[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, go ahead.
Rick Rosner: Alright. So when you and I started chatting, what was it, eight years ago now?
Jacobsen: God, it must have been. You were still writing for Jimmy Kimmel when I first came across your work.
Rosner: Okay, so I got fired almost eight years ago, I think, or maybe more than that. I try not to dwell on the dates too much because it just makes me feel like a bit of an asshole for not having lined up anything subsequent. But it did give us time and the mental space to work on this huge project over the past eight years or so. When we began our discussions, we were talking, among other things, about AI and super high-tech stuff pretty much leading to the end of human life as we know it. At least, human life being the apex life on the planet, within a couple of centuries. One hundred years from now, there will still be several billion humans living more or less as we do now. But there will also be augmented humans and AIs functioning at higher levels as information processors than un-augmented humans. Human life will go on for a while as it has, but it won’t be the most sophisticated form of life on the planet in terms of information processing anymore.
And within the next couple of centuries, human life won’t disappear, but it’ll become kind of secondary. This comes after ten thousand years of humans being the apex information processors on the planet. The structure of human life, with pairing up, making stuff, doing agriculture, living in communities – this is how we’ve lived for many thousands of years. Sure, London in the 21st century differs from Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, but you could argue that there are more similarities than not, in terms of how life functions on the planet. But in a hundred to two hundred years, there will be very dissimilar ways of living that are more informationally powerful and sophisticated than how humans currently live. When we first started talking about this around 2013 or 2014, not many people were discussing it. Nobody was freaking out about it. But in the past four or five years, all these big tech guys have started talking about it, in somewhat worried but matter-of-fact ways. They acknowledge that life on the planet is going to be severely disrupted and that tech will challenge all the ways of living that we’re accustomed to.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 