Rick Rosner: All right, so some trends—most competing with each other to change the world, improve the world, or potentially harm the world—are fairly obvious to the point where people almost distrust them because they've been discussed so extensively. One is AI combined with quantum computing and the disruptions they bring, including AI-driven disinformation, cyber …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1232: Trends and Their Interactions
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you usually celebrate your birthdays? Rick Rosner: We don't go out or gather with others for New Year's or my birthday. Carole likes to mark my birthdays, however. For Hanukkah, she gave me a gift certificate to Michael's Crafts since I'm running low on some glues. Jacobsen: Glues? Rosner: Yeah, …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1231: How do you usually celebrate your birthdays?
Rick Rosner: Yesterday, the Mega Millions lottery awarded someone $1.2 billion. If you choose the payment spread over time, which almost nobody does because it's a bad deal, you'd get about $550 to $560 million as a lump sum. I forget if that's before or after taxes, but it's a significant amount either way. What …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1230: What about investments and windfalls?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What game show would you have liked to be on but never had the chance? Rick Rosner: I've been on Jeopardy! once and lost, and I've been on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire twice. You can't go on Jeopardy! More than once, so that's off the table. I was on Jeopardy! …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1229: What game show would you have liked to be on?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the near future of museums? Rick Ronser: Carole and I visited The Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles today. It's not very large. We only spent about half an hour there because we didn't purchase tickets for the temporary exhibition. Instead, we viewed their permanent collection. My kid has worked …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1228: What is the near future of libraries?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How has the world changed since we started collaborating in the summer or fall of 2014? Rick Rosner: Smartphones became mainstream around 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone, though widespread adoption accelerated between 2010 and 2012. Life still feels normal in some ways, but what we accept as normal today vastly …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1227: How has the world changed since we started working together?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Hey, Rick, what would Jesus think of life today? Rick Rosner: Well, of course, he'd be astonished by all the technology. There wasn't much technology in the 1st century CE. At that time, the world population was estimated to be around 200–300 million, about 3–4% of today's population. Naturally, he wouldn't have …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else should we do? You had Matt Gaetz’s' stuff come out. Rick Rosner: It was stuff people already knew, with some surprisingly additional numbers. I'll let you talk about that because I know nothing about it. All right. So Matt Gartz is a congressman from Florida who resigned because the …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let's start. Rick Rosner: You work for humanist publications and just interviewed a prominent humanist earlier today. So, how would you define humanism? Jacobsen: "Reason, science, compassion," you might say. It’s the shorthand: reason, science, compassion. So, it has a certain amount of overlap with existentialism. There can be an overlap with …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1224: Rick Takes Humanism to Task!
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is the reasoning system test brief. Rick Rosner: All right, here's my question. Let me know when you're ready. Hey, ChatGPT, humans haven't been acquitting themselves so well lately. How likely is it that future AI will assess itself as better able to make decisions about humans than humans? Jacobsen: …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1223: The Reasoning System Test 3
Rick Rosner 