Ask A Genius 907: Simulations of Consciousness Before Consciousness

[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

Ask A Genius 906: The Funk in Daily Life from Trump

[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

Ask A Genius 904: Travel, “Valence,” and Abstractions

[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

Ask A Genius 903: Pessimism in Reporting

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: On Twitter, I left it up. Pessimism in news reporting is a thread about how bad news gets more eyeballs than good news. So, it goes into various areas. It is by John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times and a senior fellow at LSE Data Science. He shows …

Continue reading Ask A Genius 903: Pessimism in Reporting

Ask A Genius 900: Canadian and American Politics

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I wanted to make a point about comparing Canadian and American politics. A recent thing arose that I think is essential with a woman named Selena Robinson; she's the minister of postsecondary education and future skills of British Columbia. She made an insensitive, according to many, comment about Israel and …

Continue reading Ask A Genius 900: Canadian and American Politics

Ask A Genius 899: California Under Attack?

[Recording Start]  Rick Rosner: California is attacked by Conservatives for just being a liberal hell and that people are fleeing California for the free states of Texas and Florida. There's a lot of bullshit in that California has lost about 1% of its population. Some people made a ton of money in California and want to …

Continue reading Ask A Genius 899: California Under Attack?

Ask A Genius 898: Niches of Persistence

[Recording Start]  Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I proposed a topic on how evolution finds all niches of persistence. Those are generic abstract terms. I wanted to start with reproduction styles, and I'm speaking more about biological reproduction. So, our species has its form of reproduction, and I'm speaking purely in terms of a continuation of a …

Continue reading Ask A Genius 898: Niches of Persistence