from ”The Passion of the Rumsfeld” in Harper’s Magazine, May 2004
Leif Parsons
|
|
|
|
from ”The Passion of the Rumsfeld” in Harper’s Magazine, May 2004
Leif Parsons This essay originally appeared in HuffPost on August 6, 2013. I bring it back today to mark the 75th anniversary. What is left to say about Hiroshima on this anniversary? Much, of course. So far we have mostly covered the window dressing that came with victory and has lasted for three generations after […]
Dora-Mittelbau, April 1945
in memory of Yves Béon, 1925-2011, and Guido Zembsch-Schreve, 1916-2003 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 […] |