Tag Archive for: J. Robert Oppenheimer

After watching ‘Oppenheimer’ I realized that what he went thru in 1954 is what Trump is going thru in 2024

After viewing the Oscar winning best picture “Oppenheimer” I was struck by the similarities between what J. Robert Oppenheimer went thru in 1954 and what President Donald J. Trump is now going thru, 70 years later, in 2024.

WATCH: Nuclear Turning Point: The Birth Of The Atomic Age | The Real Oppenheimer | Timeline

Dr. Oppenheimer, born in New York, NY, was a well respected theoretical physicist. Dr. Oppenheimer because of his expertise was chosen to lead the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Dr. Oppenheimer built what has become the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Donald J. Trump, born in New York, NY, is a highly successful real estate developer and businessman who owned, managed, or licensed his name to hotels, casinos, golf courses, resorts, and residential properties in the New York City area and around the world. Mr. Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States.

On December 21, 1953, Dr. Oppenheimer was notified of a military security report unfavourable to him and was accused of having associated with communists in the past, of delaying the naming of Soviet agents, and of opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb.

In 2016 members of President Donald J. Trump staff were accused by the Department of Justice of cooperating with Russia. The Robert Mueller special counsel investigation was conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. The investigation resulted in roughly three dozen criminal charges, including convictions of a half-dozen Trump associates, and concluded that Russia intervened on the Trump campaign’s behalf and that the campaign welcomed the help [These charges were based upon the Steel Dossier that has be debunked]. The investigation resulted in charges against 34 individuals and 3 companies, 8 guilty pleas, and a conviction at trial. John Durham, the former U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to lead a review of the genesis of the investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. The investigation became a criminal investigation, though only three people faced criminal action. 

In 1954 a security hearing declared Dr. Oppenheimer not guilty of treason but ruled that he should not have access to military secrets. As a result, his contract as adviser to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was canceled. The Federation of American Scientists immediately came to his defense with a protest against the trial. Oppenheimer was made the worldwide symbol of the scientist who, while trying to resolve the moral problems that arise from scientific discovery, becomes the victim of a witch hunt. He spent the last years of his life working out ideas on the relationship between science and society.

President Donald J. Trump in a 306-page Mueller final report, the Department of Justice concluded that the FBI did not have enough intelligence to merit a full Trump-Russia investigation. However, Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida was raided by the FBI on August 8, 2022, as part of an investigation into whether he took classified documents with him when he left the White House.

In December 2022, the January 6 committee referred Trump to the Justice Department and recommended four charges: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., inciting an insurrection and conspiracy to make false statements. This is the first time in history members of Congress have recommended a president for criminal prosecution.

Criminal Charges Against Trump

  1. Special Counsel  Prosecutor Jack Smith Jan 6 Insurrection Case; Judge Tanya Chutkan; U.S. District Court for D.C.
  2. Special Counsel Prosecutor Jack Smith Mar-a-Lago Confidential Docs Case; Judge Aileen Cannon, U.S. District Court for Southern District of FL
  3. DA Alvin Bragg’s New York Case on Falsifying Business Records; Juan Marchan, New York Supreme Court
  4. Fulton County GA DA Fanni Willis Case Conspiracy to engage in racketeering, etc.; Judge Scott McAfee, Fulton City Superior Judge

NOTE: Smith, Bragg, and Willis are all on record as Trump haters.

Civil Charges Against Trump

  1. AG NY Letitia James Case on Defrauding NY Lenders, Insurers; Arthur Engoron, NY State Supreme Court (already found Trump Liable – fined $355 M and Prohibited from doing business in NY for 3 years; must post bond of $355 M to Appeal. Note: James is on record as Trump hater.
  2. Prosecutor Amit Prlyavadan Mehte, US District Court to D.C.; Causing physical and emotional harm to Capitol Police and Lawmakers by inciting riot on Jan 6th in D.C.
  3. Judge Lewis Kaplan, U.S. District Court for Southern District of New York Jean Carroll Defamation Case; (already found Trump Liable despite rape case dismissal) – ordered to pay $83 M to Plaintiff E. Jean Carroll who Trump stated he never met.

NOTE: It is likely that these charges upon appeal will likely be overturned.

It’s ironic how both Dr. Oppenheimer and President Donald J. Trump have suffered under a corrupt and politically motived legal witch hunts.

Final Note

In 1963 U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson presented Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer retired from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1966 and died of throat cancer the following year.

In 2024, President Donald J. Trump is now the GOP nominee for a second term in the White House. As Trump said, “Winning is my revenge.”

©2024. All rights reserved.

Artificial Intelligence Going Rogue: Oppenheimer Returns

Even restrained advocates of tech caution that equating WMD with rogue AI is alarmist; the former is exclusively destructive and deployed only by nation-states, the latter can be widely constructive and deployed even by individuals. But this distinction is, dangerously, sweeping.

In the 20th century, when J. Robert Oppenheimer led work on the first WMD, no one had seen a bomb ravage entire cities. Yet, as soon as he saw the ruin, Oppenheimer’s instinct was to scale down the threat of planetary harm. As an afterthought, it was obviously late. In the 21st century, Big Tech, fashioning AI’s contentious future, pretends, through talk of Responsible AI, to want to evade Oppenheimer’s error. But there’s a crucial difference. AI’s capacity to go rogue on scale is infinitely greater than WMDs going rogue; even afterthought may be too late.

Many argue for regulating, not banning, AI, but who’ll regulate, soon enough, well enough? Or, is banning better until the world thinks this through?

Slippery slope

Recently, IBM and Microsoft renewed commitments to the Vatican-led Rome Call for AI Ethics to put the dignity of humans first. Then, Microsoft undermined their OpenAI ethics team and Google, its Ethical AI team, betraying hypocrisy over the spirit of these commitments, never mind the letter. Tech’s now walking back some of these betrayals, fearing backlash, but Rome’s call isn’t based on a hunch about tech overreach. Tech, in thrall to themselves, not just their tools, may put humanity last.

Disconcertingly, tech oracle Bill Gates is guarded but glib, “humans make mistakes too”. Even he suspects that AGI may set its own goals, “What… if they conflict with humanity’s interests? Should we prevent strong AI? … These questions will get more pressing with time.” Point is: we’re running out of time to address them, if AGI arrives sooner than predicted.

AI amplifies the good in humans, mimicking memory, logic, reasoning, in galactic proportions, at inconceivable speeds. AGI threatens to imitate, if dimly, intuitive problem-solving, critical thinking. AI fanatics fantasise about how it’ll “transform” needy worlds of food, water, housing, health, education, human rights, the environment, and governance. But remember, someone in Genesis 3:5 portrayed the prohibited tree too as a promise, of goodness: “You will be like God.”

Trouble is, AI will amplify the bad in humans too: in those proportions, at that speed. Worse, androrithms relate to thinking, feeling, willing, not just calculating, deducing, researching, designing. Imagine mass-producing error and corruption in distinctly human traits such as compassion, creativity, storytelling; indefinitely, and plausibly without human intervention, every few milliseconds.

What’s our track record when presented power on planetary scale?

Today’s WMD-capable and willing states shouldn’t be either capable or willing; that they’re often both is admission of catastrophic failure to contain a “virus”. If we’d bought into the “goodness” of n-energy rather than the “evil” of n-bombs, over half, not just a tenth, of our energy would be nuclear. Instead, we weaponised. Do the rewards of “nuclear” outweigh its risks? Not if you weigh the time, money and effort spent in reassuring each other that WMDs aren’t proliferating when we know they are, at a rate we don’t (and states won’t) admit. Not if you consider nuclear tech’s quiet devastation.

Oppenheimer’s legacy is still hellfire, not energy!

Danger zone

Some claim that regulating, before sizing up AI’s power, will stifle innovation. They point to restraint elsewhere. After all, despite temptations, there’s been no clone-race, there are no clone-armies, yet. But — this is important — ethics alone didn’t pause cloning. Those constraints may not cramp AI’s stride.

Unlike rogue cloning, rogue AI’s devastation might not be immediate (disease) or visible (death), or harm only a cluster (of clone-subjects). When AI does go rogue, it’ll embrace the planet; on a bad day that’s one glitch short of a death-grip. Besides, creating adversarial AI is easier than creating a malicious mix of enriched uranium-plutonium. That places a premium on restraint.

But to Tech, restraint is a crime against the self, excess is a sign of authenticity, sameness isn’t stagnation but decay, slowness is a character flaw. And speed isn’t excellence, it’s superiority. Tech delights in “more, faster, bigger”: storage, processing power, speed, bandwidth. The AI “race” isn’t a sideshow, it’s the main event. Gazing at its creations, Tech listens for the cry, “Look Ma, no hands!” With such power, often exercised for its own sake, will Tech sincerely (or sufficiently) slow the spread of AI?

AI isn’t expanding, it’s exploding, a Big Bang by itself. In the 21st century alone, AI research grew 600 percent. If we don’t admit that, for all our goodness, we’re imperfect, we’ll rush, not restrict AI. Unless we quickly embed safeguards worldwide, rogue AI’s a matter of “when” not “if”. Like a subhuman toddler, it’ll pick survival over altruism. Except, where human fates are concerned, its chubby fists come with a terrifying threat of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.

The AI-supervillain with a god-complex in the film Avengers: Age of Ultron delivers prophetic lines to humans. His (its?) mocking drawl pretends to be beholden; it’s anything but: “I know you mean well. You just didn’t think it through…How is humanity saved if it’s not allowed to… evolve? There’s only one path to peace. (Your) extinction!”

Presumably in self-congratulation, Oppenheimer nursed an exotic line, mistakenly thought to be from the Bhagavad Gita, but more likely from verse 97 of poet-philosopher Bhartrihari’s Niti Sataka“The good deeds a man has done before, defend him.” But Oppenheimer didn’t ask if his deeds were good, or true, or beautiful. Worse, he glossed over another verse, indeed from the Gita (9:34): “If thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, to Me thou shalt surely come.”

“The will”, as a phrase, doesn’t require the qualifier “human will” because it’s distinctly human anyway, involving complexities we haven’t fathomed. Understanding it requires more than a grasp of which neurons are firing and when.

Vast temptations

Granted, the mind generates thought, but the will governs it. And, as Thomas Aquinas clarified, the will isn’t about ordering the intellect, but ordering it toward the good.  That is precisely why techno-supremacists alone shouldn’t shape what’s already affecting  vast populations.

AI is too seductive to slow or stop. Tech will keep conjuring new excuses to plunge ahead. Sure, there are signs of humility, of restraint. As governments law up it is compliance that will act as a brake, delaying, if not deterring disaster. But Tech’s boast proves that it isn’t AI they see as saviors, but themselves. Responsible AI needs responsible leaders. Are Tech’s leaders restrained, respectful? Or does that question, worryingly, answer itself?

Professor of Ethics, Shannon French warns that when Tech calls for temperance that’s warning enough. Their altruistic alarmism seems a ruse to accelerate AI (more funding, more research) while pretending to arrest it (baking in checks and balances). Instead, what’s getting baked in? “Bias is getting baked” into systems used by industries and governments before they’re proven compatible with real-world lives and outcomes.

“People can’t even see into the black box and recognise that these algorithms have bias…data sets they were trained on have bias…then they treat the [results from] AI systems, as if they’re objective.”

Christopher Nolan’s film may partly, even unintentionally, lionise Oppenheimer as a Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. Pop culture lionises Tech too, as saviors, breathing on machines an AI-powered fire. Except, any fire must be wielded by humans ordered toward truth, goodness, beauty.

The name “Promethus” is considered to mean “forethought“, but Tech is in danger of merely aping Oppenheimer’s afterthought.  Remember, self-congratulatory or not, Oppenheimer was fond of another Gita line (11:32): “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

AUTHOR

RUDOLPH LAMBERT FERNANDEZ

Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer who writes on culture and society. Find him on Twitter @RudolphFernandz.

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.