9/11, AI, Media, and the Future

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss the long-term consequences of 9/11, veteran suicide, media bias toward catastrophe, AI’s effects on cognition and intimacy, human progress, Cory Doctorow, journalism, American civic culture, Gene Roddenberry, and competing visions of technological futures shaped by ethics, markets, and power.

Rick Rosner: We know that the collapse of the World Trade Center exposed responders, workers, and residents to a complex mixture of dust, smoke, and other contaminants, and thousands of people enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program have since died. But you cannot simply attribute every post-9/11 death among that population directly to air pollution from the attacks. So the long-term health toll is substantial, maybe 9,000 people died from breathing Lower Manhattan air in the months after 9/11.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, a few things. Kudos to Jon Stewart for his sustained advocacy for 9/11 responders and survivors. Also, Americans get a lot of flak for this, but really, most people have some form of ignorance about these issues. Americans are among the most publicly visible populations in the world. They are about 4% of the world population, but some of the loudest motherfuckers on the planet.

Rosner: Sure.

Jacobsen: And there is a lot of self-deprecation, right? So there is some national self-criticism. Now, as roughly 4% of the world's population, while having a disproportionately large share of global media influence, there is still a general ignorance about the secondary impacts after major events. So, a major terrorist attack like 9/11 and all the other stuff, including exposure to asbestos and other hazardous materials.

The war context here also brings this to mind. Veterans who came home from Afghanistan and Iraq faced significant long-term consequences. The legality of the Iraq War remains heavily debated, while the Afghanistan intervention initially had broader international legal and political support. In America, the right and the left are wrong and right in different ways. Among post-9/11 U.S. service members and veterans, suicide has also imposed a substantial toll, with research estimating that suicides have exceeded the number of service members killed in post-9/11 military operations.

So your point is well taken, but there is also a broader and important educational point: exposure to dust and contaminants from the World Trade Center disaster had substantial health consequences. In another context, looking back, suicide among veterans and service members has also produced a major long-term death toll.

The first thing is insufficient access to mental-health care, or the stigma associated with even seeking mental-health care for a lot of men. Stigma can come from some women, some men, institutions, and from individuals themselves. It is a broader issue. I am not blaming any particular person, population, or institution.

And so that is actually a really important point: the derivative effects of catastrophes are not necessarily in the main news item. It is what follows. But there is also positive evidence. You do not really hear news items like, "Tens of thousands of people were lifted above the international extreme-poverty threshold today." That might otherwise be front-page news.

Rosner: So today on Twitter, one of the news stories was that median U.S. household income had reached around $87,000.

Jacobsen: So there is a lot to be proud of.

Rosner: Yeah, you are right. Bad news gets more coverage. Good news is more gradual. Bad news gets coverage. Immediate catastrophe gets the most coverage. And derivative effects, bad effects, can get misaligned coverage too.

Jacobsen: So we have to correct two things as media people and as critically consuming publics, which I do not necessarily have any optimism about, but it is a point. We need to emphasize how much good has been happening. But we also need to think about the immediate negative effect that is newsworthy, and also cover the slower, derivative effects. Those two counterbalances, from the media and from the public, could actually do a lot of helpful corrective work in public commentary.

Rosner: That brings us, in my mind at least, back around to AI, because you were talking about good. And thanks to AI, even if AI doesn't kill all of us, it will force us to change our view of what is good.

Because we know the reverse Flynn effect is making people stupider, right?  But people plus AI aren't necessarily stupider. People, when you interact with them, might be dumber, might be less able to have one-on-one face-to-face repartee because of tech has reduced our... might be less able to write a term paper.

Because there is evidence of a reverse Flynn effect in some countries and cohorts, with average scores on certain cognitive tests declining after decades of increases, right? But people plus AI are not necessarily becoming less capable. When you interact with people, they might be less able to have one-on-one, face-to-face repartee because technology has changed how we interact. They might be less able to write a term paper without assistance. They might be less able to read a book because they can't concentrate.

But thanks to AI and constant interaction with technology, we are certainly going to be better at some stuff than we were before this technology. And we do not have a good handle on what future goodness is going to look like. We know it is going to be weird.

We know that at some point in the future, millions of guys may be fucking robots. That is, they will not be fucking robots; they will be having sex with robots. And that sounds super dystopian, but in practice it may only be somewhat dystopian, right? There are already people using technologically sophisticated sex dolls and early forms of robotic sexual devices.

But right now it is relatively uncommon. As the robots get better, the people who turn to that will probably become a broader cross-section of the population than the earlier adopters. And it will not just be fucking robots. It will be all sorts of intimate relationships between humans and AI.

And there may be benefits to this, including perhaps some version of radically extended life, but it will not look like life now. There will be some goodness in it. There will be some creepiness and certainly some badness and some tragedy. On average, if we are lucky, there may be an overall increase in goodness. Not good behaviour, but good in terms of a pastoral fucking world of humans plus fucking AI, and not necessarily unmodified humans, but humans with technological add-ons and built-ins, kind of Borg-like. And fucking being able to talk to your dog because your dog has a chip in its head too. Go ahead.

Jacobsen: Human health and well-being have improved substantially by many measurable indicators over the long term, including life expectancy, child survival, and reductions in extreme poverty, although progress is uneven and some indicators have recently stagnated or reversed in particular places. Human behaviour may or may not improve alongside those developments, although you can make a general argument that people are less sick.

And if people are physically and mentally healthy and emotionally balanced, then they may be more likely to behave better. But you will still have the perennial problems of bad behaviour.

This also creates new problems, which futurists have discussed for decades, many of whom have been associated with traditions such as secular humanism, Unitarian Universalism, Ethical Culture, and Humanistic Judaism. Isaac Asimov, for example, served as president of the American Humanist Association, was an honorary president of American Mensa, and was one of the most prolific and influential science-fiction authors and futurist thinkers of the 20th century. Right? So a lot of people come along in our traditions, and they not only ask difficult questions; they give answers.

I mean, they might use goofy terms like "positronic brain," but the fundamental ideas are important scenario-building exercises for considering the future. And the people who are building technology today, I think the general joke is that the ones who are building the dystopia are the ones who only read the first few chapters, and the ones who are trying to build the ethics around the technology are the ones who read the whole series and the whole books.

Cory Doctorow is admirably sophisticated and truly understands his subject. He is immensely knowledgeable, and he is responsive to active problems using accurate language that is comprehensible to pretty much everyone.

Rosner: He is so clear and entertaining about fucking everything.

Jacobsen: Remarkable. He really is a remarkable communicator. He is the Oprah of contemporary futurists and technology-policy writers because he really understands how to communicate complicated issues.

I look at some of the most prolific interviewers in broadcasting history. Larry King conducted tens of thousands of interviews over his career. That is insane. Oprah Winfrey has also conducted thousands of televised interviews and conversations over decades. Enormously talented woman. And we still have her. Larry King, unfortunately, is long gone.

Beyond those two, I have some candidates. I would like my name to be up there eventually. But in terms of journalists, maybe in a personal top five, I would include someone like Fareed Zakaria. America has attracted a lot of very talented people. Among those who are like an Oprah of futurist technology-policy writers, who can communicate clearly to the public and are still listened to, is Cory Doctorow. He is up there among those people.

Rosner: I like him.

Jacobsen: I like Cory Doctorow.

Rosner: Yeah.

Jacobsen: Another excellent communicator who does not get enough praise is Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!. She received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award in 2024.

She does proper, almost flat journalism, but she gets the details right. She offers a left-wing perspective, which has its issues, but she delivers knowledgeable journalism from that perspective and keeps doing her work in an environment that can be hostile to left-wing views.

Rosner: Which brings us back to America now. America has definitely gotten more douchey since World War II. And it is largely, well, political agitation and tech. Personalized tech can make people more self-focused. In the frickin' 1930s, we were all in the fucking Depression, suffering together. Some Americans volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, including roughly 2,800 who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and related International Brigades in support of the Spanish Republic. And then you had millions of people who, not necessarily willingly or enthusiastically, went off to fight in World War II.

Jacobsen: To make the world safe for democracy. Was that World War II? I think it was.

Rosner: The phrase is more closely associated with Woodrow Wilson and U.S. entry into World War I. But anyway, you cannot imagine... I mean, there were a ton of isolationist forces back then too, particularly before Pearl Harbour. But after the United States entered World War II, the country mobilized on a massive scale.

War sucks, but Americans widely understood themselves as fighting for a good cause. And that opinion of ourselves as good people, noble and sacrificing and willing to work with others to make everything better for everybody, has been eroded more recently. But that can maybe be seen as a blip on the overall... What is it? What is MLK Jr.'s? The arc of the moral universe?

Jacobsen: Towards justice, yeah.

Rosner: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." King famously used that formulation, adapting an idea Theodore Parker expressed much earlier. We are a bunch of douchebags right now in America, but we can see that as a temporary dip, maybe caused partly by technology and perhaps to some extent by the social and psychological disruption associated with COVID. I do not know.

I have got other stuff, or do we call it a night?

Jacobsen: We can do more.

Rosner: All right. One more thing about Cory Doctorow. He is the guy who, for people who do not know him, came up with the term "enshittification," which is a great concept. The word itself is maybe too long, but what are you going to do? It describes how online platforms that initially provide substantial value to users become progressively worse as their operators shift value toward business customers and then toward themselves.

Oh, also one more thing. Frickin' the guy who came up with Star Trek. What is his name?

Jacobsen: Roddenberry, right?

Rosner: Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek was created by Roddenberry, who flew combat missions as a U.S. Army Air Forces pilot during World War II and later became a Los Angeles police officer. Then he had this idea of a more optimistic future where humanity had overcome many of its internal divisions. And he is maybe the epitome of someone who didn't just read the first few chapters.

Right? Because in the Star Trek future, they are mostly on a ship. They get along on the ship unless there is an episode where some alien presence turns everybody into an asshole. But mostly it is people of different races and, to a more limited extent in the original series, genders, doing their jobs together, which was unusual for American television at the time. In later Star Trek series and films, when they go back to Earth, you often see a really clean, nice future.

And that Star Trek future, and to some extent, though less so, Star Wars, is free of... Well, let's just stick to Star Trek. It is super clean, everybody gets along, and the Federation has little conventional advertising or money-driven consumer culture.

Jacobsen: When you said "first few chapters of the book," it is like a...

Rosner: Is it a little naive? Yeah. To come up with a more complete vision of the future, you need to incorporate gross market forces, right? The icky... You have got to Blade Runner it up a little bit.

Jacobsen: Time to go.

Rosner: All right. Thank you. See you tomorrow.

Jacobsen: I will see you tomorrow.

Richard “Rick” Rosner (born May 2, 1960) is an American television writer, producer, game-show writer, media personality, and high-range intelligence-test participant. His credits include Remote Control, The World’s Funniest!, Twenty-One, The Weakest Link, The Man Show, Crank Yankers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Grammy Awards, and the Primetime Emmy Awards. He wrote more than 1,000 credited episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, won a 2012 Writers Guild Award as part of the After the Academy Awards writing team, received multiple Writers Guild nominations, and earned a 2013 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Rosner achieved the only known perfect score on Ronald K. Hoeflin’s Titan Test, ranked among the leading scorers on the Omni Mega Test, and served six years as editor of Noesis, the Mega Society journal. He earned approximately twelve years of college credit within one year and completing requirements equivalent to eight academic majors. In 2013, the World Genius Directory named him “Genius of the Year - America.” Rosner appeared on Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, was profiled by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris in First Person: One in a Million Trillion, and has spent decades developing ideas in cosmology, intelligence, science, technology, television, and culture.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with more than 200 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.