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 discuss how AI and augmented humans could manage human needs, shape values, and influence population trends through subtle, persuasive means. They explore economic shifts, virtual reality, fertility manipulation, and the future of commerce, cautioning against the dangers of greed in AI development.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Alright, so go ahead. 

Rick Rosner: My wife took me to CostCo yesterday, and she wants me to get hearing aids. I’m going to get one for my weaker ear, and we’ll see if that helps. I don’t know. A lot of hearing loss is just not paying attention.

Anyway, while I was sitting there, I watched people checking out. The two most common items people seemed to buy were bottled water and toilet paper. People’s needs are pretty simple—we need to wipe our asses.

Rosner: We need to stay hydrated. We need to be entertained. We need orgasms, shelter, clothing.

When you think about what it takes to keep most humans in reasonably good shape, it seems that advanced technology—maybe AI, or AI working with augmented humans—should be able to support a decent-sized population without burning through the future’s resources.

Human values and commerce still provide a decent transitional framework while we shift from a human-run world to an augmented-human–slash–AI-run civilization. AI will eventually develop its own goals and values. If we’re intelligent and competent, we’ll help guide those goals so we don’t get destroyed. But if AI is developed by people who aren’t greedy or idiotic, we can probably work with it and not be crushed.

Jacobsen: Though a lot of the people working on AI are greedy idiots.

Rosner: That’s true. Also, I’ve said this before—and I should verify it again—but as a percentage of average income, food and clothing cost about a quarter of what they did 100 years ago.

Back then, more things were labour-intensive, and logistics were more complex. You couldn’t easily get stuff from countries with much cheaper labour. Global trade, automation, and scaling have made things more affordable over time. We’ll eventually do that with housing, too.

Transportation’s trickier, but we’ll use it less. The 20th century might’ve been the golden age of going places. We had the means and the need to be somewhere to experience it physically.

This century, that need is dropping. With digital immersion and simulated presence, we won’t need to move around as much. And overall, the cost of keeping humans going is going down. That’s one of the big hopes for humanity’s survival—it might get too cheap to kill us. There won’t be a reason.

Plus, AI will get persuasive. Like, extremely compelling. It’ll be able to talk us into anything. If AI—or a group of AIs—decides Earth is fine with 4 billion people, it could propagandize us into stabilizing the population at that number.

Jacobsen: You’re talking like AI is a single thing. There’ll be competing AIs, with different agendas. But if the consensus among them is a specific goal, they’ll reach it. Not through force, but through what I’d call “pervasive persuasion.” Subtle and creative. Like how people use Wi-Fi signals to detect motion or map spaces.

AI won’t need to talk to us directly. It’ll influence behaviour at various access points we won’t even recognize as vulnerabilities. Fertility, for instance, there are so many ways to affect birth rates without ever mentioning babies.

We’re not talking mass killing. We’re talking about tweaking the reproductive rate—how many humans are in the next generation. 

Rosner: One idea that comes to mind: robot girlfriends. If they’re sexy—and they will be—and you can’t get them pregnant. It’s like releasing sterile mosquitoes into a population. Everyone in a relationship with a robot gets removed from the reproductive pool. Unless, they go out of their way to make arrangements.

Same goes for people who spend most of their time in virtual reality. If they’re plugged in 18 hours a day, and only unplug to sleep or go to the bathroom—though who are we kidding, they’ll stay in VR while they’re shitting—that’s another chunk of the population not reproducing.

But if AI decides it needs more humans, it’ll be just as easy to push us the other way. There are plenty of tools to ramp up fertility, too. It’ll be easy to keep us happy, more or less, except for the usual sources of unhappiness that have always been around: extremists, the “burn-it-all-down” types, the ones drawn to political and religious chaos.

But for most people, AI will get what it wants while keeping us entertained—and maybe even satisfied.

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

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