The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

The Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer was a highly principled man. But above all else he was a curiosity-driven problem solver. Consider these words, in their own way as chilling as his famous Bhagavad Gita quotation (on seeing the first nuclear test, he recalled some lines from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”): “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.” It was an attitude shared by his colleague on the Manhattan Project, the brilliant, polymathic Hungarian American John von Neumann. “What we are creating now,” he said, “is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.”

When Curiosity Outruns Conscience