Ask A Genius 1572: Movies, Mega Test, AI, and Consciousness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/24
What is your favorite movie and why? Or what is one of your favorite movies and why?
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen talks with Rick Rosner about movies, mega-IQ tests, AI, and the future of consciousness. Rosner explains why Long Shot succeeds as sharp wish-fulfillment, reflects on the brutal difficulty of Cooijmans and Hoeflin high-range tests, and worries that humans may become like dogs—immersed in sensation but missing understanding. He sketches consciousness as a crisis-response system that allocates attention under pressure and predicts that only tightly AI-augmented people will ride the coming tsunami of complexity, while most drift through frictionless entertainment, sporadic insight, and increasingly outsourced thinking, with ethics and meaning left dangerously unresolved for everyone.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your favorite movie and why? Or what is one of your favorite movies and why?
Rick Rosner: I like Long Shot with Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen. She plays the Secretary of State, and he plays a schmuck who writes speeches. It’s really funny and very wish-fulfilling. Normally that would annoy me, but they build it out well. They make it so it’s not too fucking lazy. It’s not lazy at all. It feels well-constructed.
Jacobsen: What was the most obscure or difficult IQ-ey problem, or at least high-range test question you ever took? Not the 3 interpenetrating cubes problem. That was hard for everyone.
Rosner: Not to give anything away, but the most obscure would be from Cooijmans. I can’t talk about it extensively, but he is the king of obscure test design, both in subject matter and item construction. There might be others, but he is the most obscure for which I at least have a shot at solving the items. Anybody can build a meandering path through arcane material that nobody has a chance in hell of navigating to the correct answer. With him, occasionally I make it out of the thicket. But I can’t talk about specific problems or specific subject matter, because that would be a clue, and he would hate that. Plus, I don’t want to contaminate his test. We know that the Mega Test and the Titan Test, both created by Ronald K. Hoeflin, were compromised by years of people discussing them and sharing answers online. You had people saying, “What’s the answer to this?” and “Here’s the answer to that.” Mostly they’re wrong, but sometimes they’re not. It’s bad. Hoeflin did really good work, and it became obsolete because of that kind of contamination. And Cooijmans does good work.
To get back to what I was saying yesterday, I was thinking about how human thought is going to change under the AI regime. For a lot of people—not that people aren’t already this way—we’re going to be like dogs. We’ll experience things, but we won’t understand things, because we’ll be under the auspices of big-data thinkers spitting out more complexity in a rapid-fire, rat-a-tat manner than we can decipher. So we’re going to have to team up with AI to have any chance of understanding the world. When there was less of the world to understand, and it came at us more slowly—like for the hermit in Train Dreams—you had a chance to slow down and actually have an idea about things.
In the future, a lot of people will just have impressions and a swirl of being entertained and getting boners, for those who can, and just enjoying a swirl of experience with little introspection or hope of making sense of it all. And then the people who are wired in, who are half-AI themselves, they’ll be hit with insights like insight porn. They’ll get hit with wonders and revelations. And will that be any better? I don’t know. Or is it just another form of jacking off?
Jacobsen: It is almost aside from arguments about whether we think the same way or whether we can create an apparatus—like the brain and the current form of computation—that functions the same in process. The output can be basically the same. A robot that can dance can be considered a human that dances, not in terms of subjective experience or feeling, but in terms of making the same motions. Similarly with intellectual or linguistic productions, especially with LLMs. So what you are pointing out is something almost independent of what people claim are the most critical questions. In that sense, these might actually be the most critical questions. They may be superficial in the final analysis.
Whether or not they solve this open problem—similar in processing, but just in terms of functionality—functional, pragmatic dreams of the world, process-oriented. And, you know, for all intents and purposes.
Rosner: It’s the same because consciousness—well, mental processing—is one of those “let’s do it in the cheapest way possible while still getting a reasonably reliable result” situations. Our brains evolved to efficiently process the world for us. And the way AI will think, once it’s made efficient—and even when it isn’t—will be very, very similar. Consciousness will arise reasonably soon, whether or not we try to create it intentionally, because consciousness is an efficient instrument.
You take all the known processes and make them semi-conscious or unconscious. We don’t have to think about walking or breathing unless something unusual is going on. Then you take all the unknown stuff, throw it into the pot in the middle, and kick it around. Most of the time you resolve it quickly, or it doesn’t fucking matter and you move on. And then you move on to the next set of things you have to consider in your immediate set of needs and environment.
That’s what consciousness is. They call it a stream of consciousness because you pass by a bunch of stuff, but “stream of consciousness” isn’t really the right way to think of it. It’s not a SWAT team of consciousness—we’re not in tactical gear—but it’s a constant crisis-response team where a bunch of things demand your attention. You give each thing the attention it deserves in light of how important you think it is, what resources you have to think about it, and everything else that’s going on. It’s just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
It’s not even like the cleaner guy in Pulp Fiction who shows up to deal with special situations. It’s people scrambling to keep up with things every single microsecond. And when you get AI up on its feet in real-world situations, it’ll be that way for it too.
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