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: How can you construct feelings into robots if that can be done? Rick Rosner: Well, an editorial in the LA Times this morning asked, "Are you going to be mean to your phone when it has emotions?" It suggested that phones might have emotions within the next 10 years. That's plausible. I forget exactly …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1240: Constructs with Contructed Feelings
Rick Rosner: I do believe in magnetic personalities, though, because I live in a town of schmoozers. Do you know what a schmoozer is? Jacobsen: Yes. Someone who basically kisses up—a kind of social smooth-talker. Rosner: It’s Yiddish. Jacobsen: I wasn’t sure if it was in the general non-Jewish lexicon. Rosner: It is. My stepdad …
*Interview conducted in October-November, 2024.* Rick Rosner: So, we were talking about people being glued to their phones. I’m not sure if it’s as bad in semi-rural Canada as it is in L.A., or in places like Hong Kong. Carole and I were in Hong Kong 30 years ago. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was that …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1172: The Big Arc of Technological Integration
*Interview conducted in October-November, 2024.* Scott Douglas Jacobsen: By the way, what would the surface area of the Earth be if it were laid out flat in two dimensions? Rick Rosner: The Earth’s total surface area is roughly 200 million square miles, with land making up about 50 million square miles. Jacobsen: That seems close …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1171: Mr. Evolution Via Natural Selection
*Interview conducted October/November, 2024.* Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who is your favorite philosopher? Rick Rosner: That I have one? What Wittgenstein’s or Kierkegaard’s or most people’s most famous philosophers’ philosophy was, I don’t know. I can say one sentence about existentialism. I started taking a grad-level course in phenomenology when I was at CU, but I …
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the weirdest physics fact that you find interesting? Rick Rosner: The thing I find most consistently weird in physics is how you can make objects float in mid-air in a superconductor field or a magnetic field. That floating effect—where something just hovers—if you wanted to show someone how strange physics can …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1120: Weird Physics of the World
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
Rick Rosner 