LOS ALAMOS AND THE AI TRINITY CODE

How a Machine that Thought Won the War

De: Richard Murch

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Just imagine for a moment, that the Manhatten Project had developed AI to speed the delivery of the Atomic Bomb. This is the Novel

Oppenheimer had heard rumors. In the tight, interlocking world of American theoretical physics, rumors moved faster than published papers, and there had been whispers since 1940 of something von Neumann was building — something that went beyond the calculating machines that sat in university basements performing ballistics tables.

Something that could, it was said, model physical processes of extraordinary complexity. Something that learned. And it was very fast. Now that was very interesting.

He had dismissed the rumors as the usual aggrandizement that attended von Neumann's projects. The man was brilliant — almost offensively so — but he was also a showman who enjoyed the theater of his own reputation.

Sitting across from General Groves in that windowless room in Washington, Oppenheimer understood for the first time that the rumors had been, if anything, an understatement.

Groves gave him two mandates. The first was the one the world would eventually come to know: design and build a functional atomic weapon before Germany achieved the same. The second mandate was spoken more quietly, and its weight took longer to settle. Oppenheimer was to oversee The Oracle — to use it, to protect it, and to ensure that its existence remained unknown to the overwhelming majority of the scientists who would work under him at the laboratory yet to be built.

The machine was, Groves explained with characteristic bluntness, above the clearance level of almost everyone on the project. If it was discovered, if it was compromised, the consequences would extend beyond the loss of any single weapon design.

Oppenheimer asked one question. He asked whether The Oracle had been told what it was helping to build.
Groves stared at him for a long moment. Then he said that the machine was not told anything. It was given problems. It produced solutions. That was all.