Aipocalypse: Winning the AI/SI Race is Surviving It
What if winning the AI/SI race was surviving it?
Part 3 of a series, following "Probably Provenance" and "Human in the Loop."
Weapons of Mass Destruction
In the summer of 1942, three years before anyone detonated an atomic bomb, a small group of physicists met at Berkeley to sketch a weapon that didn't exist yet. Edward Teller raised a question that still sounds like science fiction: what if the explosion ignites the nitrogen in the air? Not a city. The sky.
They didn't wave it off. Hans Bethe and others worked the numbers and concluded the air couldn't sustain a runaway reaction. The worry never fully left the room, though. Minutes before the Trinity test in July 1945, people were still joking about it, and Enrico Fermi reportedly took bets, understood as a joke, on whether the blast would destroy just New Mexico or the whole world. When the...
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