AI doomerism echoes 1941 atomic bomb fears, archives show

The early atomic-energy debate unfolded against a backdrop of major scientific optimism that a world-changing breakthrough was near. In 1919, Sir Oliver Lodge told a British scientific society there was 'enough atomic energy in an ounce of matter to destroy a continent,' the same year Ernest Rutherford first split the atom. H.G. Wells had coined the term 'atomic bomb' in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. By 1925, a syndicated Sunday feature asked 'Dare Science Release the Atom's Power?' while noting atomic energy held enough power in a drop of water to run 500 locomotives for an hour. Six years later, Compton announced he was studying the release of atomic energy, which he said could bring 'radical change in civilization.'

These debates took place amid a broader sense of scientific optimism and a cycle of excitement, anxiety, and dread that echoes today's AI discourse. In 1939, scientists sought to calm a public anxious about nuclear fission, blaming Wells for instilling doomerism and insisting atomic energy could only be released 'by direct intent, in the laboratory.' After 1945, President Harry Truman called the atomic bomb a monster that could wipe out civilization, and media archives showed a mix of public reassurance, worry, and debate over international nuclear governance. One historian told a Rotary Club in Missouri the world might be destroyed 'by a small group with nazi ideals or by an accident,' proposing all atomic information be placed under UN control.

The most worrying lesson from the archives is that serious discussions around governance and regulation for atomic energy did not happen until it was used to bomb Japan and kill an estimated 200,000 people. Even today, nuclear weapons remain only patchily governed: various treaties exist, but major players often can't agree on terms, and the last treaty limiting US and Russian strategic arsenals, New START, expired in February, leaving the world's two largest nuclear powers without binding limits for the first time since 1972. Whether AI follows a similar trajectory — or, as some experts suggest, comes to resemble electricity or aviation with effects shaping geopolitics over a more protracted period — remains an open question.