[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Are you familiar with Dinesh D'Souza? Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes. Rosner: So you know he’s a right-wing propagandist and kind of often not too concerned with exact truths, right? Jacobsen: Yes. Rosner: So, he saw a tweet I think where somebody was talking about how statistically Trumpy Republicans are dumber than …
Category: Ask A Genius
Ask A Genius 839: Machines Will Come to Know
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: A quick thing that just came up. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, quick thing you just came out. So, sincere disagreement. Go. Rosner: All right, so we were having a disagreement about whether it matters whether an AI appreciates its own jokes or not. Basically we're arguing about a very short window …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 839: Machines Will Come to Know
Ask A Genius 838: AI and Consciousness
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: We have talked about consciousness, physics, and everything for nine years. Moreover, when we have been talking about AI and what is to come early on and medium on four years ago, five years ago, we were talking about how big data processing would change everything that humans have taken the low-hanging …
Ask A Genius 837: Brakes From Family
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I know Carole and Isabella put the brakes on for you a bit because you tend to go full throttle and things, at least earlier in your life you did. Rick Rosner: Yeah. Lazier, but yeah. Jacobsen: You've had that phrase, lazy has replaced crazy and by crazy I translate …
Ask A Genius 836: Evolving Jewish Views
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Addendum. So you're reform Jewish. Rick Rosner: Yes. Jacobsen: You grew up reform Jewish? Rosner: Yes. Jacobsen: Mom and dad were reform Jewish? Rosner: Yes, further back there was Orthodox. My great-grandfather was a rabbi. My mom grew up in a more towards the conservative household. They kept kosher. I …
Ask A Genius 835: Plato and Socrates
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Alright, so you just asked me what I think Socrates or Voltaire would think if they suddenly found themselves in a very religious era, for example, in the year 800 AD in Europe, when the Catholic Church ran civilization to a certain extent. The cultural life, the passing on of non …
Ask A Genius 834: Long Covid
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is Covid over? Please tell me. Rick Rosner: No, people are thinking and pretending it's over because we are now three years and two or three months in. People are sick of it and nobody's reporting results anymore. Testing is way down. Carol, my wife, works at a school and …
Ask A Genius 833: Boiling Down AI Talk
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Last time we were talking about AI and I just wanted to boil what we were saying down to its essentials which is that AI seems to be able to do a rough approximation of in task information processing at a level that is either comparable to human or enough in …
Ask A Genius 832: ChatGPT and Substrate Independence
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Well, it started with me reading a tweet that said that cheap AIs can be almost as good as expensive AIs. Apparently for language model AIs you can spend millions of dollars pumping them full of information and get a chat bot who's pretty good at chatting but this tweet said …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 832: ChatGPT and Substrate Independence
Ask A Genius 831: Did Rick Memorize the World Almanac?
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had, not only had, but have a very interesting life history. There's one thing in there that I had question marks about and I really don't know the answer to. Off tape I phrased it wrongly that I thought you had studied or memorized The World Almanac. Rick Rosner: …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 831: Did Rick Memorize the World Almanac?
Rick Rosner 