Pray We'll Never Have a Manhattan Project for AI

Those who do not learn from Oppenheimer are doomed to repeat him.

People ask me about the bitcoin monasteries. One way to answer is to ask what they are not. What that we understand well can we understand will be distinctly unlike the bitcoin monasteries?

It remains to be seen whether Christopher Nolan — an auteur preoccupied with the role of death and destruction in man’s struggle to master his memory by mastering technology, media very much included — can escape the gravitational pull of Robert Oppenheimer’s most revealing remarks about the Bomb:

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, USAEC Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, 1954).

We have considered technique here recently. Etymologically it is difficult to tease apart technique from art — terms that predated the capture of philosophy (“natural science”) by “politics” (the military) and of course Christianity, which makes it a mistake to push the contrast too hard.

But listen somewhere around the one hour mark to how Priestmonk Kosmas describes the challenge of childrearing: it’s an art, which means it’s difficult. It’s not something you can shortcut to or speedrun by reading a book or multiple books. The proper knowledge concerning proper childrearing must be acquired through practical experience, incarnate action of course but also fundamentally spiritual action, spiritual discipline in motion, through the workings of the Spirit.

Now from one view this seems obvious — as in a certain sense it should be. But more carefully considered, what underlies the spiritually difficult art of childrearing is the way of the Lord before He returns with finality, in glory, that is, in His preparation for that return: difficult not simply because more strenuous, more constrained — for what are these things to God — but the way in which they are so, the way in which His life and love operate and bear fruit in this world. Patience, humility, beginning from the beginning, step by step, soul by soul, painstakingly building stone by stone… building, in other words, precisely as men and this world do not want to build, as they vainly and proudly struggle to prove by whatever means we must not build. The Lord’s way? There’s no time! We don’t have the luxury! We’ll be left behind! It isn’t proven! It’s not effective! It doesn’t scale! On and on.

Of these various complaints and objections, there is one particularly powerful one, one that seems not to play on the various panics and fears hinted above: The Lord’s way is not technically sweet.

The sweetness of the Lord’s way is a sweetness we must associate with and experience as an art, though it does include, in the original or etymological sense, the life of technique (tekhnikos: “pertaining to art,” tekhnē: “art, skill, craft in work”; artizein: “to prepare”, from root *ar- meaning to fit together, akin to the Latin arma: “weapons”). Oppenheimer did not assert that the Bomb arose from the irresistible allure of the divine and spiritually difficult art of bearing fruit of the life of the Spirit. The scientist sees something technically sweet, shoots first, asks questions later. Technique tyrannizes, makes tyrants, for the sake of its particular sweetness. It is a sweetness which is in a practical sense of this world, material, a “payoff” — but which, I think Oppenheimer knew well, and tried in his way to express, is in a spiritual sense not of this world, but rather of the heavens at war, among the legions of the rebellion.

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose (Massachusetts Institute of Technology lecture, 1947).

With all this in mind it strikes me as not to be wished for that, as some intelligent people now are suggesting, the American government set its sights on a Manhattan Project for AI.