A biographer whose Pulitzer prize-winning book inspired the new movie Oppenheimer has expressed support for a US senator’s attempt to bar the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapons launches.
“Humans must always maintain sole control over nuclear weapons,” Kai Bird, author of American Prometheus, said in a statement reported by Politico.
“This technology is too dangerous to gamble with. This bill will send a powerful signal to the world that the United States will never take the reckless step of automating our nuclear command and control.”
In Washington on Thursday, Bird met Ed Markey, the Democratic Massachusetts senator who is attempting to add the AI-nuclear provision to a major defense spending bill.
Markey, Politico said, was a friend of Bird’s co-author, the late Tufts University professor Martin J Sherwin.
A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Markey and Bird “shared their mutual concerns over the proliferation of artificial intelligence in national security and defense without guardrails, and the risks of using nuclear weapons in south Asia and elsewhere.
“They also discussed ways to increase awareness of nuclear issues among the younger set.”
J Robert Oppenheimer was the driving force behind US development of the atomic bomb, at the end of the second world war.
Bird and Sherwin’s book is now the inspiration for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster starring Cillian Murphy in the title role.
The movie opens in the US on Friday – in competition with Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film about the popular children’s doll.
On Friday, Nolan told the Guardian: “International surveillance of nuclear weapons is possible because nuclear weapons are very difficult to build. Oppenheimer spent $2bn and used thousands of people across America to build those first bombs.
“It’s reassuringly difficult to make nuclear weapons and so it’s relatively easy to spot when a country is doing that. I don’t believe any of that applies to AI.”
Nolan also noted “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and AI experts now calling for such technology to be controlled.
Nolan said he had “been interested to talk to some of the leading researchers in the AI field, and hear from them that they view this as their ‘Oppenheimer moment’. And they’re clearly looking to his story for some kind of guidance … as a cautionary tale in terms of what it says about the responsibility of somebody who’s putting this technology to the world, and what their responsibilities would be in terms of unintended consequences.”
Bird and Sherwin’s biography, subtitled The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, was published in 2008.
Reviewing for the Guardian, James Buchan saluted the authors’ presentation of “the cocktails and wire-taps and love affairs of Oppenheimer’s existence, his looks and conversation, the way he smoked the cigarettes and pipe that killed him, his famous pork-pie hat and splayed walk, and all the tics and affectations that his students imitated and the patriots and military men despised.
“It is as if these authors had gone back to James Boswell, who said of Dr Johnson: ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.’”
