“When bad actors face no practical constraints, that is always dangerous. Language let us compress reality into symbols, freeing our minds to roam more widely. That same generalist power makes us adaptable—but it also means our systems can fragment when pressure rises. The slope does not always look slippery, until it does.”
AI replaces good work with bad work, yet people expect limitless growth. Rosner argues the real mistake is assuming human cognition is excellent. If consciousness is evolutionary rather than sacred, artificial systems could eventually reach our clumsy level. The question is not whether AI becomes conscious — but how competently.
In this conversation, Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen examine whether humans can maintain meaningful understanding in an AI-driven world. Rosner argues that advanced intelligence will force people either to merge with AI or accept a diminished grasp of reality, comparing non-integrated humans to household dogs navigating a world they cannot interpret. Jacobsen responds that many communities—such as the Amish—function pragmatically within limited worldviews, even when those frameworks are false. Together, they discuss religion, pseudoscience, and functional ignorance, concluding that long-standing human tendencies toward siloed understanding will likely intensify as AI accelerates the pace of complexity.
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen talks with Rick Rosner about movies, mega-IQ tests, AI, and the future of consciousness. Rosner explains why Long Shot succeeds as sharp wish-fulfillment, reflects on the brutal difficulty of Cooijmans and Hoeflin high-range tests, and worries that humans may become like dogs—immersed in sensation but missing understanding. He sketches consciousness as a crisis-response system that allocates attention under pressure and predicts that only tightly AI-augmented people will ride the coming tsunami of complexity, while most drift through frictionless entertainment, sporadic insight, and increasingly outsourced thinking, with ethics and meaning left dangerously unresolved for everyone.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner outline potential compute futures: dystopian “cruel” systems, protective “conservative” networks, uncompromising optimization turning everything into infrastructure, leisure-driven “endless fun,” passive “idiocracy,” market-driven “capitalist,” adaptive “contextual” orchestration of CPUs, GPUs, QPUs, and speculative “Darwinistic” evolution where compute outlives humanity, cost, time, and energy efficiency optimization.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner in a wide-ranging conversation starting with swear words and diving into utilitarianism, longtermism, effective altruism, AI ethics, simulated consciousness, moral uncertainty, and capitalism. Rosner critiques modern frameworks, explores future consciousness, and calls for ethical clarity amid rapid technological change.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss Berlin’s controversial AI-operated “cyberbrothel,” raising urgent ethical questions about consent, violence, and societal norms. They explore future scenarios involving conscious AI sex robots, examine agency and emergent personhood, and reflect on humanity’s diminishing ethical control as AI intelligence accelerates beyond human comprehension.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner about the nature of therapy, particularly couples counseling. Rosner shares his extensive experience in therapy, noting the importance of unbiased therapists. He reflects on the complexity of discussing current events, like the Israel-Palestine conflict, within therapeutic environments, recognizing the emotional weight it carries for many, including American Jews. Rosner expresses frustration over politicization in counseling and stresses the need for impartiality. He relates this dynamic to personal communication challenges with his wife, emphasizing the role of therapy in fostering constructive dialogue about personal and external issues, including political tensions, without ideological bias.
Rick Rosner: So, you've got more powerful propaganda now. We no longer have the fairness doctrine—the policy Reagan eliminated in the 1980s—which required opposing candidates to be given equal airtime. Although many news outlets still try to adhere to that principle, I'm not exactly sure what the doctrine originally stated. Essentially, if you aired a …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1267: Inflection Upon Inflection
Rick Rosner: Now, regarding Pete HegSeth, a guy who was confirmed by a tied Senate vote of 54–50, with JD Vance (the Vice President) breaking the tie—he was confirmed as Secretary of Defense by the smallest margin in history. However, he has well-documented alcohol problems and even paid off a woman $50,000 who had accused …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1264: AI and Energy Demands, and Pete Hegseth
Rick Rosner 