Opinion: What Oppenheimer’s reading list can teach us

In 1963, “The Christian Century” magazine asked theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer what books had shaped his “vocational attitude” and “philosophy of life.” Oppenheimer, often cited as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his service during the Manhattan Project, had by that time been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, had his security clearance revoked in 1954 and grown increasingly concerned (along with other leading thinkers) about the potential dangers scientific inventions posed to humanity.

Oppenheimer’s list of books included works by Plato, mathematician Bernhard Riemann and scientist Michael Faraday, and the “Bhagavad-Gita,” with which he has famously long been associated. But perhaps surprising coming from a physicist, he also included great works in verse: Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

When one considers that Oppenheimer was a man so intimately familiar with cataclysm — not to mention humanity’s capacity to devise its own ruin — it makes sense to see among his guiding texts a tragedy in blank verse and a poem best known for using lilacs growing “out of the dead land” as a metaphor for the fractured experience of modernity.

Whether during the age of the atomic bomb or our current moment, poetry has spanned the breach between the beauties and the dangers of what human beings are capable of creating. In the title poem of his 2010 collection “Come On All You Ghosts,” Matthew Zapruder writes: “But poems / are not museums, // they are machines / made of words, / you pour as best // you can your attention in” – his lines a play on the language of another poet, William Carlos Williams, who asserted in “The Wedge” (1944): “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.”

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But what happens when the circuit runs in reverse, when you ask the machine made of words to make its own poem? (At this point, you or someone you know has probably asked ChatGPT to write some verses, and industry leaders warned this week that AI poses a “risk of extinction” to humans.) What happens when the inner workings and potential reach of scientific inventions are unknown, even to the human beings who create them?

Such queries are the purview of a new series, “Our AI future: promise and peril,” which explores how artificial intelligence will affect our lives, the way we work and how we understand ourselves. Berkeley computer science professor Stuart Russell spoke with CNN Opinion’s Jessica Chia and Bethany Cianciolo about how AI has evolved through the decades, how large language models like ChatGPT work, the importance of regulation and his fears about the technology becoming too powerful and moving outside of our control.

Russell asked, “If you make systems that are more powerful than human beings, how do human beings maintain power over those systems forever?”

But the goal, according to Russell, isn’t to stop AI “from becoming more intelligent than humans. The goal is that as it becomes more powerful, we enforce certain design constraints that result in it being controllable and it being safe. Airplanes go faster than people, but they have to be safe in order for you to be carrying passengers in them.”

Russell also raised the issue of AI systems falling into the hands of malign forces, saying, “The next problem we’re going to face is that even though we may understand how to build perfectly safe general purpose AI, what’s to stop Dr. Evil building general purpose AI that’s going to destroy the world?” He also worries about humans becoming too dependent on the technology, and then losing “the incentive to learn and to be capable of anything. And that, I think, would be another form of catastrophe,” he said.

A debt ceiling lesson

Clay Jones

On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a deal to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling through January 1, 2025, with 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats voting for it. The Senate passed the bill the following evening. Ahead of signing the bill into law on Saturday, President Joe Biden spoke from the Oval Office Friday, saying “No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed. We averted an economic crisis and an economic collapse.”

The lesson here, wrote John Avlon, is that the “vital center has saved America from default – and Congress from itself. Again. … It’s evidence that American government can work when the center holds.” Both Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have faced criticism from within their own parties for the deal, noted Avlon, but McCarthy was forced to rely on the support of moderate Democrats, a familiar maneuver as “the third consecutive Republican speaker to face the frustration of trying to corral the far-right into a responsible governing coalition.”

Trumpism’s future

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Speaking with CNN’s Poppy Harlow this week, former FBI Director James Comey attributed the public’s distrust with the agency he once led to the toxic influence of former President Donald Trump and predicted that at some point, the Republicans’ “fever around Donald Trump and the MAGA world will eventually break.”

Comey’s remarks reflected “a common misperception,” said Julian Zelizer, that “Trump’s ongoing support within the GOP is some sort of aberration that revolves around the person rather than the party. Instead of talking about the electoral coalition that propelled Trump into power, and which currently makes him the leading Republican nominee for reelection, the conversation continues to revolve around the former president himself.”

Rather than a personality cult, Trumpism reflects the deeply held convictions of a GOP base that has been solidifying for decades, opined Zelizer, and while political parties can change dramatically, history shows that “these kinds of changes take decades to happen. They are not the result of one candidate winning or losing, nor are they some sort of short-term spell that parties go through and come out of.”

While the base isn’t breaking up with their man any time soon, Trump may be alienating former allies he can’t afford to lose, observed SE Cupp. After taking to Truth Social to blast his own former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for citing Iowa poll numbers showing him losing some momentum, right-wing voices from Newsmax host Rob Finnerty to Trump’s former deputy communications director Matt Wolking, quickly came to McEnany’s defense. Cupp concluded, “Attacking McEnany was obviously an indignity not worth suffering for a political movement that’s suffered happily through plenty of them… [And while] I’m sure Trump has plenty of fight left in him, Kayleigh might just be a canary in the coal mine” — revealing that even Trump’s followers think he can go too far in attacking those who were once so loyal to him.

Pride

Luciano Vecchio's comic "Sereno." - Courtesy of Luciano Vecchio

Pride Month began this week. It’s a politically precarious time, with trans health care, companies’ support for LGBTQ rights and books that center queer identity coming under attack amid the intensifying culture wars. Still, Pride is also a time to revel in culture’s power to transform, sustain and bring joy to LGBTQ communities. For comic book writer and artist Luciano Vecchio, it’s a time to hail the power of LGBTQ representation in the world of superheroes and explain the origin story of Sereno, a queer superhero.

“A superhero comic hits like magic lightning and can open channels of infinite imagination,” he wrote. “In my case, that lightning hit me as a young kid in Zárate, my own Smallville in Argentina, a corner of the Global South very, very far from where the heroes I was reading about were born.”

Vecchio recalled growing up “as a closeted queer kid in self-denial,” always “an outsider to myself.” For him, “Sereno is my love letter, my humble gift in return to the genre that nurtured me. He is the hero I wish I had as a kid, who would in turn save my past, present and future. The stories we tell can shape ideas and transform the real world we inhabit. With that realization there was no turning back. I had to pick my role in the imagination battlefields to participate in the change I want to see in everyday life for me and my community.”

Putin’s mouthpiece

Dmitry Medvedev (R) and Vladimir Putin make a joint appearance at a congress of the United Russia party on September 24. - AFP/Getty Images

This week, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, launched the latest in a growing list of outlandish pronouncements — branding the United Kingdom Russia’s “eternal enemy,” accusing the UK of waging an “undeclared war” on his country and saying that British officials can be considered legitimate military targets.

Why does he do it? Frida Ghitis explored that question, asking whether Medvedev, currently serving as deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, is “seeking to gain Putin’s favor with his rants” or is “speaking for the Russian president.” Ghitis assessed that this “is not just a case of Putin the puppeteer speaking through his former prime minister. Medvedev’s social media posts almost seem like declarations of loyalty.” Medvedev “may try to sound tough – threatening British officials and US senators, and raising the prospect of nuclear Armageddon – to impress the boss. But Medvedev knows that above all else he needs Putin to think of him as unequivocally loyal and useful. Anything less could prove disastrous.”

For more on Russia:

Michael Bociurkiw: The war on Russia’s doorstep just got uncomfortably close

Student loans

On Thursday, the Senate approved a Republican-led resolution to strike down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, a week after the House passed the same measure. Biden has promised to veto the bill, as the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on the legality of his relief plan.

“I can only hope – contrary to what some predict – that the court allows this important financial relief measure to go forward, to help millions of Americans caught in the financial vice of debt – all because they were trying to improve their lives through education,” wrote Sophia A. Nelson. Two decades into her professional life, Nelson reflected, “I was a successful writer, lawyer and businesswoman. But I was still saddled with onerous college student loans.”

For borrowers like her, “people of color who hope to use higher education to rise from poverty or the working classes,” she maintained, “college debt is not only a massive investment, but it’s also a huge gamble. … Biden’s one time plan to ‘cancel debt’ will not fix our broken student loan system. What it will do is help 40 million borrowers who, like me, were drowning in debt and need immediate relief. What student borrowers really need are long-term solutions – even beyond the measure that the Supreme Court may be poised to do away with.”

Swimming safely

A child watches others swim at the Emancipation Swimming Pool on July 19, 2022 in Houston City. - Brandon Bell/Getty Images

“Can’t we do better than this?”

So asked Jill Filipovic — a former lifeguard and swim instructor — after reading about several drownings over Memorial Day weekend. With summer nearly upon us, it’s critical that more kids learn how to swim. Drowning remains among the leading causes of death in children in America. Black kids, who are five and a half more times as likely as White children to drown in swimming pools, are far less likely to have access to swimming lessons.

“But there are simple, creative solutions to be found – for example, a federal program to bus elementary school kids to the closest local pool for after-school swim classes, at no cost to parents,” she wrote. Filipovic argues more can be done to prioritize water safety: “We could create a national swimming curriculum, much as we’ve created a vast network of public schools to make sure that kids can read and count,” she contended. “Water skills are not as necessary as literacy and numeracy, but swimming is still a life-saving skill. And it’s one every American child deserves to have.”

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Scottie Pippen can’t let it go, but we should

Jordan talks with teammate Scottie Pippen during a game against the Philadelphia 76ers in 1992. - Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images

Tongues wagged this week after NBA legend Scottie Pippen blasted Michael Jordan on a podcast, saying “he was horrible to play with.” Pippen — known for complaining about the likes of Jordan, Charles Barkley and coach Phil Jackson — was “largely unappreciated when he was active and is perhaps even more so now,” asserted sports commentator Will Leitch. But the latest remarks “were yet another example of his increasing crankiness in his post-playing career,” Leitch noted.

The bigger problem with getting all fired up about Pippen going after Jordan (which he’s done before, in the wake of the Jordan mega-documentary “The Last Dance”), Leitch said, lies in the quicksand of nostalgia, sucking us into the basketball past, making it “feel more than it actually is. It’s hard to blame Pippen for hanging onto his last moments of relevance, but it shouldn’t be so hard for us not to. There’s a great game happening on the court right now, with today’s players making new memories every night. Pippen has to live in the past. We don’t have to.”

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