核武器规划历史与现代 AI 实验室言论的相似性反思

I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons.

Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown).

In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during the missile gap years when the U.S. thought it was falling behind the Soviet Union in nuclear capabilities.

Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation:

I loved RAND, where I ended up spending ten years [...] Much, I imagined, like members of a religious order would, I shared with my colleagues a sense of brotherhood, living and working with others for a transcendent cause.

They were insiders: burdened with the responsibility of knowledge others did not possess.

precisely in my early missile-gap years at RAND and as a consultant in Washington, there was our sense of mission, the burden of believing we knew more about the dangers ahead, and what might be done about them, than did the generals in the Pentagon or SAC, or Congress or the public, or even the president. It was an enlivening burden.

And what was their “enlivening burden”? Saving the world:

[My colleagues] shared a feeling—soon transmitted to me—that we were in the most literal sense working to save the world.

What really stood out was this part, where Ellsberg describes how he and his colleagues truly believed the end was nigh:

From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust. Alain Enthoven and I were the youngest members of the department. Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.

This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits. It’d be a small sacrifice on behalf of the employees to demonstrate their faith that universal high income is just around the corner. (The corporate cost savings would just be a nice bonus.)