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Keep in mind Von Neumann was ethnically Jewish and the fact that the Jews he would have grown up with went from respected citizens to extermination in a matter of years might have affected him. I have no idea if that is the case but the fatalist, apocalyptic attitude you reference is the kind of thing you occasionally hear from Jews profoundly warped by the atrocities of that era.

> My "coziness" with the military industrial complex would be to help design weapons using AI. I'm simply fine with that. I wouldn't be advocating for the extermination of a population!

So you'd be fine helping them design weapons that could exterminate a populace but you wouldn't advocate actually using them?

I’ve thought carefully about it for a long time. I still change my mind from time to time, but currently, the view is that we need to own the space before others do.

Suppose you had the option to help discover and design the first nukes. Would it have been better to refuse, and wait for Russia to design them? The early efforts were crucial.

If it were possible to ban AI weapons across all countries for the rest of eternity, I would of course refuse to work on them. But that’s a bit like designing a society with the assumption everyone will be honest.

OK, but let's be serious, I don't think anyone's asking you to design AI-powered weapons ("hey, this guy has trained GPT-2, he must have the skillz to design smart cluster munitions!").

So let's see something more realistic. Have you ever, I don't know, stolen your buddy's new bike because if you don't, somebody else will? Or taken an upskirt picture because people do that kind of thing? Or thrown a burger wrapper out a car window because everybody does it? Are there things you simply find disagreeable or repulsive and you won't do them because you simply don't want to?

Or do you really go around in life trying to maximise your asshole potential, just because you assume everyone else will, too? I am genuinely curious because I certainly don't, I try to minimise my asshole potential, first of all because I don't want to be an asshole. I don't care if other people are assholes. The world is full of assholes. But I am me, not them. YMMV.

There would be no negative consequences for you if you failed to take an upskirt picture. But if a country falls behind in weapons technology, then its very existence is imperilled.

On that, please see my point in my second comment above about considering a realistic scenario.

Additionally, I believe that being an asshole is a negative consequence (of one's choices in life?) in and of itself. In a sense, I think it's the worse thing that can possibly happen to a person, to be an asshole.

I would contest the claim that being an asshole is something that “happens to” a person, rather than something that the person chooses to do.

I don't think that anyone ever chooses to be an asshole. I think people realise that they've been assholes, or they don't. I agree that people become assholes through things they do by choice, but I don't think anybody does something only an asshole would with the express purpose of being an asshole.

I'm naive, huh?

Do you think Lincoln was a lunatic?

I think Lincoln didn't have access to an arsenal that could end humanity if used in the wrong way, so I don't know if the comparison is warranted.

In general, if someone is trying to exterminate a population, then I believe that they fall under the lunatic umbrella, and that the umbrella should come down like a Venus fly trap and gobble all of them up. On balance, if we did this to every such person throughout history, then history may have fared better. There are zero populations of humans that need an exterminator (at least, an exterminator of humans).

Lincoln refused to coexist with the Confederates.

I’d put refusing to coexist with Communists on that level, and they actually took over von Neumann’s home country.

The United States of America is preserved today - intact - specifically because Lincoln valued coexisting with the confederates above almost all else. He made clear even in his first inaugural address that the preservation of the Union was paramount.

There is an incredibly important distinction between fighting against the ignorant temper tantrum of your brothers and sisters and exterminating them all.

> I think Lincoln didn't have access to an arsenal that could end humanity if used in the wrong way, so I don't know if the comparison is warranted.

Neither did the US in 1950. You’re thinking of H-bombs, which didn’t exist until 1952.

> In general, if someone is trying to exterminate a population

Which is not, in the context of 1950, what von Neumann was advocating. He was advocating for the use of strategic bombing in a campaign to topple a totalitarian regime that murdered tens of millions of people anyway. Which is what most people agreed was a good idea with the Nazis five years previous.

This is quite wrong. The plans were to drop hundreds of nukes. Those were definitely in the right order of magnitude to potentially end humanity. Certainly enough to kill the vast majority of the USSR.

There is no strategic use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear armed country. The plan was a war of extermination. Strategically at the time the majority of the military was in the GDR, not even in the USSR.

> The plans were to drop hundreds of nukes. Those were definitely in the right order of magnitude to potentially end humanity.

I'm not sure where you're getting a plan to drop hundreds of nukes on the Soviet Union in 1950 from Von Neumann--source?

In any case, these weren't hydrogen bombs. There were probably hundreds of relatively legitimate military targets in the USSR in 1950 that could be usefully attacked with nuclear weapons with yields in the tens of kilotons (versus the hundreds to thousands of kilotons of hydrogen bombs). It's a big country and you could drop hundreds of nuclear weapons in the right parts of it without destroying population centers. The Soviets themselves did that with their own testing.

> There is no strategic use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear armed country.

Which the USSR barely qualified as in 1950. Plus, they had few reliable ways of delivering those nuclear arms to US soil. That's the point of attacking them in 1950 as opposed to waiting until they had a large nuclear arsenal and the ability to reach the United States.

What makes Lincoln a lunatic?

It's not sporting to only present bait as your argument. Just go ahead and outline what you are trying to say.

I don’t think he was one.