Richard Rhodes: evaluation

Transcript context

…s mistakes. I made mistakes. Oppenheimer would charge me with a mistake if I spoke wrong. But before the war, after the war, but not during the war.” During the war, he was a superb wise lab director. Because unlike most scientists, he was not only a physicist of high class, but he really was psychologically astute as a human being, as I think insecure people often are because got to scope out what's going on. Oppenheimer wrote pretty good poetry. He was interested in art. He wanted to read the Bhagavad Gita Gita in the original Sanskrit so he learned Sanskrit. He was very smart, needless to say, and had a very high IQ. Not all the physicists who did first class work did have high IQs. They took some other qualities as well. It took the [unclear] sitting down in a chair and focusing on one thing until you got through to it. That's what Robbie said. And he said, that's why Oppenheimer never won a Nobel Prize. All in all, Oppenheimer became in this place that some of these people later were calling [unclear]. Remember they were working on a bomb that was going to kill hundreds of thousands of people but it was the most curious collection of people who had felt like theirs was a spiritual field before the war. And here they were in the war and they began to think, well, maybe this isn't so spiritual, maybe we're doing something truly horrendous and when Bohr comes along and says, wait a minute. Oppenheimer by then was kind of a student of Bohr's. Oppenheimer had the job of recruiting everyone for Los Alamos without telling them what they would be doing because it was secret. So he would go to a university campus where there was a young physicist he wanted to recruit and they would go out for a walk to get away from any hidden microphones. And Oppenheimer would say, I can't tell you what we're going to be doing. I can tell you that it will certainly end this war and it may end all war. And that was quite enough. I mean, most of them figured out what they'd be doing anyway, because it was sort of obvious when you start looking at the list of people who are going there. They're all nuclear physicists. So Oppenheimer and Bohr together brought this idea to Los Alamos and later to the world that there was a paradox. The bomb had two sides and they were in a sense complementary because although it's certainly true that this was going to be a very destructive weapon, it would also maybe be true if all worked out and they tried to make it work out, that it would put an end to large scale war. If you go to the numbers and graph the number of man-made deaths from war starting in the 18th century, it's almost exponential up to 1943, when 15 million people died between the war itself and the Holocaust. And then it starts to decline as the war begins to come to an end. The war is really 1945. It drops down to about one to two million deaths and it stays there ever after. And although one to two million deaths a year from war is nothing to be proud of, we lose six to seven million people in the world every year from smoking. illion deaths and it stays there ever after. And although one to two million deaths a year from war is nothing to be proud of, we lose six to seven million people in the world every year from smoking. So in a curious way, the introduction of how to control nuclear energy changed the nature of nation states such that they could no longer at the limit defend their borders with war. They had to find some other way, at least when the scale goes up, they had to find another way. I think that's very important because people somehow don't really understand what a millennial change, the introduction of the release of nuclear energy into the world, really was. As we've been talking, I've been thinking over and over again about your question about AI and the whole larger interesting question that you can see how it fits into the bomb story of unintended consequences. All the countries that worked on the bomb at some level were thinking, oh my god, we're going to have a weapon that will surpass them all. One ring to bind them all like Lord of the Rings. They thought it would aggrandize national power, but what it did was put a limit to national power. For the first time in the history of the world, war became something that was historical, rather than universal. It was something that would no longer be possible. And who did that? Scientists going about their quiet work of talking to each other and exploring the way the universe works. Bohr, who's one of my favorite people in the world, he liked to say, science is not about power over nature, as people seem to think. Science is about the gradual removal of prejudice. By that, he meant when Galileo and Copernicus changed the way everyone looked at the position of the earth in the universe, not the center of the universe anymore, but just a planet revolving around a third-rate star. It changed the way everyone thought about the whole world. When Darwin definitively identified our place in the natural world as a brainy ape, it's still taking time for a lot of people to swallow that one. But inch by inch, these prejudices about where we are in the world and how powerful we are and what our purpose is and so forth are being drained away by science. The science of nuclear fission and nuclear energy is draining away and has drained away the theory that we are sort of universally capable of destroying each other and getting away with it. But the dark side is, the unintended consequence is, it's only by having a Damocles sword over our heads, the potential for destruction of the human world, that it's possible to limit war in this way. That's the threat. And when people start saying, well, look, we can have a conventional war if we've got nuclear weapons, because you're not going to attack us. You don't dare. We'll use our nuclear weapons on you. Something's changed most recently in all of this. It's outside the range of all the books I've written. It's a whole new thing. I guess you have to work through all the combinations, just as evolution does, before you come up with the one that actually fits the reality of the world. There's at least 10 different things and I'm trying to think which branch of the tree I want to explore first. On the AI question, yeah, I'm trying not explicitly connect the dots too much. Every time I read something in history, I think oh, this is exactly like so and so. First of all, the broader outline of the super eclectic group of people who are engaged in this historical pursuit, they understand it's a historical pursuit, they see the inklings of it. My second to last guest was Ilya Sutskever, who is the chief scientist at OpenAI which is the big lab building this. He was basically the Szliard of AI, how Szilard discovered nuclear chain reaction, Sutskever was the first person to train a neural network called ImageNet. Anyway, from that moment on, he was one of these scientists who sees that you could build a nuclear bomb immediately as soon as the news hits the floor. He saw this coming 10 years ago, scale this up and you've got something that's human level intelligent. I was reading through the book and so many things like this came up. One was a good friend of mine who works at one of these companies. And they train these models on GPUs, which are computers that can perform all these matrix calculations in parallel. And I was thinking about these engineers who were in short supply during the making of the bomb, let's say they're working on the electromagnetic separation of the isotopes. And it's this really esoteric thing, you're a chemist or a metallurgist or something that you're really needed for this specific thing. And he's in super high demand right now, he's like the one guy who can make these very particular machines run as efficiently as possible. You start looking and there's so many analogies there.…

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