by The pioneering biologist JBS Haldane, another socialist, agreed with Wells’ vision of the final fate of the war. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test gave birth to an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced firsthand bombing during World War I, reflected: “If we could use the forces we now know that exist within the atom, we could have such a capacity for destruction that I know of no other means than divine intervention that would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation. A year earlier, FCS Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, aptly summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s: “Our best prophets are increasingly anxious about our future. “They fear that we are learning too much and that we are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”
Other prominent interwar intellectuals were concerned about advances in non-military technologies. Many of the same fears as keeps AI engineers awake at night — calibrate thinking machines to human valuesconcern that our increasing dependence on technology could undermine human ingenuity and even fear of a robot takeover – made its debut at the beginning of the 20th century.
Czech playwright Karel CapekThe 1920s drama “RUR” imagined a future in which artificially intelligent robots would wipe out humanity. In a scene that would strike fear into the hearts of Silicon Valley’s death row inmates, a character in the play observes: “They are no longer machines. They are already aware of their superiority and hate us as they hate everything human.” As godfather of AI Geoffrey Hintonwho quit his job at Google so he could warn the world about the technology he helped create, explained: “What we want is some way to make sure that even if “these systems are” smarter than us, they’re going to do things. that are beneficial for us.”
This fear of a new machine age was not limited to fiction. Popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s political treatise, “Social Decline and Regeneration,” from 1921, warned that our dependence on new technologies was leading our species toward degradation and even annihilation, an argument The New York Times he reviewed with enthusiasm. Others went to great lengths to act on their angst about the machine age. In 1923, when “RUR” opened in Tokyo, a Japanese biology professor, Makoto Nishimura, he was so convinced Because of machine-facilitated extinction, the work shows that he sought to create other benevolent robots to prevent the human species from being “destroyed by the pinnacle of its creation,” artificial man.
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One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and cured by social, political, and economic factors during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and vernacular sense, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety to maintain their privileges in the midst of social change. Today they are politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-wing politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its perspectives: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and that, therefore, our destiny is tilted inexorably toward self-destruction.
