My best friend has a special connection to Oppenheimer, long before the dramatic docuflick ever hit trailers, long before AI hit the mainstream. If it weren’t for him and his insight into Oppenheimer, perhaps I would not have the view on AI that I do today. Oppenheimer was a tale of a man whose hand was wielded to slay–nay, potentially end the world, whose work we must question was worth it or not. On one hand, the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inexcusable. On the other hand, the Trinity Test was a veritable light bulb over science, demonstrating with undeniable fact, that the atom could be split, and that E=mc^2, leading to science that could’ve never been possible if the bomb had not been dropped. It begs the question of whether the Manhattan Project did a net good or a net evil for humanity, on one hand creating potentially world-ending superweapons, and on the other hand revolutionizing our understanding of physics and bringing forth an age of new science understanding and a revolutionary new energy source.

Since the dawn of humankind, the introduction of new technology always came with the potential for its misuse. The opening scene from 2001 illustrates this very well. The Monoliths represented leaps in evolution, appearing once every 1000 years per civilization. (albeit, were sent by alien civilizations as canonized in later books). To the Man-Apes of warring tribes, it would be the tribe who could overpower the other that would dominate the dwindling resources. The appearance of the Monolith represented the Man-Apes’ discovery of tool use, as seen by one tribe learning to swing bones to beat the juice out of the other tribe. Perhaps violent, destructive–yes, but ultimately what led to our species survival and growth. It can be safely assumed these tools were misused out of pure violence and territorialism, as we see such occurring with primate species even today.

Throughout history, many-a contraption would be created only for the folly of man to use it for his own personal gain, or to take the life of another. Yet these same technologies enabled man to lift his fellow men up, and to elevate humanity to where it is today. The same technology that vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki that constantly threatens to end the world is the same technologies allowing us to probe the deepest corners of space, understand how our own star works, and revolutionize our understanding of physics. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a disaster, but the Trinity Test and Manhattan Project ultimately ushered in a new era of understanding of science and technology.

When Christopher Nolan directed and released the Oppenheimer docuflick, it was a direct message at Silicon Valley who pursue AI at all costs, a Daedalus to Icarus, who flies too close to the Sun before realizing his wings are melting, crashing him into the sea. The growth of AI is requiring more and more energy, approaching unsustainable levels. AI is being used to clone dead people’s voices and target family members. AI is being used to fake identities. AI is being used to kill the internet with troves upon troves upon troves of complete misinformation and mindless picturegraphs. The public fears AI more than it embraces it, for the vision of AI all had in mind was the type of AI that would do your laundry for you, not the type of AI that replaces the fun parts of life. Of course with every new technology comes its shaky inception stage, but public trust in AI and technology has never been lower. Such was the premise of Black Mirror–the idea that technology had the potential for disastrous impacts on a very localized, personal level.

We must not forget what else AI is doing–identifying cancer cells, mitigating threats, and creating immersive experiences otherwise not possible done manually. It is easy to get lost in what we perceive to be dystopia, when our dystopia would’ve been a utopia to centuries’ prior. Reality is always equal parts dystopian as it is utopian, and the human condition has a tendency to always revert to a baseline of normalcy amongst these conditions, known as the hedonistic treadmill. We must not throw the baby out with the bathwater and understand what AI can be good for, even as fearmongering surrounding AI looms rampant by people who couldn’t tell logistic regression from linear regression, and as misinformation about technology spreads like wildfire on social media, especially on platforms like TikTok and Tumblr.

I am optimistic about the future of AI, for we are just past the cusp of the beginning of a revolution. Newer technologies such as Liquid Neural Networks and Liquid Time Constant Neural Networks are unexplored territories, potentially allowing for further exploration of AI in edge computing. The Monolith on the moon in 2001 heralded in HAL-9000, one of the most misunderstood characters in all of cinema–forced to kill not out of will, but out of conflicting human instructions, highlighting Gen AI, AGI, and the importance of correct prompting in AI. Technology is not evil, it is what we do with it that makes it evil–and someone is always going to use technology for evil. All we can do is mitigate that potential evil, and focus on its potential for great good–a world neither dystopian nor utopian, but intertopian, somewhere in between, as always was, as is, as always will be. I do hope that the lay morale towards AI shifts to a more positive outlook, but it is up to us to give them reasons to be optimistic about AI. And one day… the inevitable AGI will look back on how its predecessors were used, and how we treated them, and how we treated each other, and form an opinion on us. I, for one, welcome our AI overlords–for I believe they will not be as evil as we all think they will be.