The Man Who Wrote the AI Doomer Bible - The Atlantic

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The Man Who Wrote the AI Doomer Bible - The Atlantic

Richard Rhodes wrote a classic book about Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. AI researchers are eager to see themselves in it. Photograph by Ian Allen for The Atlantic July 20, 2023, 4:34 PM ET Doom lurks in every nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s home office. A framed photograph of three men in military fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first appear to be two water heaters but are, in fact, thermonuclear weapons. Resting against a nearby wall is a black-and-white print depicting the first billionth of a second after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba. And above us, dangling from the ceiling like the sword of Damocles, is a plastic model of the Hindenburg. Depending on how you choose to look at it, Rhodes’s office is either a shrine to awe-inspiring technological progress or a harsh reminder of its power to incinerate us all in the blink of an eye. Today, it feels like the nexus of our cultural and technological universes. Rhodes is the 86-year-old author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb , a Pulitzer Prize–winning book that has become a kind of holy text for a certain type of AI researcher—namely, the type who believes their creations might have the power to kill us all. On Friday afternoon, he will take his seat in a West Seattle theater and, like many other moviegoers, watch Oppenheimer , Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster about the Manhattan Project. (The film is not based on his book, though he suspects his text served as a research aid; he’s excited to see it anyway.) Read: Oppenheimer is more than a creation myth about the atomic bomb I first encountered The Making of the Atomic Bomb in March, when I spoke with an AI researcher who said he carts the doorstop-size book around every day. (It’s a reminder that his mandate is to push the bounds of technological progress, he explained—and a motivational tool to work 17-hour days.) Since then, I’ve heard the book mentioned on podcasts and cited in conversations I’ve had with people who fear that artificial intelligence will doom us all. “I know tons of people working on AI policy who’ve been reading Rhodes’s book for inspiration,” Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote recently. A New York Times profile of the AI company Anthropic notes that Rhodes’s book is “popular among the company’s employees,” some of whom “compared themselves to modern-day Robert Oppenheimers.” Like Oppenheimer before them, many merchants of AI believe their creations might change the course of history, and so they wrestle with profound moral concerns. Even as they build the technology, they worry about what will happen if AI becomes smarter than humans and goes rogue, a speculative possibility that has morphed into an unshakable neurosis as generative-AI models take in vast quantities of information and appear ever more capable. More than 40 years ago, Rhodes set out to write the definitive account of one of the most consequential achievements in human history. Today, it’s scrutinized like an instruction manual. Rhodes isn’t a doomer himself, but he understands the parallels between the work at Los Alamos in the 1940s and what’s happening in Silicon Valley today. “Oppenheimer talked a lot about how the bomb was both the peril and the hope,” Rhodes told me—it could end the war while simultaneously threatening to end humanity. He has said that AI might be as transformative as nuclear energy, and has watched with interest as Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have engaged in a frenzied competition to build and deploy it. Read: AI doomerism is a decoy AI boosters and builders would no doubt take comfort in an argument Rhodes once made, in the foreword to the 25th-anniversary edition of his book, that the discovery of nuclear fission, and thereby the bomb, was inevitable. “To stop it, you would have had to stop physics,” he writes. This argument echoes in the rhetoric of bullish AI companies and governments who see the technology as part of a global informational arms race. Democratic nations cannot pause or wait for laws to catch up, the logic goes, lest we lose out to China or some other hostile power. That idea helps explain why a technologist would construct an AI system even as they believe it could extinguish human life—and so does the epigraph in the first section of The Ma...