Ask A Genius 1403: Living with AI Doom and Global Conflict: Rick Rosner on Survival, Ethics, and the Gaza War
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 and Scott Douglas Jacobsen discuss living in a rapidly transforming world, grappling with AI threats and the Gaza-Israel war. Rosner critiques doomsday scenarios, survivalist mindsets, and misinformation, emphasizing ethical clarity amid geopolitical tragedy. The conversation weaves tech anxiety with moral responsibility in an age of accelerating uncertainty.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Looking back, what do you think is important for a meaningful life? Or a life that builds momentum?
Rick Rosner: Let’s not talk about that. Let’s do a different question.
Jacobsen: Okay. What kind of life is important to have in a world that’s being rapidly reshuffled?
Rosner: Sure. With P(doom) being significantly above zero—even if humanity isn’t doomed by AI, there are a lot of schmucks who’ll tell you not to worry about it. But they’re schmucks.
Jacobsen: We do not know what AI can do—or how fast it can do it.
Rosner: Exactly. It can iterate a thousand times faster than us, and that’s probably conservative. So how do you live your life under the dangling sword of AI? That’s a real question.
One thing you should do is talk to AI—keep abreast of it. Probably more than I do, but I know a little. Try your best to know what’s coming. Try to make yourself able to work with it. The people who can work with it might be better positioned to survive it.
Some people say go into a field that’s immune to AI—whatever field that would be. AI is coming for everything. Then there are the prepper types who say: live in the woods, hoard gold, buy drums of food that doesn’t expire, and get a trad wife with trad kids and move them all to a cabin.
Jacobsen: I guess that’s one way to go.
Rosner: It seems that if AI sends crawling spider robots to cover the whole surface of the planet… is that gonna work? Our couples’ counselor says, “Don’t worry about stuff that you can’t do anything about.”
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: AI might be, to some degree, one of those things. Run it down.
Jacobsen: I looked at the actual numbers for the Israel-Gaza war too. They’re not great. They’re bad. Fifty-three thousand dead? I checked all the numbers from the UN, Human Rights Watch, and others. I got quotes from the UN, Human Rights Watch, international sources, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Hamas leaders. No one has a clean slate here.
Rosner: Everyone’s a fuckhead. Literally everybody. When you report the facts, it presents itself like a ledger On October 7, it shifted quite strongly to Israel for that year. But after that—
Jacobsen: It’s an imbalance.
Rosner: Yes. Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis—most of them civilians. Since then, Israel has killed around 53,000 Palestinians. That’s roughly 2.65% of the population—more than one Palestinian in 40. Most of them were not Hamas. Israel is also denying aid, so of the two million Palestinians still alive, many are starving. I do not know the exact percentage of those starving, though.
Jacobsen: And Israel has 300,000 troops.
Rosner: That’s a lot. You’d think with that many troops and Gaza being only about 50 square miles, they’d be able to completely take it over. I know they’re trying to spare the lives of the hostages—there are 58 hostages left, 24 of whom are supposed to still be alive. Netanyahu uses “trying to save them” as an excuse for the bombings, but it’s probably mostly horseshit. October 2023. This war should have been settled eight months ago—whether through capitulation or with an occupying force.
But no one wants to be the occupiers. Ideally, you’d have a multinational force—tens of thousands of troops—to keep Hamas down and begin rebuilding. But instead, the war continues, and hundreds of Palestinians are still getting killed every week. I’d guess that in most weeks, the majority of those killed are not Hamas.
And Hamas replenishes. They started with 30,000 troops. They might be down to 18 or 20,000, but that’s still less than a tenth of Israel’s force. One more addendum: when Israel occupied Gaza for a few years—they only had 8,000 people occupying it. A) Not enough people. B) Maybe not the best people to be occupying Gaza.
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