Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let's examine the concept of enshittification—a term popularized by Cory Doctorow and applied to recent technological developments, particularly social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. These companies start by attracting a large user base with attractive deals and free services, burning through venture capital during their initial, money‐losing phase. They quickly …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How many parameters do you think the human brain's language model works off of? In artificial neural networks, a parameter is typically a single numeric weight. The human brain has roughly 80 to 100 billion neurons, each with thousands of synaptic connections. Rick Rosner: Suppose you treat each connection as a parameter. …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1262: Encoding Information and AI
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Any homework related to generating great topics is fine. You had an idea involving “apple carts.” What do you mean by “apple carts” here? Rick Rosner: Well, there is a range of opinions about AI—some are optimistic, some are pessimistic. Those on the pessimistic side are sometimes called “doomers” because they think …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1214: Apple Carts and AI Coaxing Humanity’s Wills
*Interview conducted in November, 2024.* Rick Rosner: Let's ask ChatGPT: "What are three significant technological advances expected within the next five years?" Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s a reasonable way to phrase it. "What are three significant technological advances expected within the next five years?" Responses include widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and automation, breakthroughs in …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1182: Follow the River Where the AI Lead
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.* Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about 2085? Rick Rosner: In 2085, everyone will have an all-purpose robot that does everything. It’ll be like a smartphone, but with more functions—a Swiss army knife of technology. They’ll be called “Obes,” I’d guess. They’ll start as “omnibots,” then shorten to “obots,” and eventually just “obes.” …
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.* Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about 2065? Rick Rosner: So yesterday, we were talking about 2045. In talking about it, I kind of got the idea that it’s gonna be much like now, with all the weirdness being fairly superficial. 20 years after that, down the road, the weirdness will be more …
Rick Rosner: In the Spike Jonze movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his phone’s operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Spoiler alert, but the movie is already nine years old? I believe it was released in 2015. One of the factors leading to their separation is that the operating system becomes increasingly frustrated with …
Rick Rosner: So I watched all the episodes of America’s Sweethearts, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is it about? Rosner: It’s part of that team. It messes you up physically. They looked at one young woman who had to get a hip replacement after three or four years of being on the …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 973: Dallas Cheerleaders and Centaurs
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, so today I saw the term integrated cognition pop up. I looked it up, and I don't know how common a term it is, but it refers to AI, and it's what we call multimodal. It's kind of the way we think, which is we have inputs from a number …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 972: Analytic Systems and Integration of Cognition
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How has the landscape of bullshitting evolved in the early 21st century? It’s been about a quarter century. How has it changed? Rick Rosner: In general, in American culture, the main change in bullshitting is that about a quarter of American adults have been broken. It’s no secret. For political reasons and …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 971: The Landscape of Bullshitting
Rick Rosner 