TagAtomic bomb
A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Canticle of Speculative Warning
A 1959 novel's speculation of nuclear fallout is yet a story of hope.This past year seems to have been the year of the atomic bomb, at least in what I’ve read and watched. I started 2023 by reading The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, a pair of novels that consistently alludes to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer arrived a few months later in July, sobering audiences worldwide and reinvigorating public interest in the godlike power these brilliant scientists had unleashed on the world. Most recently, I read the 1959 dystopian novel by Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a speculative tale about nuclear holocaust and the perennial human tendency for self-destruction. What a cheery year it’s been! Maybe I’ll switch things up and read Anne of Green Read More ›
What Oppenheimer Teaches Us About Today’s Cultural Moment
Let us hope we have the wisdom to take heed of the messages the movie communicates.
“I Can Perform This Miracle”
The new "Oppenheimer" trailer gives a chilling hint of the atom bomb raceChristopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and Interstellar, is breaking ground in the historical film genre with his upcoming film Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt. The film, currently slated for release in July, has a chilling new trailer that gives a larger sense of the movie’s scope, and the profound moral dilemma at the heart of the creation of the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the theoretical physicist largely responsible for the develop of the bomb in World War II. The new trailer emphasizes the United States’ fierce “arms race” with Germany. In the trailer, Oppenheimer says, “We’re in a race against the Nazis. And I know what it means Read More ›
Godfather of AI: I Regret What I’ve Done
The AI arms race will blur fact and fiction, says Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, often regarded as the “godfather of AI,” sat down with The New York Times and shared his concerns over the new arms race in artificial intelligence. Hinton was instrumental in AI research and is considered a pioneer in the field. Hinton revealed his departure from Google, where he worked for over a decade. Since the debut of ChatGPT-3 in November of 2022, Google has been struggling to maintain its longtime search engine dominance, trying to infuse an AI chatbot into its own search feature, alongside competitors like Microsoft. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton said. Hinton thinks that the proliferation of artificially contrived images, text, etc., will Read More ›
When Science Fiction Comes to Life…
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it sometimes grows out of itA senior editor at Wired told us a while back that science fiction writer H. G. Wells’s 1914 tale, The World Set Free, formed part of the inspiration for the atomic bomb, exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. … in the novel Wells imagines a new kind of bomb, based on a nuclear chain reaction. In this science fiction story Wells imagines that atomic energy would be discovered in 1933 (20 years in his future), and that the bomb would first explode in 1956. Wikipedia notes, “As fate or coincidence would have it, in reality the physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, conceived of the idea of nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and filed for patents on it in Read More ›
Stark Lessons from the 75th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb
Nuclear weapons have not been used to destroy a city since Hiroshima and NagasakiSeventy-five years ago today an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Einstein’s equation E=mc2 showed that 700 milligrams of mass (m), less than a third of the weight of a US dime, could be converted to enough energy (E) to destroy a Japanese city. The atomic bomb ended WWII. Advanced technology such as the atomic bomb not only wins wars but gives pause to otherwise aggressive adversaries. For this reason, I argue in my book, The Case for Killer Robots,that the United States must continue to develop cutting edge lethal AI for military use. As described in John Hersey’s essay “Hiroshima” in the New Yorker (1946), the effects of the atomic bomb were horrifying for the civilian population. Human beings Read More ›
