Rick Rosner: “Optimism drives innovation. Unrealistic optimism ignores thermodynamics, economics, and biology.”
Tag: technology
Ask A Genius 1626: U.S. Employment 2025–2026: Benchmark Revisions, Near-Zero Payroll Growth, and AI’s Labour Shock
Rick Rosner: “The trajectory is empirical, not mystical, and it deserves careful measurement rather than panic or denial.”
Ask A Genius 1617: High-Range IQ Tests in the AI Era: Mega Test, SAT, and Measuring g
“High-range IQ testing is a sport that very few people play. At this point, with individual intelligence increasingly intertwined with technologically assisted intelligence, you would have to convince me there is still a compelling use for this subculture.”
Ask A Genius 1610: The New York Post, Murdoch’s Media Strategy, and Why James Cameron Chose New Zealand
“It would also exist essentially to irritate liberals every day, which amounts to free publicity.”
Ask A Genius 1594: Venezuela, Power, and Why Language Made Humans Dangerous Generalists
“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.”
Ask A Genius 1587: Why Rick Rosner Wants to Die by Cryonic Preservation
“I would choose cryonic preservation. Your blood and water are replaced with cryoprotective solutions, then your body is cooled to liquid-nitrogen temperatures to avoid ice crystals that destroy tissue. Revival remains speculative—no one has ever been brought back—but if identity can be preserved, I believe it is worth attempting.”
Ask A Genius 1584: AI Growth, Human Cognition, and the Myth of Consciousness as Excellence
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.
Ask A Genius 1575: Merging, Understanding, and the Limits of Belief
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.
Ask A Genius 1491: Gen Z’s Digital Dependence, Declining Sex Rates, and Future in an AI-Driven, Modified World
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss Gen Z’s deep reliance on digital devices, reduced face-to-face interaction, and declining sexual activity. Using the “hermit crab” analogy, Rosner suggests Gen Z feels vulnerable without phones but functions well in a tech-supported world. Data shows historic lows in partnered sex, masturbation, and romantic relationships among young people, driven by over-entertainment, anxiety, and social challenges. While this trend could lower birth rates and ease environmental pressures, it also raises economic concerns for consumer-driven capitalism. The conversation explores potential societal shifts, AI integration, and acceptance of future human modifications as adaptation strategies.
Ask A Genius 1396: Envisioning Diverse Paradigms of Future Computation
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.
Rick Rosner 