to generate new spins on old philosophical dilemmas—and then invent completely new ones.
And we still haven’t even reached consensus on abortion. Even though, let’s be honest, the consensus should be there. A majority of Americans agree with abortion access—though they can be talked out of it. But if you gave Americans a few classes in reasonableness, you could probably get 75 to 80 percent to agree: if you get rid of a blastocyst that’s 32 cells, you’re not committing some unspeakable evil.
Yes, it’s alive in the womb. But it’s not a baby. It’s not the greatest tragedy in the world to sweep that away.
Whether it’s a zygote, a 12-day-old embryo, or a first-trimester fetus, there’s some point after conception—but well before six months—where it’s not the worst thing in the world to take a pill or undergo a procedure and get rid of that clump of cells. It’s smaller than the period at the end of a sentence.
But we’re not allowed to reach that consensus anymore—because there’s political hay to be made in getting people worked up.
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