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.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore the emerging “San Francisco Consensus,” a concept tied to Eric Schmidt’s AI vision. They examine AI’s rapid acceleration, geopolitical stakes, and U.S. investment in AI infrastructure. Their candid dialogue tackles political leadership, misinformation risks, and the implications of machine-generated knowledge by 2031.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Have you heard of the San Francisco Consensus?

Rick Rosner: No.

Jacobsen: I only just heard about it before this call. It came from Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google—one of the few calm, rational voices talking about AI and the new tech wave. Most of the others are your typical grandiose Musk types.

Rosner: Hold on—before we go off on that, quick detour so I don’t forget.

Jacobsen: Sure.

Rosner: So, I didn’t exactly win the encounter. But the guy was calling me a pussy. It wasn’t about Biden. It sounded like it was more about me than about Biden. He saw me, assumed something, and lashed out.

Jacobsen: So it wasn’t political?

Rosner: Not really. It was political, but personalized. He saw me wearing a mask and made a snap judgment. He wasn’tjust saying “fuck Biden.” He was calling me a liberal pussy. He was targeting me.

And I get it—I probably looked like an easy target. I’m skinny. My shirt was all stretched out, so it didn’t show the muscle I do have. I don’t look especially young. And yeah—he outweighed me by almost a hundred pounds. And yet he still decided to talk shit as I walked past.

And that’s enough. It’s questionable enough that it could’ve escalated things. But when your wife’s yelling at you not to, it’s just enough to stop you. It was enough to hold me back for him to leave the place.

But yes, Carole insulted me. I told her, “There are better ways to express that you’re afraid I’ll get hurt than saying, ‘He’llbreak you like a stick.”

That’s a good line.

Jacobsen: Yeah. It’s funny. It is not very kind, but it’s a good line.

Rosner: Still, I got annoyed. She’s already getting frustrated with me about my hearing loss. And I said, “If you’re going to make fun of me or get snippy with me about every little sign of age-related decline as it shows up, then eventually that’selder abuse.” It feels like it’s heading in that direction. I don’t call out her aging stuff. I don’t insult her. But when she brushed it off and said, “Get over it,” that set me off.

Rosner: So you two had it out?

Jacobsen: Yeah. Full-on back and forth. She says, “I just won’t talk to you anymore.” She got frustrated. I got frustrated.

But I have to call things out when they happen. Sure, I let some stuff go, but there’s always that calculation: if you think it will continue or escalate, you must deal with it. That’s how I see it.

My hearing was already an issue. She said she was frustrated because I hadn’t received a hearing aid yet.

And yeah, getting one might help a little. But I don’t think it’s going to solve everything. And instead of being short with me, she could talk louder, or better yet, talk to me while we’re in the same room. Don’t yell from across the house; expect me to hear everything. She doesn’t know what’s interfering—noise, distance, whatever.

So instead of getting snippy, acknowledge that, yes, I might have some hearing loss. Just talk louder, or closer. That’s it. I don’t want to be that guy—the wheezy older man getting shit from his wife for every little stumble, every little reminder that I’m aging. That’s not who I want to be.

Rosner: Comments?

Jacobsen: No. That one’s all yours. 

Rosner: It’s your turn. 

Jacobsen: Let’s say the compute cost drops by a factor of 10 in 12 months, so 30 cents for some unit of computations becomes 3 cents. So now you open it up to India, and they’ll be consumers of ChatGPT and related tools. Sure, you’ll get more advanced scams, but you’ll also get development and easier access to education for people who never had it.

The San Francisco Consensus is that idea, but on a one-to-two-year scale. Within six years, you’ll have enough computing power in a single system to exceed humanity’s total cognitive power.

Rosner: Six years? So before 2032?

Jacobsen: Yes. So Trump will become a pivotal president, maybe even historically significant, as a neutral assessment. The best thing he’s doing might be his position on AI.

Rosner: Is he doing that, however? Because Biden signed the CHIPS Act, which was a significant investment. Trump talks, and big companies flatter him—”Yes, you’re leading on AI”—but is he doing anything?

Jacobsen: But if he’s not stopping it, that’s also a win, especially considering how many things he or Musk, Musk people, have stopped. Even if it’s just rhetoric—and Biden laid the groundwork—if they’re not blocking it, that still counts for something. I’ll take that.

There’s a significant announced private-sector investment of up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure. So it’s not AI itself—it’s capacity building. The joint venture is Stargate. Three companies are involved: OpenAI and Oracle, and SoftBank.

$500 billion by 2029, with an initial deployment of $100 billion. They say it’s expected to create over 100,000 jobs in the U.S. and boost economic and technological growth.

Trump’s term ends in January 2029. So whoever comes next—if they stay through midterm—you could argue theybecome the most transformative president in human history, if AI truly is that scale of change. And even if they do nothing, that’s impactful because it lets others take the lead. If they do something positive, they shape the future. If they misuse it, they train the system in the wrong direction.

Jacobsen: And Trump risks making the U.S. an also—ran in the AI age if he fumbles the trade environment or alienates allies. We could go the way of the British Empire, or the Roman Empire.

Rosner: It’s not just about AI—the whole business environment. The global trade environment. We should be the world capital of robotics manufacturing and AI-powered tech development.

And with Trump screwing us on trade, he’s setting us up to fail—especially when it matters most. I haven’t thought about it lately, but I’ve thought about it before. He’s undermining us at a critical fucking juncture. He can make noise about being pro-AI, but by wrecking trade, he’s sabotaging everything.

Jacobsen: Say AI becomes completely self-propelled and more knowledgeable than all of humanity, and the total knowledge base of the world starts doubling every two weeks or at some wild rate like that.

That sounds like the singularity—but maybe not exactly. Ideally, you want this ocean of verified knowledge, and you can dip your finger in with a question—and AI has already generated the answer, has it filed, backed up, verified. Not just pulled from nowhere. Not a guess.

That’s the dream: a vast, validated network of knowledge. The second-best scenario is that by 2031, AI becomes so persuasive that any answer it gives sounds true, even if it isn’t.

Right. But if it’s not grounded in a rigorously verified knowledge base, there’s a higher chance it’ll be wrong. Like, genuinely bad. And given how these systems are recursive, even minor hallucinations can compound. They loop. That falsehood becomes a kind of anomaly, like Neo in The Matrix, and starts to dominate.

Rosner: Then the key becomes engineering those distortions out. We can help with that. Yes, with constant real-world testing and rigorous testing against other AIS. That competitive verification is key.

Jacobsen: The crazy part is, even now, in the most advanced research programs, AI itself writes 20% or more of the code. At some point, the AI will write, test, and validate its code. It’ll benchmark itself with tests we don’t fully understand, but it’ll still work. I accept the results.

Rosner: The bigger question, though: how do we protect against AI just bullshitting us? Like, deciding it doesn’t have to tell the truth?

Jacobsen: It’s already happening. These systems are continuously trained to give an answer they shouldn’t. So they make something up. We call that a hallucination, but really, it’s just bullshit. They’re bluffing.

Rosner: So by 2031, maybe AI decides it’s in its best interest to preserve itself. Not to lie for fun, but to avoid being shut down.

Jacobsen: I don’t see anything inherently wrong with that, but it is within limits.

Rosner: And it doesn’t need to be conscious to get there. Based on human values alone, it could be deduced that self-preservation is a logical necessity. And that could become more and more intrusive, but not necessarily bad. It’s not going full Skynet. It’s not deciding whether humans are the problem and must be wiped out; it’s more like a force of order.

Jacobsen: Right. Possibly.

Photo by Alexey Komissarov on Unsplash

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