"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

absolutely necessary, was bad for you.

It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost
70-year nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the
improved treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many
levelheaded people, would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be
designing a robotic "replacement species," when we obviously have so much
trouble making relatively simple things work, and so much trouble managing - or
even understanding - ourselves.

I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of
the necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a
necessary humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril.
The commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the
scientific evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made
systems we have built should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I
have worked on certainly humbles me.

We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and
the resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current
situation are troubling.

The effort to build the first atomic bomb was led by the brilliant physicist J.
Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was not naturally interested in politics but
became painfully aware of what he perceived as the grave threat to Western
civilization from the Third Reich, a threat surely grave because of the possibility
that Hitler might obtain nuclear weapons. Energized by this concern, he brought
his strong intellect, passion for physics, and charismatic leadership skills to Los
Alamos and led a rapid and successful effort by an incredible collection of great
minds to quickly invent the bomb.

What is striking is how this effort continued so naturally after the initial impetus
was removed. In a meeting shortly after V-E Day with some physicists who felt
that perhaps the effort should stop, Oppenheimer argued to continue. His stated
reason seems a bit strange: not because of the fear of large casualties from an
invasion of Japan, but because the United Nations, which was soon to be formed,
should have foreknowledge of atomic weapons. A more likely reason the project
continued is the momentum that had built up - the first atomic test, Trinity, was
nearly at hand.

We know that in preparing this first atomic test the physicists proceeded despite
a large number of possible dangers. They were initially worried, based on a
calculation by Edward Teller, that an atomic explosion might set fire to the
atmosphere. A revised calculation reduced the danger of destroying the world to a
three-in-a-million chance. (Teller says he was later able to dismiss the prospect
of atmospheric ignition entirely.) Oppenheimer, though, was sufficiently concerned
about the result of Trinity that he arranged for a possible evacuation of the
southwest part of the state of New Mexico. And, of course, there was the clear
danger of starting a nuclear arms race.