[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, this is just to clarify that Tom Hanks is not a dick who outbids people for the contents of storage lockers. Actors and other celebs often think it is fun to play themselves as dicks. There was a show you probably have not heard of called Jury Duty, where one guy …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 913: Junior High Enemies and Don Draper
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, I'm going through my book and talking, which is set like ten years in the future, about what life might be like then. You said to plug Carole's book, too. I've been working on this thing for years and years; you could argue for decades because I'm taking much stuff from …
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I was talking about the square root law of mesh networks, which states that the efficiency of people whose brains are linked is proportional to the square root of the number of people in the network. Black box-ness. So, we see this with AI and Google Translate, where AI can be effective, …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 911: The Square Root Law of Mesh Networks
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, you should know that the main character is a celebrity and, to some extent, an industrialist who has used his celebrity to be the figurehead of a sizeable semi-insidious tech corporation, mainly in the 2030s; that is the period I am writing about. One of the things that he has access to …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 910: Rick’s Book is About a Celebrity
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, we're still talking about notes from my novel in progress. The entertainment industry facilitates sociopaths; I think that's long been apparent, especially sociopaths who either are talented or claim to be gifted. There's the saying nobody knows anything in the entertainment industry, which refers to nobody knows what's going to be …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 909: The Forever-Book In-Progress
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: American morale; that'd be good. Rick Rosner: Two of me yammering ago, I talked about how Trump's rhetoric has gotten uglier and Republican party rhetoric, generally, has just gotten more divorced from reality and aggressive. We're talking about American morale, and I told my wife that the people interested in non-normal government …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 908: American Morale and “Trump is a fucking idiot”
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Some people say, or at least one person I read, that AI is a misnomer; it's just high technology. Calling it intelligence, artificial, or whatever you want to call it, it's just increasingly powerful technology. We have the same genetics as humans did 100,000 years ago. We're not getting any smarter biologically, …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 907: Simulations of Consciousness Before Consciousness
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, you've been away for a couple months and plus you're up in Canada, so you don't get the daily barrage of awfulness that is US News. My wife Carole just had to turn off the news and leave the room yesterday, I think. Experts on cyber-attack and propaganda say that …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 906: The Funk in Daily Life from Trump
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: We haven't talked about anything in a couple months because you've been away but among the things we haven't talked about is AI which is all anybody thinks about anymore. I think in the future, people will have to define themselves in some way relative to AI the same way almost …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I took a long ride from New Orleans to Chicago and Chicago to Los Angeles. Rick Rosner: We were saying making distinctions in quantum mechanics is a big deal. You would have virtual landscapes of possible things happening and, occasionally, things changing in the quantum mechanical characterization of a system reflecting that …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 904: Travel, “Valence,” and Abstractions
Rick Rosner 