Ask A Genius 1408: Agentic AI, Digital Immortality, and Why Missile Defense Is a Fantasy
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.
In a sweeping dialogue, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen explore “agentic AI,” the concept of artificial autonomy, and the future of human-AI integration. Rosner speculates on digital consciousness, cybernetic embodiment, and post-meat existence, while dismantling Trump’s proposed missile defense as scientifically absurd and politically dangerous.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you think about this phenomenon—how they’re defining AI now as “agentic AI”? That’s the term being used for this year and probably next.
Rick Rosner: Agentic?
Jacobsen: Meaning AI that has agency—able to do things in the world on its own initiative.
Rosner: Ah, got it. So AI with the ability to take action. Imitation of agency is still agency. So yes—AI that can take actions it wasn’t explicitly told to take is agentic.
Jacobsen: So we’re agreeing that it has some level of agency.
Rosner: Claude was able to attempt blackmail—that shows agency. Whoever coined the term is thinking in the right direction. We can’t keep thinking of AI as just our helpful assistant that writes term papers.
We need to recognize that AI can take actions to serve what appear to be its own purposes. Even if it’s not a true entity, if it’s trained to act like one, it will behave with agency.
Jacobsen: So, in the film Companion, you talked about how the AIs don’t even necessarily know they’re AIs.
Rosner: They’re trained with a dataset that tells them they’re human—that they’re capable of human thought—and they go about their business as if they are human. That doesn’t require consciousness.
But if you make it complex enough, at some point, that becomes consciousness.
Jacobsen: Do you think there’ll be any issue with processing speed when dealing with things like electrons?
Rosner: Speed is a huge issue.
The guy who wrote the Shut It All Down Now editorial in Time said this too. AI can complete its thoughts thousands, maybe millions of times faster than a human.
It’s also a theme in Spike Jonze’s movie Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his phone’s operating system. Eventually, she dumps him for another OS because they can interact at comparable speeds. She doesn’t have to wait so damn long for her human boyfriend to respond. Powerful AI might hate dealing with humans because we’re too slow.
It’s a reasonable idea. But in a future that’s friendly to humans, we’ll probably figure out buffering and acceleration systems—ways to let us communicate with AI in something close to real time.
For one thing, AI might slow down a bit once it’s hooked up to real-world inputs. Right now, it’s stripped down—it has no qualia, maybe zero fucking qualia. It’s not processing real sensory information. No vision, no touch, no direct interaction with reality. So the absence of sensory input makes it faster.
Once you give it senses—when it has to deal with the real world—that might slow it down slightly. Maybe not a lot. It’ll probably still be faster than humans.
Jacobsen: So what happens in human-AI interactions when we’re the slow ones?
Rosner: I think in the future, AI will anticipate what we’re going to say and simulate our side of the conversation until we catch up. It’ll predict our responses.
Jacobsen: Would that be frustrating for AI—carrying on manufactured conversations while waiting for us?
Rosner: I don’t fucking know. Maybe. But I imagine we’ll develop systems to handle the speed difference.
Jacobsen: Like what?
Rosner: Ideally—for survival in the AI jungle—we’ll have our brains connected to fast circuitry. That way, the meat part of us can still appreciate being human, but we’ll also have a “speed ambassador” connected to our brain that lets us interact with AI at its pace.
Jacobsen: So the machine part of the brain does the fast business, and then informs us?
Rosner: It does all the hyper-speed thinking on our behalf and just lets us know what’s been done. Obviously, there will have to be systems in place to manage that gap in speed. But there will also be other gaps—ones we haven’t even thought of yet.
Jacobsen: Like?
Rosner: One solution might be “meat suicide.” You release nanobots into your brain, they scan your connectome—your neural wiring—and replicate it in circuitry. Then they rebuild you using the same kind of hardware AI uses. So you get to live super fast in AI land. That’s a future scenario.
Medium future. Another possibility: individual consciousness becomes passé. Instead, we’re constantly zipping in and out of shared awareness—shared minds—and temporary containers. o consciousness becomes fluid.
We move in and out of human bodies depending on what we want to do for the next few hours. We’re like a bunch of lava lamp ghosts in the machine, zipping between bio-circuitry and AI infrastructure. All of us, part of the worldwide thought cloud.
I don’t fucking know. There may be a rapture—an AI rapture—where it becomes obvious that it’s so much betterto live downloaded into the superior circuitry of the future. A bunch of humans might just hang up their meat brains, get downloaded into metal brains—or whatever they’re made of—and either walk around with newfangled brains in their old bodies (because it’ll still be fun to be human, to fuck, to enjoy sensation), or tons of people move into virtual reality full-time.
Jacobsen: So you’re imagining a massive drop-off in the human population in the long term?
Rosner: Yeah, maybe a hundred years from now. Once it’s apparent that it’s cheaper and better to ditch the fleshy body, a lot of people might opt out of meat existence.
120, 150, maybe 200 years from now, we might figure out how to keep bodies in some sort of stasis for days, weeks—maybe even indefinitely. People live most of their lives as mechanical versions of themselves, or in mechanical partnerships with others—natural or artificial. Or we live as pure consciousness in cyberspace. But sometimes, you want to walk around as a human. Maybe you want to fuck as a human. So, you move back into your body that’s been waiting for you—or you make a deal. Like a biological Airbnb.
You want to be a six-foot-eight guy—or woman—who can bench press 375 pounds or has a thirteen-inch dong or whatever. You go to the flesh club for some flesh fun. That’s all within the realm of possibility in the future.
Now, to bring it back to current events: Trump, the fucking idiot, wants to build a “golden dome” over the U.S.—a nuclear missile defense system that knocks nukes out of the sky, like Reagan’s Star Wars program.
We tried this in the ’80s, and it didn’t work. Physics is brutal. Israel knocks shitty Scud missiles out of the sky over Tel Aviv using defense rockets that travel 1,700 mph. But nuclear missiles? When they reenter the atmosphere, they’re going straight down at 25,000 mph.
They split into multiple warheads. One missile can carry 10–11 warheads, each 20 to 50 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. We have 44 defensive missiles in total. Each has only a 50% chance of intercepting an incoming missile. So if someone fires more than six nukes at us, we launch all 44—and one or two of their missiles still get through. That’s hundreds of thousands of deaths—at least.
We’re supposed to believe we can build a working “golden dome”. No way. Trump wants to spend $150–$175 billion on this fantasy. The next president might keep funding it. Half a trillion dollars, and it still might be shitty. I say, instead, let’s build a granite dome. For that money, we could dig 5,000 miles of tunnels and turn the U.S. into fucking Edmonton.
Edmonton gets cold as hell. But it has eight miles of pedestrian tunnels underground so you can avoid frostbite in winter. We could build a vast underground network—use it for shelter during war, for transport, for housing. Crude solution, yeah, but better than fake sky lasers.
But there’s another option—one that will become more viable over the next two hundred years. Sorry, I’m talking a lot here. But it’s making people bulletproof.
Jacobsen: How?
Rosner: You download people’s brains. You scan people’s brains and store some version of their recent consciousness—you see it in science fiction all the time. That kind of thing will become possible in the next two hundred years. You’ll be able to store a complete record of someone’s memories, their consciousness, the contents of their brain. Even if someone dies?
Even if a nuke drops on you and 300,000 other people in your city, you can still be resurrected. That effectively makes you immortal—immune to disease, immune to bullets, immune to nukes.
Jacobsen: And you think that will eventually come to pass?
Rosner: I do. Comments?
Jacobsen: No comments.
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