‘Oppenheimer’ director Nolan has fiery words for Silicon Valley heads
Director Christopher Nolan (center) stands behind actor Cillian Murphy (far right) on the set of "Oppenheimer." Universal Pictures
“Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan is not mincing words when it comes to Silicon Valley’s inner circle.
In a post-screening panel Saturday in New York City, Chuck Todd, the longtime host of “Meet the Press,” asked Nolan about an obvious parallel to his three-hour-long epic about physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer: the founders and chief executives helming the world’s buzziest tech companies, especially the ones betting big on artificial intelligence.
“I think what I would want them to take away is the concept of accountability,” Nolan said, according to the Verge. According to the outlet, Nolan referred to “a wide variety of technological innovations that have been embraced by Silicon Valley” without explicitly naming any company or product.
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“The rise of companies over the last 15 years bandying about words like ‘algorithm,’ not knowing what they mean in any kind of meaningful, mathematical sense. They just don’t want to take responsibility for what that algorithm does,” Nolan added.
The acclaimed director then went on to talk about artificial intelligence as a “terrifying possibility” without any accountability from industry heads. “Not least because as AI systems go into the defense infrastructure, ultimately they’ll be charged with nuclear weapons, and if we allow people to say that that’s a separate entity from the person who’s wielding, programming, putting AI into use, then we’re doomed.”
Already, it seems clear that a healthy bit of AI’s biggest boosters — Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Bill Gates included — are also the same ones sounding the alarm about how dangerous and world-shifting the technologies they’re developing could be. All types of signatories — including Altman, Gates and executives at Musk’s new artificial intelligence venture xAI — signed on to a statement in May calling for “the risk of extinction from AI” to be treated on the level of “societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
As critics have pointed out, that sort of rhetoric creates anxiety and hype at the same time — this technology could get so powerful and omnipotent that it could result in an apocalyptic future — but ignores the technology's real-world harms, including algorithmic bias and rampant misinformation.
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Nolan goes on to make the tie between AI and his latest work explicit. “When I talk to the leading researchers in the field of AI they literally refer to this right now as their Oppenheimer moment,” Nolan said. “They’re looking to his story to say what are the responsibilities for scientists developing new technologies that may have unintended consequences.”
Source: SFGATE
