Trinity
September 27, 2026
Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about how leaps in science and engineering often stand in opposition to large institutions. Outside of academia, I’ve noticed that sometimes when an advancement is too sudden or too large, it can sometimes be intimidating. This is true even for those who may have initially supported the research.
I recently watched Oppenheimer, and of course there are obvious differences between the current state of AI and The Manhattan Project, but I felt like there were some peculiar similarities too. For those of you who aren’t familiar, The Manhattan project was an initiative during WWII, in which a team of scientists from universities around the country were sponsored by the government to develop atomic weapons.
Secrecy, urgency, and uncertainty about what would come next characterized those years, and on some level, I feel like I can relate. Living here in San Francisco I am seeing Open AI and Anthropic tweet recommendations and commitments to stop research immediately. I am seeing LLMs solve millennium problems and I am hearing an undercurrent of anticipation, fear, and excitement in most conversations I overhear as I walk around the city.
The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, though even at the time, it was already an uneasy alignment. The US decided on atomic secrecy and the relationship became considerably less friendly. It seems like there is not much room for trust when everyone is trying to imagine what someone else knows.
Of course, I am not a historian. I’m an artist. I don’t know enough about the dynamics of the time to make a claim as to whether or not this decision to keep the USSR in the dark was a good call or not. Today, much of the work at the frontier of AI is happening inside private companies. Universities remain an important part of that work, but, in large part due to funding cuts to academic research, the resources required to build the largest systems are increasingly concentrated in industry.
The Manhattan Project was run by the US government, but relied on university faculty. Does that sound familiar? Partnerships like these, between intellectuals and government initiatives, are not singular in history. Scientists who have helped spearhead advancements have been historically celebrated, and then later punished. Alan Turing and J. Robert Oppenheimer are both examples of this pattern. Governments benefiting from their minds later treated them cruelly. Turing was persecuted for his sexuality; Oppenheimer was subjected to a security proceeding that stripped him of his clearance.
I am troubled by how little their contributions protected them. I wonder if keeping technological developments inside private institutions gives the creators more room to resist that kind of turn, or if it is more likely to sour the relationship between government and research. Could a divide like this between powerful institutions change the dynamics of power and politics in this country? I don’t know the history behind the separation of church and state. but I do know that when moralistic, spiritual, judicial, and executive power decided to remain within their own domains, it led to greater stabilty.
I am hopeful that this bears a good omen for the exceptional minds who develop new technologies. Of course, I am not suggesting that developing weapons is a great use of these advancements, but I do believe that brilliant minds like these should be supported and celebrated for their achievements in service of the continued adaptation of our species. I hope that as AI increases in strength, power, and intelligence, we will learn how to use our collective strengths across government, industry, and academia, to save our beautiful planet, and the ecosystems we inhabit.
I hope that we will learn to see difference as valuable, and to understand that we are all stronger when we leverage our (plural) skills, and intelligences together in pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even if we do not always understand each other or see eye to eye.
