John von Neumann wanted to start World War III | Marc Andreessen and Lex Fridman

What actually happened, I believe – and again I think this is a reasonable reading of history – is that nukes prevented World War III. Through the game theory of mutually assured destruction, had nukes not existed, there would have been no reason why the Cold War did not go hot. The military planners at the time on both sides thought there was going to be World War II on the plains of Europe, with 100 million people dead. It was the most obvious thing in the world to happen, and it's the dog that didn't bark. The best single net thing that happened in the entire 20th century is that that didn't happen.

There's another hypothetical scenario. The other hypothetical scenario is the Americans got the bomb and the Russians didn't, and then America's the big dog. Maybe America would have had the capability to roll back the Iron Curtain. I don't know whether that would have happened, but it's entirely possible. The act of these people who had these moral positions – because they could forecast, they could model the future of how this technology would get used – made a horrific mistake, because they basically ensured that the Iron Curtain would continue for 50 years longer than it would have otherwise. These are counterfactuals; I don't know what would have happened, but the decision to hand the bomb over was a big decision made by people who were very full of themselves.

Yeah, I would probably not have handed it over. I would be careful about the regimes you hand it over to. Maybe give it to the British or something, a democratically elected government. Well, look, there are people to this day who think those Soviet spies did the right thing because they created a balance of terror, as opposed to the US having just that. Let me tell the full version – the full version of the story is that John von Neumann is a hero of both yours and mine. He advocated for a first strike. When the US had the bomb and Russia did not, he said, 'We need to strike them right now, strike Russia.' Yes, apparently. Because he said World War III is inevitable. He was very hardcore. His theory was that World War III is inevitable; we're definitely going to have World War III. The only way to stop it is we have to take them out right now, before they get the bomb, because this is our last chance. Now, is this an example of philosophers and politics? I don't know if that's in there, but this is on the other side. Most of the case studies in books like this are the crazy people on the left. Von Neumann is a story arguably of the crazy people on the right.

This actually brings up the point: in AI, who are the good people to reason about the morality, the ethics, outside of the more complicated stuff that you agree on – that it will go into the hands of bad guys and all the kinds of ways they'll use it in interesting and dangerous ways? Who are the right kinds of people to make decisions on how to respond to it? Is it tech people? The history of these fields – what this book talks about – is that the competence, capability, intelligence, training, and accomplishments of senior scientists and technologists working on a technology, and then being able to make moral judgments on the use of their technology – that track record is terrible, catastrophically bad. The people that develop the technology are usually not the right people. The claim is, 'Of course they're the knowledgeable ones,' but the problem is they've spent their entire life in a lab; they're not theologians. When you read this and look at these histories, you find they are generally very thinly informed on history, sociology, theology, morality, ethics. They tend to manufacture their own worldviews from scratch; they tend to be very thin. They're not remotely the arguments that you would be having if you got a group of highly qualified theologians or philosophers.

Well, no, they're both bad. So definitely not them either. But look, this is a hard problem. It goes back to where we started: who has the truth? How do societies arrive at truth, and how do we figure these things out? Our elected leaders play some role in it; we all play some role in it. There have to be some set of public intellectuals at some point that bring rationality and judgment and humility to it. Those people are few and far between; we should prize them very highly. We should celebrate humility in our public leaders.