[Nuclear experts demanded limits on the atomic bomb. AI developers
should follow that example.]
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SUNDAY SCIENCE: THE SCIENTISTS WHO UNDERSTOOD THEIR OBLIGATION TO
HUMANITY  
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John Mark Hansen
July 22, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ Nuclear experts demanded limits on the atomic bomb. AI developers
should follow that example. _

, The Atlantic

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, spent years
wrestling with the conflict between his science and the dictates of
his conscience. In part because he publicly expressed his concerns
about the hydrogen bomb and a nuclear arms race, Oppenheimer—the
subject of a new biopic—ended his career as a martyr in Cold War
politics. Fortunately, many other early nuclear experts, including the
University of Chicago scientists who first produced a chain reaction,
felt an obligation to help prevent the misuse of atomic science. These
scientists understood something that today’s pioneers in artificial
intelligence and genetic engineering also need to recognize: The
people who usher revolutionary advances into the world have both the
expertise and the moral responsibility to help society address their
dangers.

In laboratories at universities and at for-profit companies today,
researchers are working on technologies that raise profound ethical
questions. Can we engineer plants and animals resistant to natural
predators without upsetting the balance of nature? Should we allow
patents on life forms? Can we ethically fix supposed abnormalities in
human beings? Should we allow machines to make consequential
decisions—for instance, whether to use force to respond to a threat,
or whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike? Atomic scientists
at Chicago and elsewhere left behind a model for the responsible
conduct of science, a model as applicable now as it was in
Oppenheimer’s day.

The race to the atom bomb began at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the
University of Chicago, where, on December 2, 1942, the first
engineered, self-sustaining nuclear-fission reaction occurred. The
scientists gathered in what had become known as an “atomic
village” included Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born physicist who a few
years earlier had helped persuade Albert Einstein to warn President
Franklin D. Roosevelt that a weapon of awesome power was within
scientific reach—and that Hitler’s scientists knew it too. The
now-famous Einstein-Szilard letter
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which launched the United States on the crash course known as the
Manhattan Project, was the nuclear age’s first great act of
scientific responsibility. The first lesson from the Met Lab was:
Scientific knowledge, once obtained, cannot be called back. Perceiving
the world-changing potential of recent discoveries in nuclear physics,
Szilard and his colleagues _had to _inform the leaders of our
democracy.

Chicago’s atomic village had an eclectic mix of scientists. Some,
such as the physicist John Simpson, were young Americans who had grown
up amid New Deal social reforms. Among the more established scientists
were a number of Jewish émigrés, including Szilard, the German
physicist James Franck, and the Russian German biophysicist Eugene
Rabinowitch, whose experiences before leaving Europe had sensitized
them in various ways to the moral dimensions of science. Franck, in
fact, had firsthand experience of the subjection of science to
politics. While working as a young researcher in Germany when World
War I began, he had volunteered for the kaiser’s army and was an
officer in the unit that introduced chlorine gas onto the battlefield.
His friend Niels Bohr, the distinguished Danish physicist and Nobel
laureate, harshly criticized his decision to accept the role, which
Franck came to regret deeply.

By 1943, the primary work on nuclear-bomb development had shifted to
Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The scientists remaining at Chicago’s Met Lab had time to try to
shape decisions about the use of nuclear technology, both in what
remained of World War II and in the looming postwar period. The second
lesson from the Met Lab was that, although scientific discovery is
irreversible, its effects can be regulated. In her 1965 book, _A
Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945–1947_,
the historian Alice Kimball Smith, drawing on archival material and
interviews, chronicled the intense discussions raging among the
scientists during this period. The Met Lab scientists ultimately
arrived at specific objectives that were lofty, practical, or both.
They wanted to give Japan a preview of the atomic bomb’s power and
the opportunity to surrender before being subjected to it. They also
wanted to free science from the fetters of official secrecy, avert an
arms race, and design international institutions to govern nuclear
technology.

The third lesson from the Met Lab was that major decisions about the
application of new technology should be made by civilians in a
transparent democratic process. In the mid-’40s, the Chicago atomic
scientists began bringing their concerns to leaders of the Manhattan
Project and then to public officials. The Army bureaucracy preferred
to keep secrets, but the scientists fought it every step of the way.
Szilard, Franck, Rabinowitch, Simpson, and scores of their colleagues
led the effort to educate politicians and inform the public about
nuclear dangers. The scientists organized associations, among the
first of which was the Atomic Scientists of Chicago. They gave
lectures, wrote opinion essays, and founded publications, most notably
the _Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_, which Met Lab scientists
edited and published on the University of Chicago campus. Working with
colleagues at the other Manhattan Project sites, they marshaled
support for the passage of the Atomic Energy Act, which created an
independent agency of civilians, accountable to the president and
Congress, to oversee the development and deployment of nuclear
science. Their efforts continued well into the Cold War, with the
successful campaigns for nuclear test bans, nonproliferation compacts,
and arms-control agreements.

In the 21st century, many decisions about the development and
deployment of new technologies are taking place in private
laboratories and corporate executive suites, out of the public’s
sight. Like the military’s secrecy requirements so resented by the
Met Lab scientists, exclusive private ownership of scientific ideas
impedes collaboration and the free flow of knowledge upon which the
progress of science depends. The primacy of private decision making is
an abrogation of the public’s right to participate, through the
democratic process, in ethical decisions about the application of
scientific and technical knowledge. These are the kind of choices the
Met Lab scientists considered to be the public’s to make.

In August 1945, two atomic bombs caused the immediate or eventual
deaths of 150,000 to 220,000 people
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some months later, at a meeting in the White
House, Oppenheimer told Harry Truman
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“Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” But Truman reminded the
physicist that the decision to drop the bombs was his own. Having made
the weapon possible, the nation’s atomic scientists nevertheless
acquitted themselves well. The regime they fostered, the template they
created for responsible science, helped make that first use of nuclear
weapons the only use in war to date. We will be wise to heed the
lessons they learned.

_JOHN MARK HANSEN
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political-science professor at the University of Chicago._

_Since 1857, THE ATLANTIC has been challenging assumptions and
pursuing truth._

_When the founders of The Atlantic gathered in Boston in the spring of
1857, they wanted to create a magazine that would be indispensable for
the kind of reader who was deeply engaged with the most consequential
issues of the day. The men and women who created this magazine had an
overarching, prophetic vision—they were fierce opponents of
slavery—but they were also moved to overcome what they saw as the
limits of partisanship, believing that the free exchange of ideas
across ideological lines was crucial to the great American experiment.
Their goal was to publish the most urgent essays, the most vital
literature; they wanted to pursue truth and disrupt consensus without
regard for party or clique. _

_Subscribe to The Atlantic
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THIS FOSSIL IS A FREEZE-FRAME OF A MAMMAL FIGHTING A DINOSAUR
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A fossil found in 2012 in the Chinese province of Liaoning appeared to
show a Psittacosaurus, a plant-eating Triceratops relative, entangled
with a Repenomamus, a smaller mammal.
By Kate Golembiewski
New York Times
July 18, 2023

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