Politics of tech

‘Oppenheimer’ and the politics of tech

By BEN SCHRECKINGER

If you think the relationship between tech leaders and Washington is fraught now, the movie “Oppenheimer” — the weekend’s #2 top-grossing release, after the Barbie movie — offers a reminder that it was once much, much tenser.

The Robert Oppenheimer biopic, if you’ve somehow missed both the PR onslaught and the three-hour film itself, tells the story of the atom bomb’s invention. But the film, based on the monumental 2005 biography “American Prometheus,” actually revolves around a political mess in the Manhattan Project’s aftermath.

Oppenheimer was the physicist in charge of the project, but in the years that followed, he became outspoken about the dangers of a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, warning that it threatened humanity’s survival.

Then in 1954, with Washington in the grip of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, the Energy Department stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance on the basis of his personal associations with communists. (In December, the Biden administration made the symbolic gesture of reversing the decision, saying it resulted from a “flawed process.”)

That all happened seven decades ago, but it’s lost on precisely nobody that Washington is, once again, grappling with the proliferation of another technology that carries potentially existential stakes.

The film’s director, Christopher Nolan, has noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and the AI pioneers who are now warning about the technology’s dangers.

On Thursday, Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts met with “American Prometheus” co-author Kai Bird in Washington to discuss Markey’s proposal to amend the National Defense Authorization Act, which is currently before the Senate, to ban the use of AI in making nuclear launch decisions.

DFD spoke to Bird Friday about those parallels, the role of scientists in public life, and yes, this weekend’s other blockbuster release.

What lesson does Oppenheimer’s experience offer right now, as Washington scrambles to figure out what to do about AI?

We need to be having informed discussion. And our politicians are going to need to start thinking and passing some legislation to regulate this technology.

What happened to Oppenheimer should be a reminder that the sooner we do that, the better.

Oppenheimer created the atomic bomb, and within months he was speaking out publicly about the dangers it posed and the need to regulate it and to create international guidelines and norms for ensuring that we don’t engage in an arms race. Well, he was ignored. Harry Truman ignored his advice and the national security establishment helped to bring him down precisely because he was threatening their budgets. And instead of regulating nuclear weapons and essentially banning them, which is what should have happened under international controls, we engaged in a very expensive arms race.

You just met with Ed Markey about his NDAA amendment. What do you make of the amendment, and its chances?

He’s introducing legislation to prohibit the use of AI in launching decisions for nuclear weapons, which would seem to be a wholly commonsensical thing to do.

But he explained to me that he’s encountering questions and reluctance from his Republican colleagues who say, “We don’t think we need to address this now,” and “Aren’t some of our adversaries already trying to use AI to determine when and how to use nuclear weapons? So if they do, don’t we have to do it?” And of course I disagree with that.

The film depicts Harry Truman’s disgust with Oppenheimer’s misgivings about the bomb during an Oval Office meeting. The president comes off as callous in that scene, but isn’t there a case that people in academic communities often have visions for society that tend toward the utopian or impractical, and that scientists should be subordinated to elected leaders when it comes to shaping public policy decisions?

No, because I don’t think our politicians, many of them are scientists. So we need to understand that scientists should be a part of a political debate.

And they themselves will disagree based on their own philosophical and religious and ethical values. But nevertheless, they are important parts of the debate because they have a knowledge about the technical and scientific issues.

Much of the movie revolves around the question of whether Oppenheimer’s advice to government officials — on the export of radioactive isotopes and the development of a hydrogen bomb — was purely technical, or was somehow tainted by communist sympathies. How do you draw a line between a scientist’s technical conclusions and their views about the world?

I think it’s impossible to separate your values. Oppenheimer was a great scientist precisely because he was a humanist as well. And he loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the novels of Ernest Hemingway.

The notion that scientists should only be giving quote “objective” scientific advice is precisely the problem. Oppenheimer was always trying to use his political values to inform us on the choices we faced with how to live with the bomb. And that was quite proper.