Ask A Genius 1575: Merging, Understanding, and the Limits of Belief
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/27
How does the Rosner–Jacobsen dialogue explore the widening gap between AI-enhanced understanding and traditional worldviews?
In this conversation, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen examine whether humans can maintain meaningful understanding in an AI-driven world. Rosner argues that advanced intelligence will force people either to merge with AI or accept a diminished grasp of reality, comparing non-integrated humans to household dogs navigating a world they cannot interpret. Jacobsen responds that many communities—such as the Amish—function pragmatically within limited worldviews, even when those frameworks are false. Together, they discuss religion, pseudoscience, and functional ignorance, concluding that long-standing human tendencies toward siloed understanding will likely intensify as AI accelerates the pace of complexity.
Rick Rosner: All right, there are a couple of general paths that people can take with AI. They can remain separate from AI in the future. Just today on Twitter, people were talking—more directly than I’ve seen before, though it’s true—that people are going to have to merge with AI to keep up with AI. We’ve talked about that, but I haven’t seen others discussing it. So you can merge with AI and continue to participate in understanding the world, because the world’s going to get super big-data complicated. And if you want anything close to a high-level understanding, you’re going to have to be working with AI.
Or you can avoid working with AI and give up on much understanding of the world. The analogy I was thinking of—and I may have brought it up yesterday—is the one about dogs. In human households, or anywhere really, but especially in human environments, dogs experience a ton of things they don’t understand. They understand enough to get fed, know where they’re supposed to relieve themselves, where they sleep, and how to behave in a home. I wonder whether our dogs—and dogs in general—understand, for example, when I throw a treat that I don’t have control over exactly where it lands. I toss a treat, and it bounces; sometimes it bounces toward them, sometimes it takes a bad bounce.
I assume the white dog, who’s more intelligent than the brown dog, understands that this isn’t me messing with them; it’s just the way treats move when they hit the ground. Brown dog—who knows what the brown dog thinks? I would guess the white dog knows I can control light switches. I can make things light up by doing something, because she will sometimes wait for me to turn on the lights before going up the stairs, since she’s losing her eyesight. I would guess the white dog doesn’t think I control the weather, but does she even think about where the weather comes from? It’s a world full of things dogs can’t meaningfully interpret. And in the future, for people without intimate ties to AI, it may become all experience with very little understanding. Maybe I’m being a techno-prick, but maybe not. Comments?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: They’re going to have their own silos technologically. They’ll be functional within those. White dogs have been Amish for several centuries now.
Rosner: Given that, what do we think of the Amish’s understanding of the world? The Amish.
Jacobsen: They don’t have an understanding of the world. They don’t have a truth-based notion of the world. They have a functional, pragmatic idea of a limited world. That’s more accurate. In that way—farming and such—it’s more akin to how regular non-human animals operate than how more science-oriented contemporary human organizations operate.
Humans had a functional, limited understanding of the world until the past 100 years, when we really started tearing everything apart and understanding it.
Rosner: So is it so bad to be siloed? Sequestered in a world you understand?
Jacobsen: It’s a world, but it’s a false understanding, because God isn’t there to intervene. For all intents and purposes, there is no God like that. Otherwise, he’d be saving babies who drown in tsunamis. It’s a dysfunctional but false worldview. Many delusional people make their lives comfortable.
I don’t think they should be shamed, but what’s the difference between believing God will intervene to help you get pregnant and believing horoscopes or planetary alignments determine your love life? It’s the same type of belief. It’s the same urge to know, expressed as a different form of not knowing. But people get through. It’s benign overall. Prayer, for example, I don’t have much of a problem with it.
Rosner: People have always believed in nonsense that doesn’t interfere much with daily life. If you’re a shoemaker or an engineer or a physicist who happens to hold unconventional beliefs about resurrection and cosmology, like Tipler, it doesn’t stop you from being competent in many areas.
Jacobsen: Thinking the Earth is 6,000 years old when it’s actually about 4.5 billion years old makes you wildly wrong, like 99.99% wrong. But it’s still relatively benign in terms of daily functioning. What matters more is whether someone can read the instructions on a diabetes pill bottle. That’s consequential. That’s more functional. The rest is a deeper question about truth.
Rosner: We’re looking at issues we’ve always had; they’re just going to become more extreme with AI. All right—should we wrap it up?
Jacobsen: We should.
Rosner: Don’t you have any final thoughts?
Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: All right. Thank you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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