Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

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Well, the Manhattan project springs to mind. They truly thought they were laboring for the public good, and even if the government let them wouldn’t have wanted to publish their progress.

Personally I find the comparison of this whole saga (deepmind -> google —> openai —> anthropic —-> mistral —-> ?) to the Manhattan project very enlightening, both of this project and our society. Instead of a centralized government project, we have a loosely organized mad dash of global multinationals for research talent, all of which claim the exact same “they’ll do it first!” motivations as always. And of course it’s accompanied by all sorts of media rhetoric and posturing through memes, 60-Minutes interviews, and (apparently) gossipy slap back blog posts.

In this scenario, Oppenheimer is clearly Hinton, who’s deep into his act III. That would mean that the real Manhattan project of AI took place in roughly 2018-2022 rather than now, which I think also makes sense; ChatGPT was the surprise breakthrough (A-bomb), and now they’re just polishing that into the more effective fully-realized forms of the technology (H-bomb, ICBMs).

> They truly thought they were laboring for the public good

Nah. They knew they were working for their side against the other guys, and were honest about that.

The comparison is dumb. It wasn’t called the “open atomic bomb project”

Exactly. And the OpenAI actually called it "open atomic bomb project".

They literally created weapons of mass destruction.

Do you think they thought they were good guys because you watched a Hollywood movie?

If you really think you're fighting evil in a war for global domination, it's easy to justify to yourself that it's important you have the weapons before they do. Even if you don't think you're fighting evil; you'd still want to develop the weapons before your enemies so it won't be used against you and threaten your way of life.

I'm not taking a stance here, but it's easy to see why many Americans believed developing the atomic bomb was a net positive at least for Americans, and depending on how you interpret it even the world.

The war against Germany was over before the bomb was finished. And it was clear long before then that Germany was not building a bomb.

The scientists who continued after that (not all did) must have had some other motivation at that point.

I kind of understand that motivation, it is a once in a lifetime project, you are part of it, you want to finish it.

Morals are hard in real life, and sometimes really fuzzy.

In this note: HIGHLY recommend “Rigor of Angels”, which (in part) details Heisenbergs life and his moral qualms about building a bomb. He just wanted to be left alone and perfect his science, and it’s really interesting to see how such a laudable motivation can be turned to such deplorable, unforgivable (IMO) ends.

Long story short they claim they thought the bomb was impossible, but it was still a large matter of concern for him as he worked on nuclear power. The most interesting tidbit was that Heisenberg was in a small way responsible for (west) Germany’s ongoing ban on nuclear weapons, which is a slight redemption arc.

Heisenberg makes you think, doesn't he? As the developer of Hitler's bomb, which never was a realistic thing to begin with, he never employed slave labour for example. Nor was any of his stuff used during warfare. And still, he is seen by some as some tragic figure, at worst as man behind Hitler's bomb.

Wernher vin Braun on the other hand got lauded for his contribution to space exploration. His development of the V2 and his use of slave labour in building them was somehow just a minor disgression for the, ultimately under US leadership, greater good.

To be reductionist - history is written by the victors.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/status-2

Charitably I think most would see it as an appropriate if unexpected metaphor.

I think they thought it would be far better that America developed the bomb than Nazis Germany, and the Allies needed to do whatever it too to stop Hitler, even if that did mean using nuclear bombs.

Japan and the Soviet Union were more complicated issues for some of the scientists. But that's what happens with warfare. You develop new weapons, and they aren't just used for one enemy.

What did Lehrer (?) sing about von Braun? "I make rockets go up, where they come down is not my department".

Don't say that he's hypocritical,

Say rather that he's apolitical.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

That's the one, thank you!

Hmm do you have some sources? That sounds interesting. Obviously there’s always doubt, but yeah I was under the impression everyone at the Manhattan project truly believed that the Axis powers were objectively evil, so any action is justified. Obviously that sorta thinking falls apart on deeper analysis, but it’s very common during full war, no?

EDIT: tried to take the onus off you, but as usual history is more complicated than I expected. Clearly I know nothing because I had no idea of the scope:

  At its peak, it employed over 125,000 direct staff members, and probably a larger number of additional people were involved through the subcontracted labor that fed raw resources into the project. Because of the high rate of labor turnover on the project, some 500,000 Americans worked on some aspect of the sprawling Manhattan Project, almost 1% of the entire US civilian labor force during World War II.

Sooo unless you choose an arbitrary group of scientists, it seems hard. I haven’t seen Oppenheimer but I understand it carries on the narrative that he “focused on the science” until the end of the war when his conscience took over. I’ll mostly look into that…

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