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This AI Panic Is Nothing New

In the 1940s, The Nation asked questions about the atomic bomb we’re asking of artificial intelligence today.

An automatic camera recorded an atomic bomb test explosion in the Marshall Islands in 1946.

Over the past few weeks, employees and executives at leading tech companies have offered stark warnings that the development of artificial intelligence is running far ahead of humanity’s ability to control it, and that the chances of an extinction-level error are alarmingly high. Whether or not this is actually true, many have drawn comparisons between the current panic and that over the atomic bomb in the 1940s, when leading scientists warned that the new weapon needed to be controlled and tightly regulated by an international alliance if humanity was to avoid destroying itself.

As the discourse has picked up on those parallels, I have often thought of a Nation editorial published just days after the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In “One World or None,” the magazine’s then-editor, Freda Kirchwey, laid out her belief that unless a truly empowered international governing body was put in charge of the bomb, the end of humanity would be a question of when rather than if. “The atomic bomb represents a revolution in science—the greatest revolution ever accomplished,” Kirchwey wrote. “It calls for a comparable revolution in men’s thinking and in their capacity for political and social readjustment.”

In 1946, a book also titled One World or None, a collection of essays by leading scientific and cultural figures like Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann and others, warning about the technology’s potentially devastating power, became a bestseller and was subsequently turned into a terrifying short film by the same name, which is still worth watching today.

In the eighty years since Hiroshima, with some too-readily-forgotten close calls in between, little has been done to weaken the “One World or None” argument. Today, the spiraling chaos of the global order makes it hard to say Kirchwey’s argument has been proven wrong. And, of course, should the worst occur, there likely wouldn’t be anybody around to affirm she got it right.

Struck, like many, by some of the parallels between that moment and this—scientists warning of catastrophe, officials promising prosperity, rival powers unwilling to slow down—I wanted to see what other writers in The Nation were saying at a time of widespread uncertainty about whether humanity’s capacity for........

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