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Spring semester’s end marks my retirement from teaching after 20 years at Johns Hopkins. Now the old unsolved mystery: Where does the time go? I will miss the students, some more than others. (The faculty are already remembered like odd ducks from childhood. It is highly possible that I have become one, too.) They brought […] A report that Google is hedging on its pledge to stop participating in Project Maven, the military program to adopt artificial intelligence for drone targeting, brings to mind Hans Bethe’s 1995 plea to scientists and engineers developing new nuclear weapons: “cease and desist.” For the old lion of Los Alamos, there was only one way […] After three generations of futile efforts to develop reliable defenses against ICBM’s, tracing back to the Nike, Patriot, and Sprint programs of the 1950’s and 60’s and warped by Ronald Reagan’s science fictional “Star Wars” scheme, the Trump administration will today pick up the eternal torch. The chimera of anti-missile weaponry remains the most […] With the passage of another Cold War “whiz kid” whose youthful technological prodigy was sacrificed on the altar of nuclear supremacy, historians are left to contemplate why. Harold Brown’s mentor, Edward Teller, epitomized the clinical paranoia that ruled the era, so much so that Teller became unemployable in the government he relentlessly militarized. By contrast, […] Can you find the Nazi war criminal?
Apollo 8, 12/21/68 Concerns about harmful applications of artificial intelligence are “very legitimate.” Dangers posed by artificial intelligence are “not one of those things that keeps me up at night.” Guess which words were spoken by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and which by DARPA director Steven Walker. While the tempest-tossed masses may be forgiven for not even knowing […] As the international scientific community adjusts its wig after the shockwave of the world’s first genetically altered babies, one thing is clear: self-regulation of research is always a pipe dream. He Jiankui is neither a “rogue scientist” nor “crazy.” He is not a Dr. Moreau. He carries all the credentials of his profession’s elite. History […] Long ago and far away, in an old collegetown in the land of prestidigital lakes, lived three damsels in a half-timber cottage. They had faces that could launch thousands of ships and the most handsome, strongest young men of the college gladly would have tried that and whatever else might possibly win even a single […] The stratospheric jackpot that poured into the lap of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen transformed him into the kind of American hero that will take generations of historical consideration to bring back down to earth. Part of the zeitgeist that will have to be conjured is the culture of 1970s engineering that placed a technological revolution […] The Congressional Research Service, which is supposed to help members of Congress understand the limitless arcana of American government, has issued an update on the B-21 Raider strategic bomber program. Although billions of dollars continue to pour into the project–one of the Air Force’s top 3 procurement priorities–since CRS’s last look, the research agency has […] |